Category: md-1

I remember sitting in church one Sunday evening. It was “Missions Sunday,” which is usually code for “Preacher Vacation.” Missions Sunday at my church was when a visiting missionary came in (usually in the summer) and was basically given 15 minutes to share the story of his ministry. Typically, this was accompanied by a (boring) photo slideshow. Sitting there, even as a kid, I thought, “This guy spends all year in some amazing corner of the world, meeting amazing people, and he’s supposed to share all of his stories in 15 minutes or less?”

In January 2004, my dad and I were on a flight from Little Rock to Orlando, on our way to check out a film school there. It was my last semester at Harding University, and I was looking at pursuing a post-graduate degree in my newfound love: documentary filmmaking. On the flight, an idea crossed my mind that probably changed my life forever: “What if I used film to help missionaries ditch the slideshows on “Missions Sunday”? What if a missionary could show a relevant, ten-minute film, highlighting the sights, sounds, highs, and lows of their ministries, while still having five minutes to direct an inspired audience to their booth in the foyer?”

Over the next year, with that idea in mind, I eagerly studied the art of filmmaking at Full Sail University in Orlando, Florida. There I learned the craft and got to have as much hands-on time as I desired with any piece of equipment you could ever hope to find on a Hollywood set. Shortly after graduation, my wife Lauren and I moved to Los Angeles, where I spent the next two years working (mostly pro bono, the L.A. norm) in a variety of positions in the film industry.

The longest tenured job was at The Documentary Channel, a satellite TV network on the Dish Network that airs entirely independent documentaries. I loved my job there, which included assisting their editors and, the best part, screening hundreds of documentaries. It was almost like a second film school. I started hanging out around doc filmmakers and I soaked up how they operated.

In January 2007, Taylor Smith, a friend of mine from Chattanooga, called me up and said, “You should come down to Perth, Australia, where I’m working as a church-planter, and film what we’re doing.” This sounded like a great idea. Finally I would get to put my passion and energy behind a real life “Missionary Documentary.” The only problem: I’d have to quit my job.

In June 2007, I finished that documentary and began trying to get it in the hands of people I had been sharing my dreams with for the last three years. I was very proud of the way it turned out and others began to take notice. That film got me work on another promo film and so on and so on. Before I knew it, it was late 2008 and I had already traveled to four foreign countries on three continents, making high-quality, informational films about missionaries and Christian non-profits.

That’s still what I’m doing today. My company, C1 Entertainment, was created to bring high-quality, affordable HD video content to clients that might not otherwise be able to get their stories out there. I love my job and the opportunities it brings. I’m now doing all kinds of work, including weddings, corporate gigs, and even developing my own feature length documentaries that focus on social and global awareness issues.

I take great pride in my work, being my own toughest critic. I am constantly looking for new, cutting edge ways to help tell great stories. It’s my passion; it’s what I love.

From my perspective as a filmmaker, the mission of God is helping tell His story in a relevant way. As a society, we are connecting more and more with people who put themselves in the line of fire for a cause. We admire their zeal, we connect with the people they reach out to, and we begin to project our own worldview into what we see or hear, that is, “Could I do that?” or “If they can do that, why can’t I do this?” “This” being a cause or concern near to our own heart. Whether these stories are told in the name of Christ or not, we are responding to them in a big way. Why not channel this power and use it to help those whose stories might otherwise be left out?

I am blessed with the gift of telling stories through the medium of film. Because I’ve been given this gift, it’s my part in the missio Dei to use it for his glory.

Patrick lives in Dallas, TX with his wife, Lauren, and dog, Sebastian. Check out his website at: http://C1entertainment.com or follow him on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/C1-Entertainment/147350212323) or Twitter (http://twitter.com/c1entertainment).

Missio Dei is the name given by theologians to the conception and practice of mission in a post-colonial world. Proposals related to missio Dei have appealed to and coincided with a rebirth in trinitarian theology. The present essay traces this conversation from Barth and Rahner to recent revising directions represented by Moltmann and Pannenberg, proposing that the way forward for understandings of missio Dei are tied to the reality of God constituted by dynamic, reciprocal, and open relations.

I am a self-professed “missional church” guy. I lead a graduate program in missional leadership, and I try to hang out where the missional church gang hangs out. I am in the finishing stages of a PhD in Congregational Mission and Leadership. Craig Van Gelder and Patrick Keifert are my professors. If there was a missional church lunch box and decoder ring, I would own them.

While I am happy with my new academic denomination, it is not without its problems. My computer’s spell-checker does not recognize the word missional. Nor do some of my colleagues who see it either as the latest buzzword, like seeker-sensitive and purpose-driven, or a curious conversation to which only missiologists must attend. Compounding the trouble surrounding this word is its less than disciplined use in the marketplace of churches where it can mean anything and everything. Everyone, it seems, is missional these days. This ubiquity threatens to stretch the word beyond its ability to mean anything substantive.

I am convinced, however, that this conversation is still worth attending despite all of its conceptual difficulties. The issues it addresses—an increasingly pluralistic North American culture, the social location of the church, the nature of the kingdom of God, practices of congregational leadership—are here to stay. Moreover, the resources used to respond to these issues go to the heart of Christian identity. Take, for instance, the statement of the authors of the seminal book Missional Church:

The basic thesis of this book is that the answer to the crisis of the North American church will not be found at the level of method and problem solving. We share the conviction of a growing consensus of Christians in North America that the problem is much more deeply rooted. It has to do with who we are and what we are for. The real issues in the current crisis of the Christian church are spiritual and theological. That is what this study is about.1

The theological medicine prescribed by these writers begins with recognizing that mission belongs not to the church but to God. Missio Dei, or mission of God, is the name given to this theological impulse at the heart of the missional church conversation. This emphasis has in turn situated conversations about mission smack dab in the middle of trinitarian and eschatological concerns—the life of God and God’s ultimate intentions for all of creation. This conversation is not a still stream moving slowly by but a roaring river full of implications for the life of the church.

Missio Dei Matters

Missio Dei is more than an abstract exercise that allows missiologists to pass go and move on to strategic concerns. It is a response to real problems in the practice of mission. Missio Dei, it is hoped, forms a different kind of imagination for mission rooted in particular understandings of God, church, and world. This shift in imagination, in turn, offers a way past imperialist notions of mission for a post-colonial world.2

The significance, then, of defining the church in mission in relation to missio Dei is two-fold. First, it keeps the church from seeing its life as an end in itself. The church does not exist to propagate its own life or a particular cultural expression of Christianity, but to serve the interests of the inbreaking kingdom of God. The church is called always to give its life for the sake of something bigger than itself. Missio Dei, therefore, guards against a triumphalist church possessing an imperialist mission.

Craig Van Gelder makes this distinction nicely. The move to missio Dei “represents a fundamental reframing of God’s primary location in relation to the world. When one starts by focusing on the purpose of the church, the church tends to become the primary location of God, which makes the church itself responsible to carry out activities in the world on behalf of God.”3 Missio Dei, in contrast, makes the Spirit of God the active agent of mission in the world, not just mission to the world. Additionally, mission is more than just an activity of the church. Mission is the church’s identity. The authors of Missional Church describe this identity as a “people sent.”4

Second, missio Dei makes theology, not strategy, the first task of a missional church. More particularly, this theological priority has turned the church’s attention more fully to God as triune. Making the trinitarian nature of God the condition of possibility for the church’s engagement with the world has the potential to bring fresh resources to notions of mission, especially in a Western Christianity trying to shake the lingering effects of Christendom. Missio Dei matters.

Missio Dei and Trinitarian Theology

The term missio Dei has not been around forever. It arose among missiologists in the Twentieth Century. As indicated above, it was offered by some as a corrective to imperialistic forms of mission associated with Christendom. Karl Hartenstein, to whom many attribute introduction of the term missio Dei, played a prominent role in “The Missionary Obligations of the Church” working group at the International Mission Conference at Willingen, Germany (1952). The group produced a theological statement related to mission notable for its trinitarian grounding:

The missionary movement of which we are a part has its source in the Triune God Himself. Out of the depths of His love for us, the Father has sent forth his own beloved Son to reconcile all things to Himself, that we and all men might, through the Spirit, be made one in Him with the Father in that perfect love which is the very nature of God.5

According to David Bosch, after Willingen, “Mission was understood as being derived from the very nature of God. It was thus put in the context of the doctrine of the Trinity, not of ecclesiology or soteriology.”6 Thus, the conversation about missio Dei became a trinitarian conversation.

This is a significant shift given the fact that trinitarian conversations had fallen on hard times among theologians in the wake of the Enlightenment. Catherine LaCugna suggests that this lack of interest is attributable in large part to its separation from the life of the church. Trinity simply didn’t matter to the everyday practice of the faith. And this lack of practical meaning, for LaCugna, owed to the fact that trinitarian theology had increasingly become preoccupied with immanent (God’s inner life) rather than economic (God’s saving work) aspects. Trinitarian thought was too often abstract speculation about a reality distant from everyday experience.7

Karl Barth is often cited as the figure who brought trinitarian perspectives back to the forefront of theological conversation. For Barth, theology rests on the prior action of God in revelation, and what God reveals is God’s self. The starting place, therefore, in Barth’s massive Church Dogmatics is the revelation of God, and that God as triune. Trinity becomes central to his project—prolegomena—not simply a dogmatic topic at the end of a list of other dogmatic topics. From this starting point, Barth reduces the distance between the immanent and economic Trinity since what God reveals is God’s self.8

Barth’s voice was not alone in this respect. As Stanley Grenz suggests, the theologian most often associated with closing the gap between immanent and economic notions is Karl Rahner. Rahner, a Roman Catholic theologian, is known for “Rahner’s rule,” which declares that “the ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity and the ‘immanent’ Trinity is the ‘economic’ Trinity.” The relations between Father, Son, and Spirit are not stuck in some distant heaven but displayed in God’s saving action on creation’s behalf. While Barth and Rahner display impressive differences, “both sought to recast the doctrine of the Trinity in a manner that could open vistas for theological engagement in a modern world.”9

Early statements related to missio Dei reflected the impressive efforts of Barth and Rahner. The implications of their work for theology and mission were significant.10 For Barth, this gave the “work of God” priority over the work of the church. In turn, the church could no longer confuse its own life with God’s mission, including its cultural and national identities.

The achievement of these trinitarian statements, however, was not complete with regard to mission in a post-colonial world. Notice how Bosch summarizes the trinitarian thought that characterizes Willingen: “The classical doctrine on the missio Dei as God the Father sending the Son, and God the Father and Son sending the Spirit was expanded to include yet another ‘movement’: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit sending the church into the world.”11 What Bosch identifies as “classical doctrine” represents Western trinitarian thought, emphasizing the unity or oneness of God. This might be contrasted with Eastern or Orthodox views that begin not with God’s unity but with the three persons of Father, Son, and Spirit and their inter-relations.

These differences represent an important story related to both theology and mission. The trinitarian formulations represented by Nicea and other early Christian councils emerged in dialogue with Greek philosophy. The burden of these statements about God were related in part to the concerns of classical theism. In other words, before any descriptions of God’s life and work as found in Scripture, attributes related to a philosophical understanding of God needed to be accounted for. From this starting place, God must be undivided, simple, free, and impassable. God must be an absolute subject, all reality deriving from this undivided source—from the one to the many.

In Western theology, this meant starting with God as a unity of substance or being (ousia). However one understood the “threeness” of God, this unity of being was given priority. God was, therefore, expressed in the Johanine language of sending,12 as in Bosch’s summary above. Father sends the Son; Father and Son send the Spirit. All the arrows point in the same direction, the many proceeding from the one.

This understanding of Trinity is not without problems. Beginning with the one divine substance leads almost inevitably, according to Wolfhart Pannenberg, either to modalism or subordinationism.13 In other words, Father, Son, and Spirit are either seen as three modes (not persons) of the one ousia, or Son and Spirit are seen as subordinate to the Father. For Jürgen Moltmann, this philosophical understanding of God leaves theology susceptible to monism, everything proceeding from one source.14 If everything proceeds from one source, then there are only two options—subject or object, with us or against us, good or evil. Mission, in light of this understanding of God, is susceptible for both Pannenberg and Moltmann to imperialist strategies and methods.

Eastern trinitarian thought, in contrast, followed more closely the lead of the Cappadocians,15 who innovated notions of ontology related to God. The achievement of the Cappadocians, according to Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas, was to redefine personhood in relation to community. Persons are only persons in community. Being itself is not related to a persisting single-subject or substance (ousia), but being is a being-in-relation. According to the Cappadocians, it was not a single, shared substance (ousia) that constituted deity, but rather the three persons (hypostasis) in relation. God is, therefore, social and is defined by the communion (perochoresis) of three persons.16

While this marks a substantial shift in the classical understanding of God, the Eastern tradition does not fully escape the pressures of philosophical theism. As Pannenberg points out, Eastern theologians retained a single source concept of God by identifying the person of the Father as the one source of deity. What ties both classical trinitarian traditions together is a God defined by relations-of-origin.17 All the arrows, in relation to creation, still point in one direction.

This history is important related to current discussions of missio Dei. Both classical trinitarian traditions fit well a church identified with empire. The relationship between theology and social structure is complex and cannot be reduced to simple cause and effect formulas. But at the very least, there was a good fit between notions of God defined by relations-of-origin and missions flying under the banner of Christendom. The trinitarian imagination of the church did not provide an obvious critique to notions of mission that were colonial or imperialistic.

The question then related to Barth and the revival of the trinitarian tradition is, Would recovering classical understandings of God generate a new imagination about mission that avoids colonial or imperialistic tendencies? Barth and Rahner moved away from a preoccupation with the immanent Trinity and returned the actions of Father, Son, and Spirit revealed in Scripture to the center of trinitarian discourse. But they accepted other fundamental assumptions of “classic,” Western theology that had sponsored mission under Christendom in the first place. Recovering classic notions of God might not fully overcome the seeds of imagination related to colonialism.

The accomplishment of Willingen failed to sufficiently clarify the relationships between God, world, and church.18 In fact, divisions over the relationship between church and world deepened after Willingen. A “sending” Trinity left two basic options: (1) to see the church on the side of God, over/against the world or (2) to see the God-world relationship as primary, severely limiting the church’s place in God’s missional intent. A “sending” Trinity tends to limit the engagement of church and world to sender-receiver, or subject-object, which ultimately doesn’t deliver a church in mission from an instrumental relationship with world, even if that mission is seen as God’s mission. As I have written with others elsewhere:

The straight-line logic of either God-church-world or God-world-church finds a theological accomplice in straight-line Trinitarian thought, where all the arrows point in the same direction. Trinity conceived exclusively in terms of relations of origin lacks both the capacity to deliver a more dynamic, participatory God-world-church relationship and the imaginative capacity to fund mission in a post-colonial situation.19

While we might applaud the intention of Willingen and subsequent attempts to reposition understandings of mission in trinitarian theology, it is not enough simply to update classic trinitarian understandings that gave warrant for the very kind of mission we hope to avoid.

New Trinitarian Directions

Fortunately, the trickle that began with Barth and Rahner has become a mighty trinitarian stream. From Grenz’s perspective:

Whenever the story of theology in the last hundred years is told, the rediscovery of the doctrine of the Trinity that sprouted and then came to full bloom during the eight decades following the first World War must be given the center stage, and the rebirth of Trinitarian theology must be presented as one of the most far-reaching theological developments of the century.20

While Barth and Rahner remain pivotal figures in this story, Gary Simpson points beyond them to suggest a “revisionary direction proposed in some recent trinitarian thinking that will make an apostolic difference in the life and practice of today’s Christian congregations.”21

For many in the tradition of Western theology, this means paying greater attention to Orthodox trinitarian thought. This move usually begins with an appreciation for the theology of the Cappadocians, emphasizing the priority of the three persons. This is sometimes referred to as social trinitarianism. God doesn’t just have relationships, God is relational. The significance of a social understanding of the Trinity for many is that it provides warrant for a more communitarian ontology. In other words, God exists in community for the sake of community. Community, therefore, takes precedence over the individual. Reality rooted in the life of God is more fundamentally relational than instrumental. This is certainly a move forward.

The question is, how would social trinitarian perspectives impact understandings of mission? Put another way, how would a social Trinity alter our understandings of God, church, and world? Van Gelder illustrates the attempt to take cues from both “sending” and “social” trinitarian thought in defining mission. His approach is to merge the two perspectives. When brought together, “we begin to understand the church, through the redemptive work of Christ, as being created by the Spirit as a social community that is missionary by nature in being called and sent to participate in God’s mission in the world.”22 This certainly adds a social dimension to our understanding of God as a sending God. It does not necessarily, however, change the fundamental relationships between God, church, and world.

The Cappadocians did give priority to three persons (hypostasis) over the single substance (ousia) prioritized in Western theology. But, as we noted above, they were still concerned to preserve the impassability and subjectivity of deity by protecting the monarchy of the Father, a different way of naming a concept of God defined by relations-of-origin. Everything has its origin in the Father. The Father is eternally begetting the Son and spirating the Spirit. The Father is distant from creation, a massive ontological gulf separating them. Like Western theology, all of the arrows still point in one direction. Though Zizioulas updates this tradition in impressive ways, if anything the church recedes more deeply on the side of God in a God-world relationship marked by an impassable ontological gulf.23

It is not enough to augment “sending” with “social.” Notions of God, church, and world must be more fully participatory and mutually implicating to avoid the specter of paternal or imperialistic mission strategies. If all the good stuff is fully decided on the God side of the God-world relationship, and if the church is seen as mediate between God and world, then all that is left the church is a strategic relationship with the world. A more robust, participatory relationship between God, church, and world offers a new range of potential relations. And this begins with a more participatory view of the Trinity.

Moltmann, Pannenberg, and a Participatory Trinity

I find more hope for a post-colonial missiology in the work of theologians whom Grenz groups under the heading “The Trinity as the Fullness of History.”24 I want to focus particularly on the work of Moltmann and Pannenberg in these respects. These important theologians diverge at significant points, but they hold in common three emphases that are promising for understanding missio Dei.

First, by choosing a biblical starting place as opposed to philosophical, they establish the priority of three persons without the encumbrances of an exclusively relations-of-origin viewpoint of God.25 God’s identity is not defined beforehand in relation to speculative attributes or characteristics, but precisely through the activity of Father, Son, and Spirit within history. God is not a persisting subject over against creation as object. God is revealed as a character in the drama of history. For both, the three persons of the Trinity are revealed as differentiated and related through the “history of the Son.”26 As Pannenberg puts it, “The persons simply are what they are in their relations to one another, which both distinguish them from one another and bring them into communion with one another.”27

Second, the relations of Father, Son, and Spirit are seen most clearly in relation to the kingdom of God. For Pannenberg, the drama of the kingdom reveals a much richer set of relations in the Trinity than relations-of-origin:

The Father does not merely beget the Son. He also hands over his Kingdom to him and receives it back from him. The Son is not merely begotten of the Father. He is also obedient to him and therefore glorifies him as the one God. The Spirit is not just breathed. He also fills the Son and glorifies him in his obedience to the Father, thereby glorifying the Father himself. In so doing he leads into all truth (John 16:13) and searches out the deep things of Godhead (1 Cor 2:10-11).28

In similar fashion, Moltmann demonstrates that at various points in the history of the kingdom we find Father, Son, and Spirit in manifold and reciprocal relations to one another. The sequence of relations changes from one kingdom scene to another.

In the sending, delivering up and resurrection of Christ we find this sequence:

Father-Spirit-Son

In the lordship of Christ and the sending of the Spirit the sequence is:

Father-Son-Spirit

But when we are considering the eschatological consummation and glorification, the sequence has to be:

Spirit-Son-Father.29

The activity of the three persons in relation to the kingdom, therefore, reveals a robust interdependence. As Pannenberg describes it, Father, Son, and Spirit represent “a richly structured nexus of relationships.”30 The Trinity cannot be accounted for only in relation to the eternal begetting and spirating of the Father. The relationships of Father, Son, and Spirit are mutual, reciprocal, and diverse. All of the arrows do not point in the same direction, whether from a persisting substance (ousia) or from a monarchial Father.

This view of Trinity is social to be sure. The relations of the three precede any understanding of the unity of God.31 God is social, each person open to the other. But God is also open—open to history, open to creation, open to the stranger. The same kind of dynamic nexus of relationships that characterizes Father, Son, and Spirit applies to creation as well. The world constituted by a triune God is a participatory drama with multiple characters. As Father, Son, and Spirit, God is not only acting on the world, sending to the world, but God is also for the world, with the world, and through the world. God is no longer a series of one-way sendings in a straight line but a participatory God making room for the other with movement in all directions.

Moltmann is particularly compelling at this point. In contrast to Barth, who defines God’s freedom in relation to self-sufficiency (God did not have to create the world), Moltmann defines God’s freedom as the capacity to be true to God’s self. And in this case that means being true to God’s being as love. Creation is not incidental to God, but at the very heart of what it means for God to be triune. Creation is not merely an outward act of God external to God’s identity, but an act of making room precisely within the loving relations of Father, Son, and Spirit. God’s love demands an Other. “In his creative love God is united with creation, which is his Other, giving it space, time and liberty in his own infinite life.”32 Creation is more than simply the target at the end of all the divine arrows. Creation is constitutive of God’s identity as love. The world participates in the life of God as more than just an object to God as single-acting-subject.

This trinitarian theology of participation33 bears significant implications for notions of identity. God’s identity is established within history in relation to creation, not decided by a list of attributes that establishes God’s identity apart from history. God is righteous and full of steadfast love, not simple and undivided. In the same way, the church’s identity is an identity in time and space, not an essence constituting a pure church apart from the actual life of the church. The church’s identity, especially as a church in mission, is defined in relation to the world. The church does not know its identity apart from loving God and neighbor. In a trinitarian theology of participation, the church not only takes God to the world, but discovers God there in dynamic participation. The relationship between church and world is more than simply strategic—it is inescapably and always relational and theological.

Trinity and Mission

Simpson held out the promise that revising directions in trinitarian theology would make an “apostolic difference” in the life of the church. Is this indeed the case? And if it is the case, what is the difference? Wouldn’t it just be easier to say, “Stop being imperialistic!”? Is it really necessary to think this closely about the nature of the Trinity? Is this really practical?

Admittedly, the relationship between theological innovation and changes in practice is dynamic and cannot be reduced to a cause and effect relationship. However, it is also the case that a shift of the magnitude represented by a post-colonial missiology only comes with a deep shift in imagination. Such a shift requires a revision, not just an updating, of theological sources.

More to the point, the Trinity is not simply a theory that then dictates a certain set of practices. The Trinity is an actual social reality in which we participate. Theology, in this sense, is a practice, a particular way of engaging God’s world. God’s life as triune is something in which we participate and through our participation come to saving knowledge with and through others. This kind of understanding of theology would call into question theories of mission that reduce theology to some prior theory that eventually gives way to strategy—the real payoff of missiology. Instead, missiology is participation in the life and purposes of God, which are immediately implicated by the world. In other words, theology isn’t determined first and subsequently applied to the world. Theology is participating with God in the actual conditions of the world. Because of God’s participatory life, the world is a partner in theological discernment, not simply theology’s destination.

This understanding of theology is a major shift and requires extended attention. Martin Heidegger points out that the very same philosophical project that gave us classical theism is also deeply embedded in the thought structures and languages of Western civilization. Our language can hardly express anything other than a world defined by subjects and objects.34 An understanding of God as participatory will have to travel in relation to a different grammar. Christians learn their grammar in worship.

A missional church, therefore, must make conscious efforts to practice its faith with trinitarian understandings in view. This sounds obvious, but in many congregations, especially those of the free-church tradition, this is hardly evident. This attentiveness to language, however, must go beyond merely mentioning Father, Son, and Spirit (though that would be an improvement for some); it must enact a sense of participation with and for the world. This enactment will lead in many directions. One shift, however, that might pay immediate dividends is to limit our language of “to the world” and increase our usage of phrases like “with the world” or “for the world.”

This kind of language is appropriate given our discussion of identity above. A missional church does not know its identity completely apart from its actual setting in time and space. It is not uncommon these days to see congregational “mission statements” written on bulletin mastheads or hanging from banners in our church buildings. Too often, these statements are written apart from any knowledge or input from the congregation’s immediate context. In a sending view of God and mission, this is unnecessary. Because God’s identity is determined beforehand in relation to persisting qualities, all the “good stuff” is taken to the world, not discovered in participation with the world. Because the church is imagined on the side of God in this series of arrows, the church does not need its neighbor to determine its identity in the world. All that is left in terms of the relationship between God and world is strategy.

In contrast, a missional congregation does not merely take God to the world, but participates in the life of the world expecting to find God more deeply. The nature and shape of mission is not already decided but must be discerned in relation to God’s participation in the world. The resources of the gospel are needed for this work of discernment. Clearly, not everything that appears in the world is an appearance of God’s redemptive concern for creation. Still, the church does not have the market cornered on God’s activity in the world. The church participates in the world to discern its life in mission precisely through giving its life away.

I work with several congregations in processes designed to lead them into missional innovation.35 It is rare to find a congregation that does not have an instrumental notion of the world around them. Strangers are prospects, bits of demographic data, to be turned into a plan of “outreach.” Beyond the barest demographic detail, most congregations have little idea who their neighbors actually are. There are massive untested assumptions about the lives and concerns of those around them. Not surprisingly, their neighbors seldom know anything about them either.

Some missional congregations are learning to see their neighbors as co-informants related to God’s missional intentions for the world. These congregations are becoming more adept at asking new questions. Instead of asking only the question, “How can we get these people to belong to us?” missional congregations learn also to ask, “How in the name of the Triune God do we belong to these people?”

Here the church mimics the life of God. The church’s life is a making room for the other. It is a life of hospitality. This life of hospitality is more than inviting others to church and treating them well. Because the church expects that the Spirit of God is already working in the world toward the final consummation of the kingdom of God, the church learns to expect God’s hospitality on someone else’s terms. As my colleague John Ogren has written:

Our view of participation suggests that the church is always the guest of God, missional churches will be ready to move outside the role of host and the comfort zone of home turf. Following the example of Jesus, missional congregations will be willing to assume the vulnerability of the role of guest, so that the world may share more fully the hospitality of God.36

Practices of discernment with the world coupled with notions of hospitality rooted in the life of God are properly pneumatological. That is, they require a cultivation of the gifts and fruit of the Spirit to discern the leading of the Spirit in God’s mission. The fruit of the Spirit does not lead to self-sufficient agents who acquire their identity in relation to autonomy. Rather, the fruit of the Spirit requires both vulnerability and response, a being-in-relation.

These themes of mission rooted in participation in the life of the Triune God can be extended indefinitely, the proper subject of further reflections on Trinity and Mission. These few insights are offered to demonstrate that a theology of participation renders the world as more than the object of the church’s paternal concern. Understanding the world as constitutive of the church’s own participation in the life of God is a necessary move in overcoming the legacy of imperialistic mission. Missio Dei, to the extent that it moves beyond classical notions of the Triune God rooted in philosophical notions, serves as a vital impulse in the renewal of both theological and missional practice.

Dr. Mark Love is Director of the Resource Center for Missional Leadership at Rochester College. Mark served congregations in Texas and Oregon full-time for 17 years before finding his place in the academy. In addition to teaching courses in evangelism, missional ecclesiology, and congregational transformation, Mark works extensively with congregations pursuing missional innovation. He can be contacted at mlove@rc.edu.

Bibliography

Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics. Edited by Thomas F. Torrance. Translated by Geoffrey William Bromiley. 2nd ed. 5 vols. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975.

Bosch, David J. Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. American Society of Missiology Series 16. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991.

Guder, Darrell L., ed. The Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998.

Goodall, Norman, ed. Missions Under the Cross. New York: Friendship Press, 1953.

Grenz, Stanley J. Rediscovering the Triune God: The Trinity in Contemporary Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996.

Hagley, Scott, Jannie Swart, John Ogren, and Mark Love. “Toward a Missional Theology of Participation: Ecumenical Reflections on Contributions to Trinity, Mission, and Church.” Missiology: An International Review 37, no. 1 (2009): 75-87.

Keifert, Patrick. We are Here Now: A New Missional Era, a Missional Journey of Spiritual Discovery. Eagle, ID: Allelon, 2006.

LaCugna, Catherine. God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life. New York: Harper Collins, 1993.

Moltmann, Jürgen. The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981.

Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Systematic Theology. Vol 1. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991.

Simpson, Gary. “No Trinity, No Mission: The Apostolic Difference of Revisioning the Trinity.” Word and World 18 (1998): 264-71.

Van Gelder, Craig. The Ministry of the Missional Church: A Community Led by the Spirit. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007.

Zizioulas, John D. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985.

________. Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church. London: T. & T. Clark, 2006.

This article seeks to reflect the reciprocal flow from theology to practice. People of God prayerfully read and discern the meanings of Scripture and are led to Christian practice by the Spirit of God. This flow from theology to practice is illustrated by the theology and practices of missio Dei. The narrative of Scripture describes God as the source of mission. This God, who is both holy and compassionate, calls and sends missionaries who carry out his purposes. These finite humans, however, typically question and doubt their abilities and calling along the journey. The theology of missio Dei implies a number of missional practices: entering God’s presence, interpreting and entering into God’s story, participating in trinitarian community, and incarnating God’s mission. These ministry practices, in turn, give rise to dilemmas and new questions, which lead the practitioner back to theological reflection. Missional growth occurs within this reciprocal interaction between theology and practice.

Theology and Missiology

In a very real sense theology is the mother of missiology. Out of theological reflections we form practical missiological categories and practices. It is equally true that missiology is the mother of theology. Out of missiological practice, we raise questions for theological reflection. These questions deal with how practices reflect the nature and purposes of God. Missions is best accomplished when there is a reciprocal flow from theology to missiology and from missiology to theology. Missiology and theology became distinct disciplines in the Modern Age due to the rise of pragmatism in the West and the need to differentiate teaching specialties within the academy.

When missiology is divorced from theology, practitioners make decisions by their own culturally-derived inclinations. They trust in human ingenuity and assume that they are theologically reflective. Paul Hiebert writes:

Too often we choose a few themes and from these build a simplistic theology rather than look at the profound theological motifs that flow through the whole of Scripture. Equally disturbing to the foundations of mission is the dangerous potential of shifting from God and his work to the emphasis on what we can do for God by our own knowledge and efforts. We become captive to a modern secular worldview in which human control and technique replace divine leading and human obedience as the basis of mission.1

Opting into a secular or other non-Christian worldview results in a type of syncretism. Frequently this is an unconscious blending of Christian beliefs and practices with those of the dominant culture. Thus, Christianity speaks with a voice reflective of the culture. Syncretism develops because the Christian community attempts to make its message and life attractive, alluring, and appealing to those outside the fellowship. Over a period of years the accommodations become routinized, integrated into the narrative story of the Christian community, and inseparable from its life.2

For example, Jim and his family planted a church. The guiding question forming his strategy was “How can we meet the needs of the people of this community and make this church grow?” Jim raised money for the launch, built a staff, gathered a launch team, held events to gather those interested, held preliminary preview services, and launched a weekly meeting after six months with an attendance of 200 and three years later has an average attendance of 700 people each Sunday. His goal was to launch big in order to develop momentum. By all appearances he is very successful. However, Jim is inwardly perturbed. He acknowledges that his church attracts people because it caters to what they want. The church is more a vendor of goods and services than a community of the kingdom of God. Jim knows that those attending have mixed motives: attending is their duty, a place to meet people of influence, or where children receive moral instruction. Church attendance assuages guilt and declares to others (and to self) that “I am religious.” A spiritual responsibility has been discharged. Therefore, all is well. Observing the disconnectedness and worldliness of members leads Jim to ask himself, “What have I created?”

Developing a theology of missions helps overcome such syncretism.

Metaphors of Theology of Mission

Two “ship” metaphors help us discern this relationship between theology and practice.

A theology of mission is like the rudder of a boat or ship guiding the mission of God and providing its direction. My wife is fond of remembering how our children frequently wanted to “drive” when we took them on pedal-boats. At times they were so intent on pedaling, making the boat move, that the rudder was held in an extreme position, and we went in circles. Realizing their mistake, but still intent on pedaling, they would move the rudder from one extreme to the other so that we zig-zagged across the lake. When missionaries operate without the foundation of a missional theology, their lives and ministries tend to zig-zag from fad to fad, from one theological perspective and related philosophies of ministry to another. A theology of mission, like the rudder of a boat, provides us practical direction for Christian ministry.

A theology of mission is also like the engine of a boat or ship propelling forward the mission of God. One spring my wife and I taught at Abilene Christian University’s campus abroad program in Montevideo, Uruguay. During the semester, we traveled with our students to Iguazu Falls, a spectacular waterfall between Brazil and Argentina. One highlight of our visit was a motorboat excursion against the mighty currents of the river almost to the foot of the falls. I was impressed not only by the immensity of the flow of the water but also the power of the engine to pull the boat against the tide up the river. A mission theology, like the engine of a boat, provides the power that enables finite humans to carry God’s infinite mission against currents of popular cultures.

Jim, in our example, while believing in and preaching from Scripture, unintentionally applied the beliefs and practices of his secular culture to ministry strategy. He believed that human ingenuity employing marketing strategies of a secular culture would grow a church. And in a sense it did! He planted a church with great appeal to the local culture. But it did not reflect the love, holiness, and faithfulness of a people formed to live as participants in the kingdom of God. Jim caught in the ebb and flow of cultural currents inadequately employed the rudder and engine of theology to guide and empower the mission.

A theology of mission provides both direction and empowerment for developing practices of missions.

These metaphors illustrate that theology is indispensable to the mission of God. A theology of mission provides both direction and empowerment for developing practices of missions.

Mission Alive, the church planting ministry with which I minister, encourages participants to move intentionally from Theology to Practices to Structure. We reflect on overarching themes of Scripture like the kingdom of God, incarnation, and missio Dei—threads interwoven in the narrative of Scripture which form Christian reality. We then ask how these themes are practiced within Christian ministry. These theologies and practices guide us to develop spiritually formative structures commensurate with the theologies and practices.

In this article we will consider the theme of missio Dei, the title of this journal and a significant beginning point for discussing the movement from theology to practice.

A Narrative Theology of Missio Dei

This theology, missio Dei, “express[es] the conviction that mission is not the invention, responsibility, or program of human beings, but flows from the character and purposes of God.”3 God, the source of mission, who is both holy and compassionate, calls and sends his people to be his missionaries who carry out his purposes. As finite humans, however, we typically question and doubt our abilities and calling along the journey.

God, for instance, called Abraham to become the father of an elect nation and sent him to a land that he did not know (Gen 12:1-7). Abraham, however, doubted God’s promises. Why could he not settle in Haran where some of his own people lived rather than going on to Canaan (Gen 11:31)? Would God protect him (Gen 12:10-20)? How could he become a great nation since he had no son (Gen 15:2-6)? What sign would God give him that he would possess the land of Canaan (Gen 15:8-21)? Despite these doubts, Abraham “believed the Lord” (Gen 15:6).4 His faith grew so that he was willing to obey God’s command to sacrifice his son (Gen 22) because he believed that God, who is faithful to his promises, would raise him from the dead (Heb 11:17, 19).

The biblical narratives of God’s mission invite us to participate. How do these stories describe our lives, provide motivation for ministry, and shape us to become representatives of his mission?

God called the reluctant Moses to go back to Egypt (Exod 3:1-12) to lead the Israelites from captivity. Moses, however, felt inadequate. Forty years earlier Moses, the adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter, identified the Israelites as “his own people” and felt the injustice of their bondage. He slew an Egyptian slave master (Exod 2:11-15), expecting that they would realize that “God was using him to rescue them” (Acts 7:23). God’s timing, however, was not the same as Moses’. After forty years in Midian, God called Moses to return to Egypt as his missionary of deliverance. Moses feared God’s call. He felt insufficient, afraid that he could not accomplish the task. He failed to realize that the mission was God’s, not his. He was merely the emissary carrying out the mission of God. Moses’ misunderstanding led him to object: “Who am I that I should go?” (Exod 3:11); “Who shall I say sent me?” (Exod 3:13); “What if they don’t believe me?” (Exod. 4:1) and “I have never been eloquent. . . . I am slow of speech” (Exod 4:10). These objections illustrate the human tendency to make God’s mission a mission of self. Each was based on human deficiencies or misunderstandings. God’s responses, however, proclaimed that the mission is greater than the missionary. The ever-present I AM WHO I AM was behind it.

God’s calling and sending is reflected throughout Scripture. He called Isaiah by revealing his holiness, helping Isaiah realize his sinfulness, leading him to repentance and cleansing, and then sending Isaiah to Jerusalem as his spokesman (Isa 6:1-10). God called Jeremiah as a child to prophesy and weep over a disobedient nation (Jer 1:4-8; 8:21-9:2) who were about to go into captivity (Jer 5:18). God called Zerubbabel, Ezra, and Nehemiah at various times and sent them to organize his captive people and lead them back to Jerusalem. God sent his only Son to earth to reveal his “glory, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14), “to seek and to save what was lost” (Luke 19:10), and “to destroy the devil’s work” (1 John 3:8b). Jesus, in turn, sent his disciples, stating, “As the father sent me, I am sending you” (John 20:21, cf. 17:18). Just before Jesus ascended into heaven, God sent his Holy Spirit as another Counselor so that his people would not be left as orphans (John 14:15-18).

The calling and sending of God was also evident in the early Christian church. By his authority as resurrected Lord, Jesus commissioned his disciples to “go and make disciples of all nations” (Matt 28:18-20). These disciples were sent by divine power for divine purposes. God called and sent Peter by the Holy Spirit to the house of Cornelius, thus opening the door to the Gentiles (Acts 10). God called Saul as he was traveling from Jerusalem to Damascus to persecute Christians. In a vision Jesus told him: “I am sending you to the Gentiles to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me” (Acts 26:17-18). Paul invited Timothy to join Silas and him as they traveled on the Second Missionary Journey (Acts 16:1-4). Titus accompanied Paul and Barnabas to Jerusalem (Gal 2:1). These early Christians defined themselves as apostles (Rom 1:1, 5; 1 Cor 1:1; cf. Gal 1:15-17) or ambassadors (2 Cor 5:18-20), in other words, those sent to represent God in his mission.

Describe how God has called and sent you as his missionary, that is, one sent by God in his mission for his purpose. What doubts and questions have you felt as a result of God’s calling?

Sometimes God enters into the human situation himself and becomes the Sent One, the Missionary. For instance, when Adam and Eve first sinned, God himself walked in the Garden of Eden seeking his fallen creation (Gen 3:8-19). God fought all night with Jacob, the deceiver who stole his brother’s blessing and birthright, and changed his name to Israel, meaning “one who struggles with God” (Gen 32:22-29). God in Jesus became flesh and entered human culture (John 1:14). God in his Holy Spirit indwells Christians to emancipate them from sin and to lead his people forward in witness to the world (Acts 1:8).

Understanding God’s trinitarian nature amplifies our understanding of missio Dei. God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit, though separate personalities, operate in perfect unity. The church, when living in communion with the Trinity, is called to reflect the harmony and qualities of this union (John 17:20-23). David Bosch describes this trinitarian unity of God’s mission: “The classical doctrine of the missio Dei as God the Father sending the Son, and God the Father and the Son sending the Spirit is expanded to include yet another ‘movement’: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit sending the church into the world.”5

God continues to call and send his disciples into his mission, and these disciples continue to question and doubt their calling and ability to fulfill the mission. My wife Becky and I have both received the callings and experienced the doubts. To be frank sometimes I am so filled with insecurity that I question every step I take even as God calls me forward. I have been surprised to find how much I am like Moses, asking God, “Who am I that I should go?” I struggle to listen to God when he says, “I will be with you!”

Early in life I received the call to be a missionary. It was rooted in my upbringing, much like Timothy (2 Tim 1:5), from parental encouragement to experiences in a Christian high school and university to graduate studies. Becky made a decision to be a missionary by marrying one. We felt the hand of God in times of blessing and when Christian leaders spoke into our lives encouraging us as messengers of God. We doubted our ability to leave our parents and friends and form new relationships in another land, to raise our young son (and children to come) in a foreign land, to learn new languages and cultures, and to serve as God’s messengers opening a new area to his gospel. I especially worried because of a learning disability that hinders language learning. But God was faithful in the midst of our doubts and struggles.

The mission of God, as illustrated in Figure 1,6 originated in the mind of God. He is its source. The mission flowed from him to Christ, who proclaimed God’s kingdom and in his death enacted God’s kingdom plan. He prayed that the Father would send the Spirit. This Spirit empowered the church for mission. God’s mission flowed, then, from God to Christ to the church, who, empowered by the Spirit, carries the mission to the world. Mission, therefore, is derived from the very nature of God who sends and saves finite humans who doubt and struggle along the journey.

From Theology to Practice

What practices are implied by this theology of missio Dei?

Entering God’s Presence

First, the theology of missio Dei leads us into God’s presence—to be spiritually formed by him. We, as fallen humans, are not magically transformed from sinner to saint. That transformation takes place only as we dwell in God’s presence and allow him to shape us. There are no easy roads to God. The journey is more like navigating the ruts and holes of muddy, rutted roads through forests of obstacles and discouragements than traveling well-paved interstates. Like Abraham and Moses, we question and doubt along the journey, and frequently fall from God. We grow to maturity only by looking beyond ourselves to God. We move into his presence by listening, trusting, depending—moving beyond ourselves to absorb his transforming radiance. Only then are we “transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Cor 3:18). Spiritual transformation occurs only by God’s power, despite and through our human frailty.

This shaping of our minds and souls is called spiritual formation. Spiritual formation is walking with God in such an intimate way that our character reflects his love, holiness, and faithfulness. Imagine 1 Peter 2:1-3 played out in life: Deborah comes into a Christian community as a spiritually curious God-seeker and “tastes that the Lord is good” (v. 3). While walking with other Christians in community, God begins to mold her in amazing ways, helping her overcome “malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind” (v. 1). As she comes to Christ a radical transition occurs: “Like a newborn baby, she craves pure spiritual milk, so that by it she grows up in her salvation” (v. 3). It comes from a thirst for living water (John 7:37). God is molding her within a community of Christ-followers, the matrix of her spiritual formation.

This journey of spiritual transformation is an ongoing, threefold process of purgation from sin and the dominion of Satan, illumination of God’s love and holiness, and union with God. These three moves into God’s presence are “simultaneous rather than sequential, but our finitude prevents us from seeing their simultaneity, so that we perceive of them as distinct phases.”7 The “dryness and fruitlessness” of our souls hinders us from entering the mission of God.8 Only God can purge, illuminate, and unite us with him. Missio Dei ultimately flows out of this union with God.

Seldom does one enter the presence of God individually; it is typically in communion with others. An African proverb says, “Malale kwendet agenge” (“One piece of firewood alone does not burn”). Thus listening to God almost always implies listening with others on a heart level. One model practiced by many in our church plantings is called CO2, or “Church of 2”.9 Those on a journey toward God check in with each other to listen to each other as they mutually listen to God. They acknowledge, “Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work. If one falls down, his friend can help him up” (Eccles 4:9-10). Neil Cole says:

The basic unit of Kingdom life is a follower of Christ in relationship with another follower of Christ. The micro form of church life is a unit of two or three believers in relationship. This is where we must begin to see multiplication occur. Let’s face it: if we can’t multiply a group of two or three, then we should forget about multiplying a group of fifteen to twenty.10

In CO2 conversations the acronym SASHET (Sad, Angry, Scared, Happy, Excited, Tender) provides beginning words for describing the condition of the heart. CO2s may be daily phone conversations for two weeks or twice weekly exchanges for a more extended period. A church planter focuses on nurturing a few leaders who in turn nurture other leaders. Church planter Micah Lewis says:

I have found this practice to be the most exciting spiritual practice I have ever done.  I don’t even think of it as a practice but simply as pouring myself into a relationship with God. I have started a CO2 with a good friend that I work with at Starbucks.  We check in almost everyday [sic], sharing the state of our hearts and talking about how we have been hearing from God.  It is really exciting to see how God has been at work in both of us as we listen to him.11

An important question is, What spiritually formative practices help sojourners and searchers as well as those of the community of faith come more fully into the presence of God? Practices will vary from culture to culture, context to context. CO2, for instance, is exceptionally appropriate in impersonal, individualistic cultures where people do not naturally walk together.

Imperative to this process is a contemporary catechesis for spiritual formation. This formation process should overview the narrative and fundamental teachings of the Bible; encourage memorization of Scripture (to put nuggets of God into Christian hearts); nurture holiness, love, and faithfulness within the context of ministry; and bring followers face-to-face with significant passages like the Sermon on the Mount. This spiritual formation is not so much taught as caught within a community of nurture, encouragement, and training. Alan Kreider’s The Change of Conversion and the Origin of Christendom overviews the spiritual formation patterns of the early Christian church and illustrates our need to contextualize appropriate patterns with high expectations for those on a journey to kingdom living in this post-Christendom age.12

Gradually we begin to listen to God and are surprised that God calls us into his mission. Despite questioning and doubt, we place our lives in his hands and allow him to form and lead us in his mission. Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does” (John 5:19). We likewise acknowledge that we can do nothing by ourselves but only seek to do what the Father does as illustrated by the life and ministry of Jesus.

This transformation leads us to read Scripture in a new and exciting way.

Interpreting and Entering into God’s Story

Second, missio Dei leads us to read Scripture as an amazing story of God’s movement through human history. The Bible begins with the story of creation (“In the beginning, God created . . .”) and the Gospels with the story of Christ (“In the beginning was the Word . . .”). Other genres of Scripture (Law, Letter, Prophetic Oracle, Wisdom, and Psalm, and Hymn) reflect their own particular historical settings.

Many of us, however, learned to think through Modern categories that sought to reduce the Bible to a logical compilation of facts. We assumed that “by avoiding human speculation and confining ourselves to bare scriptural facts, all people could come to understand the Bible alike. The biblical message was simple and clear, needing very little interpretation.”13 Teachings on salvation focused on steps that we must take to enter the kingdom of God (“hear, believe, repent, confess, and be baptized”) rather than the work of God in bringing us to him. We interpreted the Bible through a hermeneutic of “command, example, or necessary inference” rather than entering into the story of God’s redemptive history and allowing these narratives to form our identity. A new syncretism developed which took the facts of the Bible but interpreted them within the rational grid of our popular culture.

Trevor McIlwain of New Tribes Mission, seeking to understand the pervasive syncretism of the people served by his mission, realized that Christians only partially knew the storyline of Scripture and had inserted Christian components into their traditional narratives. His conclusion awakened me to the need for narrative theology:

We must not teach a set of doctrines divorced from their God-given historical setting, but rather, we must teach the story of the acts of God as He has chosen to reveal Himself in history. People may ignore our set of doctrines as our western philosophy of God, but the story of God’s actions in history cannot be refuted.14

The Bible is a narrative describing the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the Jesus who “appeared in a body, was vindicated by the Spirit, was seen by angels, was preached among the nations, was believed on in the world, was taken up in glory” (1 Tim 3:16); and the Holy Spirit leading his people in mission from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8). This trinitarian view of reality is progressively apparent throughout Scripture: the history of missio Dei portrays God the sovereign Lord in the Old Testament, the Anointed One sent to save us in the Gospels, and, in Acts and the Epistles, God’s leading in the church through the Holy Spirit. Bosch’s idea of God sending his Son and Spirit into the world, who in trinitarian unity send the church, becomes increasingly significant for understanding the mission of God. The Bible is a story of God’s sending; a story meant to be told, retold, and told again.

As we read Scripture, we hear within the words our own developing story(ies). Biblical stories focus our hearts, define our reality, and form our allegiance. Lives are shaped by hearing the doubt and faith of Abraham, the spiritual transformation of Jacob, the calling and ministry of Moses, and the gracious hand of the Lord upon Ezra to organize and lead God’s people. We define ourselves within God’s narrative.

Participating in Trinitarian Community

Third, a theology of missio Dei implies community. God, who exists in trinitarian community, calls us to form communities reflecting his kingdom unity. Jesus prayed:

My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world. (John 17:20- 24; emphasis added)

Christ partakes of God’s glory and is thereby united with his Father. A “perichoresis, or interpenetration,” exists “among the persons of the Trinity reveal[ing] that ‘the nature of God is communion.’”15 The church, when it reflects God’s glory, likewise participates in this unity. The church thus is a “finite” and “temporal echo of the eternal community that God is.”16 This trinitarian unity, seen in the church, is tangible, readily recognized by the world.

The ancient apologetic of Christianity, consequently, is not merely a set of rational postulates arguing for the existence of God but an incarnational apology of the presence of Christ in his people. “The church is a witness to the presence of Jesus in the world as it embodies and lives out its faith.”17 As “chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God,” we are able to “declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light” (1 Pet 2:9). Roxburgh and Boren say that the church is called to be “a contrast community shaped by hospitality, radical forgiveness, the breaking down of social and racial barriers, and self-sacrificial love. As we live inside God’s story, we are shaped into habits of life that empower us to be the sign, witness, and foretaste of God’s dream.”18 The world, as it sees the church serving in its neighborhoods, among its relatives, and in its workplaces, recognizes the church’s distinctiveness. For example, bishops of the early Christian church wrote letters asking Christians not to flee to save their own lives like the Romans when pestilence broke out but to remain to serve the sick.19

As a contrast society, the church serves the community by:

• Walking intimately with God, reflecting his love and holiness (2 Cor 3:18)
• Ministering to the poor, sick, and oppressed (Luke 4:18-19)
• Practicing hospitality (Rom 12:13; Lev. 19:33-34)
• Telling the story of God’s kingdom on different levels so that people can contextually hear it (Matt 13)
• Cultivating spiritual friendships (John 4)
• Giving and receiving ministry to help both self and others overcome sin and Satan (Acts 26:17-18)
• Fellowshipping all of God’s people (Gal 3:28)
• Making disciples (Matt 28:19)

These interconnected activities form some of the tangible ministries of a local church and lead the church to develop certain rhythms of Christian life and service.

How these activities are configured into the life of the church is not specifically mapped in Scripture but is learned on the journey. Churches are planted in different ways and with different emphases. Hugh Halter and Matt Smay describe three spheres of an incarnational community: mission, community, and communion. The kingdom becomes tangible in the confluence of these three spheres.20 Some churches are planted out of mission: what Alan Hirsch calls communitas, or shared ministry. For example, compassionate ministry sometimes leads those serving the poor, sick, and oppressed to define themselves as a church.21 Some form more slowly out of personal relationship or community, with an emphasis on hospitality and cultivating spiritual friendships. Others form community out of deep communion with God and with each other. The deepness of the church draws sojourners and Christians into the journey with God.

These emphases are reflected within the ministry frameworks of various missional resource people: David Watson of Church Planting Movements emphasizes mission; Hugh Halter and Matt Smay, community; and John White of LK10 Resources, communion.22 While mission, community, and communion exist in all churches, there are varying emphases.

Developing trinitarian community is a great challenge in church planting and renewal. How does the church grow to reflect this trinitarian unity? The answers are not easy. Primarily, this challenge calls us to live in God’s presence continually being renewed by his Spirit. It involves churches restructuring around complementary gifts rather than hierarchal structures. Attention is given to equipping “God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up” (Eph 4:11-12), to become mature (v. 13). The church thus “grows up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work” (v. 15-16).

Participating in trinitarian community readies the church to participate in God’s mission.

Incarnating God’s Mission

Fourth, missio Dei implies incarnation—that God comes to us and lives in our midst!  Sometimes God comes to us personally as he did with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.  God incarnated himself in an elect people, the Israelites, so that they might be his light unto the nations, and came to them through prophets and priests.  The ultimate expression of God’s incarnation, however, is Jesus Christ.  God in Christ became a human being and lived among us so that humans witnessed “the glory of the One and Only, who comes from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).  God continues to come to the world through the church, “the continuation of the incarnation . . . the earthed reality of the presence of Jesus in and to the world”23 and through the apostles, prophets, and evangelists carrying God’s mission to the world.

The ministry of God’s living Messiah provides a model for our incarnational ministry. Even as Jesus taught and served the masses, he focused on equipping and sending disciples. His first priority was making disciples. He modeled, equipped, sent them out, and tutored them when they returned. This equipping prepared many for ministry in what eventually became a church planting movement. Thus the core phrase of the Great Commission—“go and make disciples” (Matt 28:18-20)—also describes the focus of Christ’s ministry.

“Jesus did not come into this world and live His life on a mountaintop isolated from human suffering. He walked among us, ate with us, and shared in our humanity. He did not heal lepers from a distance, but touched them into wholeness. He pressed His disciples and prayed for them to be in the world but not of the world. The focus of their three years together was not the salvation of the Twelve, but their ministry to the entire planet.”

Erwin McManus, Uprising: A Revolution of the Soul (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2003), 111.

This ministry of disciple-making is further defined by Jesus’ words to Saul on the road to Damascus: “I am sending you to [the Gentiles] to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me” (Acts 22:17-18). Thus Christ’s mission shows searchers a new kingdom reality (“open their eyes”) and breaks the fetters of sin and Satan (“turn them from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God”). This mission creates a compassionate environment of forgiveness (“so that they may receive forgiveness of sins”), a nurturing community (“a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me”).

The mission of Jesus did not begin with the strong and powerful—within the upper class working downward or the middle class working outward—but with the poor and oppressed. The reading from the scroll of Isaiah in the Gospel of Luke is the climax of events describing Jesus’ ministry: he was led by the Spirit in his baptism (Luke 4:22), defeated Satan in the desert (4:1), and appeared in Galilee (4:14). Then Jesus read:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

because he has anointed me

to preach good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

and recovery of sight for the blind,

to release the oppressed,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

(Luke 4:18-19; cf. Isa 61:1-2)

These words defined–by God’s Spirit–Luke’s understanding of Christ’s mission!

“The year of the Lord’s favor” is the Year of Jubilee, which occurred every fifty years. At this time all debts were to be cancelled, all slaves released, and all lands restored to their previous owners (Lev 12:10, 38-42). The practices of Jubilee, seldom if ever observed, would now be realized in the ministry of Jesus and his disciples.

Jesus did not minister as a lord or earthly power broker. He came as a servant (Mark 10:45), a shepherd of the flock (John 10:11), and a steward of what God had entrusted him (John 5:19). He did not stand at the top of a pinnacle overseeing an earthly kingdom, but at the forefront of a wedge of people on mission being called and sent to minister within the culture and inviting searchers to listen and participate.24 At an appropriate time Jesus called these searchers, saying, “Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” He first chose twelve apostles “that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach and to have authority to drive out demons” (Mark 3:14-15). He then sent out the twelve and then the seventy two-by-two to find a “worthy person” (Matt 10:11) or “a person of peace” (Luke 10:6) to replicate his mission.

Can these simple disciple-making practices of Jesus be reproduced with contextual adaptations in every tribe, people, or nation in the world?

This incarnational model tends to grow slower during the initial years because the emphasis is on disciple-making rather than gathering a crowd. Frequently, God uses these new disciples to teach others who teach others—resulting in a church planting movement. These churches, simple and with replicable processes of disciple-making, develop the momentum of a spreading virus, like the early church or the church in contemporary China.25

Missional leaders create environments for discipleship, not by replicating programs or developing projects but through life-on-life in the context of Christ-formed community. Programs and projects may aid specific facets of spiritual formation but often become a replacement for incarnational living. Life-on-life consists of incarnational living in existing cultural contexts, specifically the family, the neighborhood, the workplace, and Third Places.26

Missional leaders create environments for discipleship, not by replicating programs or developing projects but through life-on-life in the context of Christ-formed community.

Family or kinship is the deepest relationship in the world, even in the Euro-American West. It is therefore not surprising that people come to Christ as a result of relatives influencing their own people. My co-worker Fielden Allison made a study of sixteen new churches among the Kipsigis of Kenya. Thirteen of the sixteen (or 81 percent) were started by a relative of one of the new Christians. The message of the Gospel generally flowed through consanguineal kinship ties (that is, related “by blood” rather than “by marriage”), and, as is typical in age-oriented cultures, from older to younger relatives.27 Sue Salazar brought two of her daughters to one of the first meetings of Christ Journey in Burleson, Texas. One daughter came with her husband and their three children; the other with her live-in boyfriend. This extended family became some of the first leaders of the church. It is important even in the West, where family relationships are waning because of individuality and mobility, for Christians to be God’s missionaries to their families.

Neighborhood is likely the second most important context for missional ministry. Roxburgh and Boren say:

The task of the local church in our present situation is to reenter our neighborhoods, to dwell with and to listen to the narratives and stories of the people. . . . It will be in these kinds of relationships that we will hear all the clues about what the Spirit is calling us to do as the church in that place. But this is not a strategy we take to a context; it is a way of life we cultivate in a place where we belong.28

Missional Christians reflect all the practices of a missional church. They bring people together for community; neighborhood events, like a cookout or party in the park. They pray for the sick, welcome newcomers, mobilize resources to help those who have lost their jobs, paint houses, build patios, and welcome people to gather around their tables. They walk intimately with God reflecting his love and holiness and cultivate spiritual friendships. Living missionally in community naturally leads to the planting of neighborhood churches in homes, clubhouses, and storefronts. Roxburgh and Boren write, “We are learning to read Scripture with the eyes of our neighborhood, which reshapes our imagination about the mission of God and allows us to begin seeing Scripture in a new way.”29

We must also represent God in both our workplaces and in Third Places. Some develop prayer groups with workmates which opens doors to new families and neighborhoods. Christians with children may visit McDonald’s once a week to interact with other parents as they are together in the play area. Others office at Starbucks or Panera Bread or spend time each week in a local pub specifically to be God’s missional presence in those places. Wherever people gather, we are God’s presence . . . for the sake of the kingdom.

The major function of missional leaders is to equip disciples to represent Jesus among their relatives, where they live, and where they work, thereby developing groups listening to and being shaped by the living word of God. Their ministry is personal and empathetic, focused around hospitality and prayer and compassionate service. Through these practices the kingdom of God becomes tangible.

Dr. Gailyn Van Rheenen served as a church-planting missionary to East Africa for 14 years, taught Missions and Evangelism at Abilene Christian University for 17 ½ years, and is the founder and Facilitator of Church Planting in Mission Alive (http://missionalive.org). His books Missions: Biblical Foundations and Contemporary Perspectives (Zondervan), Communicating Christ in Animistic Contexts (William Carey Library), and The Changing Face of World Missions (Baker Academic; authored with Michael Pocock and Doug McConnell) are widely used by both students and practitioners of missions. He has edited Contextualization and Syncretism (William Carey Library, 2006), a compilation of presentations of the Evangelical Missiological Society. His Missiology Homepage (http://missiology.org) provides “resources for missions education” for local church leaders, field missionaries, and teachers of missions.

Bibliography

Allen, C. Leonard. The Cruciform Church: Becoming a Cross-Shaped People in a Secular World. Abilene, TX: ACU Press, 1990.

Allison, Fielden. “The Effects of Kinship on Church Growth in the Kipsigis Churches.” In Church Growth among the Kipsigis of Southwest Kenya. Vol. 4. Unpublished, 1983.

Bosch, David J. Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. American Society of Missiology Series 16. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991.

Cole, Neil. Organic Church: Growing Faith where Life Happens. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005.

Guder, Darrell L., ed. Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998.

Gunton, Colin E. The Promise of Trinitarian Theology. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1991.

Halter, Hugh, and Matt Smay. The Tangible Kingdom: Creating Incarnational Community. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass: 2008.

Heath, Elaine. The Mystic Way of Evangelism: A Contemplative Vision for Christian Outreach. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008.

Hiebert, Paul G. “De-theologizing Missiology: A Response.” Trinity World Forum 19 (Fall): 4.

Hirsch, Alan. The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006.

Hirsch, Alan, and Darryn Altclass. The Forgotten Ways Handbook: A Practical Guide for Developing Missional Churches. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2009.

Hunsberger, George, and Craig Van Gelder. Church between Gospel and Culture: The Emerging Mission in North America. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996.

Kreider, Alan. The Change of Conversion and the Origin of Christendom. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1999.

Lewis, Micah. “CO2 (church of two).” Imagine a Daybreak. http://micahlewis.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/co2-church-of-two/.

Luke 10 Resources. “2-Page CO2 Brochure.” Practice #2 – Listening to Jesus with one (or two) others. http://www.lk10resources.com/practice-2.html.

McIlwain, Trevor and Nancy Everson. Firm Foundations: Creation to Christ. Sanford, FL: New Tribes Mission, 1991.

McManus, Erwin. Uprising: A Revolution of the Soul. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2003.

Murray, Stuart. Church Planting: Laying Foundations. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2001.

Roxburgh, Alan J., and M. Scott Boren. Introducing the Missional Church: What It Is, Why It Matters, How to Become One. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2009.

Van Rheenen, Gailyn. Missions: Biblical Foundations and Contemporary Strategy. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996.

________. “Modern and Postmodern Syncretism in Theology and Missions.” In The Holy Spirit and Mission Dynamics. Evangelical Missiological Society Series 5. Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1997.

Webber, Robert. The Younger Evangelicals. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2002.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. “Third place.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place.

The emergence of the concept of missio Dei amid the struggles of Christian world missions in the mid-Twentieth Century occasioned a theological paradigm shift. Although its conceptualization has been contested and sometimes dichotomized, recent developments move toward a broad, integrative vision of God’s mission that may serve as the best framework for the church’s theology and praxis.

Rediscovering Missio Dei

Everything is mission. On the lips of a “career missionary,” those words seem far too self-involved to be true, or even moderately insightful. As a summary of the implications drawn from sixty years of ecumenical reflection on the sending of the Son and the Spirit, however, they are a legitimate challenge to every corner of Christianity to understand the world, the church, and Scripture in terms of missio Dei1—God’s mission. In order to understand how missio Dei came to be a theological concept currently discussed on a broad popular level, we must enter a historical world that will be foreign territory for many readers. In so doing we may gain a clearer understanding of what is at stake theologically in the debate over terminology, which seems at first glance to be blown out of proportion. Our entry point into that world is a village in Germany called Willingen.

The ecumenical gathering of church leaders known as the International Missionary Council held its 1952 meeting in Willingen. Two immediate crises set the stage for the meeting. First, Mao Tse-tung closed China, removing all foreign missionaries. Naturally, this caused distress among these leaders, committed as they were to the spread of gospel among such a significant portion of the human population. Second, the realization was dawning that Christian missions had been deeply implicated in the colonialist project of Western civilization, a project that was beginning to crumble. Missions had been tied to the spread of Enlightenment culture, and the churches influenced by these ecumenical leaders were about to begin a long and painful struggle to differentiate their mission work—its motivations, means, and goals—from colonialism.

It is also necessary to mention a third looming specter. Colonialism aside, critical self-reflection also revealed that Christian missions was plagued by what would come to be called ecclesiocentrism. What the church expected to achieve in its missions was, through and through, too much about the church. We might characterize (or caricature) the worst of ecclesiocentrism this way: The church sends the church’s missionaries to accomplish the church’s mission, which is the expansion of the church and, implicitly, the achievement of the church’s agenda.

Willingen was host to a broad range of theological dispositions, but two polarized positions, which I will refer to as traditionalist and humanist, emerged as the dominant contenders battling over the conceptualization of missio Dei in the last century. Though they became two seemingly mutually exclusive options well after Willingen, they were not obviously diametric opposites at the conference itself. In fact, they were similar enough in their response to the problems mentioned above that participants managed to draft a unifying statement at conference end. Moreover, I will argue below that the currently emerging concept of missio Dei is a healthier blending of these two positions than many would have thought possible in the decades following Willingen.

The traditionalist position was traditional in that while it retreated from the paternalism and ecclesiocentrism of the past, it still maintained that the church was the means to the fulfillment of God’s eschatological intentions. For the traditionalist, therefore, missio Dei signified a move toward chastened self-perception by way of theocentrism. The church was freshly recognized as, we might say, merely the means, whereas God was the ultimate source, actor, and fulfiller of mission.

The humanist view did not immediately deemphasize the church’s role, though more radical elements were already present at Willingen. Instead, it focused upon a more realized eschatology, maintaining that God had already inaugurated his kingdom. The church, then, served not as means to its realization but as proclaimer of its reality.2 Dutch missiologist Johannes Christiaan Hoekendijk developed this line of thinking further. His essential argument was that because the realization of the kingdom in the world is God’s doing, and because the church is not a means to an unrealized eschatological reality, the reasonable conclusion is that mission is God’s work in the world regardless of (and, as history would suggest, often despite) the church. Thus, the humanist perspective became preoccupied with God’s work in the world apart from the church, which proponents naturally understood in terms of humanity’s socio-political concerns.

Though clearly at odds, the traditionalist and humanist views hung together on one major point of agreement: “Mission is ultimately God’s affair.”3 The expression of this fact in terms of “missio Dei” seems especially shaped by the theology of Karl Barth, who first revived the trinitarian idea of missio in 1932.4 In addition, the preliminary report from the U.S. study group hinged upon the doctrine of the Trinity. Thus, the statement that ultimately distills the conference findings reads:

The missionary movement of which we are a part has its source in the Triune God Himself. Out of the depths of His love for us, the Father has sent forth His own beloved Son to reconcile all things to Himself. . . . On the foundation of this accomplished work God has sent forth His Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus. . . . We who have been chosen in Christ . . . are by these very facts committed to full participation in His redeeming mission to the world. There is no participation in Christ without participation in His mission to the world. That by which the Church receives its existence is that by which it is also given its world-mission. “As the Father hath sent Me, even so send I you.”5

It was another document, written by Karl Hartenstein after the conference, that utilized the Latin phrase missio Dei in order to summarize the fundamental idea conveyed by the conference findings:

Mission is not just the conversion of the individual, nor just obedience to the word of the Lord, nor just the obligation to gather the church. It is the taking part in the sending of the Son, the missio Dei, with the holistic aim of establishing Christ’s rule over all redeemed creation.6

Hartenstein clearly wrote from a traditionalist perspective, though his terminology would also be co-opted by the humanist camp in order to signify an idea of mission exclusive of the church’s “taking part” in God’s movement toward the world. Yet, we may note that the dispute was not simply between those who advocated a “social gospel” and those who did not. The “holistic” notion of a kingdom over “all redeemed creation” was integral to the traditionalist view, which made room also for individual conversion, obedience to the word, and the gathering of the church. The issue remained, implicitly at least, one of eschatology and its implications for the church’s instrumentality. That is to say, a critical dialog between eschatology and ecclesiology had begun.7

Considering the concept from another angle, the intersection of trinitarian thought and salvation history was also a major variable for the alternative views of missio Dei. As Hartenstein indicates, the traditionalist view understood the “sending” of Son (and Spirit) to be constitutive of mission. It is that particular salvation-historical datum that qualifies the concept of missio Dei. In contrast, while movement within the Trinity was also basic for the humanist perspective, it was abstracted from the confines of salvation-history.8 According to this understanding, intra-trinitarian movement (missio Dei) continues in the world quite regardless of the particular sendings of Jesus recorded in the Gospels or of the Spirit experienced in the church. Moreover, despite trinitarian language in the humanist camp, without reference to the salvation-historical narrative of Jesus and the Spirit, missio “devolved into an immanent principle of world history” focused on “being, not God’s being” (emphasis original).9 At stake in this convergence of salvation history and Trinity is, again, one’s understanding of the kingdom. Is the establishment of the kingdom that Jesus announced a work that God does in world history apart from the proclamation of Jesus by the church and the power of the Spirit manifest in the church? An affirmative answer caused many to see the socio-political shifts toward a “better” (more humanitarian) world as proper to the concept of missio Dei.

At the risk of oversimplification, these basic observations lay a minimum of groundwork for considering some of the implications that this monumental shift within Western theology entailed. Because the rediscovery of missio Dei is still causing aftershocks in theology and missiology today, tracing the path of these implications will bring us to consider insights that are only now emerging.

In the Wake of Willingen: Implications of the Shift

Relief was the most immediate payoff of recasting missions in terms of missio Dei.10 If the mission is fundamentally God’s, then the church’s failures (e.g., colonialism, ecclesiocentrism) and limitations (e.g., the closure of China) were not cause for despair. Even if, as traditionalists affirmed, the church is instrumental in God’s completion of his mission, it remains God who will complete it. Not only the justification for but also the viability of mission rests upon the sovereignty of God, even in the midst of terribly uncertain circumstances. To cast it more starkly, God’s mission cannot be compromised even when the church is.

A terminological evolution also occurred in the wake of Willingen, and its subtlety continues to beleaguer missiology today. Many began to reserve “mission” for reference to missio Dei and coined “missions” (note the added -s) for the church’s missionary endeavors. The distinction served to express differing concerns, depending on one’s understanding of missio Dei, but for all involved in the conversation it was a necessary result of missio Dei’s conceptualization. Thus, more than merely an antidote for anxiety, missio Dei was a corrective for both colonialism and ecclesiocentrism. “It is inconceivable that we could again revert to a narrow, ecclesiocentric view of mission.”11 As the mission is God’s, God’s agenda is determinative rather than that of colonialism, the church, or anything else. Theocentric missions is the upshot, with the church’s continual self-assessment the corollary. In light of missio Dei, the vital question for churches becomes: Are we on board with God’s mission in any given endeavor, or are we just calling it missions?

Critics have relentlessly leveled one charge in particular against advocates’ lofty claims for missio Dei: “If everything is mission, nothing is mission.”12 There are two different uses of this well-worm adage, and both call to attention important implications for the conceptualization of missio Dei.

First, missio Dei seems to imply an ontological assertion: God is missionary in nature. The corollary is therefore that everything God does is mission. Beyond the fear that this entails a “humanistic” or “social” gospel a la Hoekendijk, the problem with everything being mission is that it “necessarily makes light work of the distinction that Christian theology, because it is rooted in church members’ experience of God, has to make between the incomprehensible activity of God in the world and the redeeming and healing activity of Jesus Christ.”13 Putting it this way, God is admittedly “doing” much more than the salvation-historically limited activity of Jesus and the Spirit in the church. The complaint is therefore semantic: because of the experiential (i.e., epistemological) difference between what are usually called “sustaining” activity and “saving” activity, there is legitimate need to distinguish between the two in our God-talk.

In other words, if God’s “missionary nature” requires that we call everything he does from providence to personal salvation “mission,” what word then will we use for the activity traditionally designated as mission? Of course, this objection does not actually deny that we ought theologically to understand all of God’s activity in terms of his revealed activity (the sending of the Son). Rather, it is a caution against ascribing to God through the label “mission” a variety of activities that are not known to be God’s doing in the same way that God’s people know their own experiences to be his doing.

Second, if everything God does is mission, then mission becomes the proper descriptor of everything the church does in participation with him. “Mission” effectively becomes synonymous with “ministry.” Therefore, many object to the idea that “everything is mission” in reference to the church’s activity. Tormod Engelsviken is representative:

It takes some courage to limit or restrict both the biblical basis and the theological understanding of mission, as well as the practical outworking of it to what is the specifically missionary “intention,” without denying the missionary “dimension” (to borrow the famous words of Lesslie Newbigin) of all the church is doing.14

This seems like another semantic grievance, however, if we are willing to admit that all Christian ministry (“all the church is doing”) has a missionary “dimension” by virtue of its relationship to all that God is doing. Although it is frustrating to our established linguistic compartmentalization, the “discovery” of missio Dei calls the church to speak about all that God does and all that the people of God do in participation with him in terms of the sending of Son and Spirit.

Indeed, the generalization of mission as a theological category was inevitable, for while the conceptualization of missio Dei occurred in the context of classically “missionary” concerns, its trinitarian basis meant that a shift necessarily occurred in theology proper rather than in missiology alone. That is to say, what is true of cross-cultural church work because it is true of God must also be true of every other church work. Whatever we are doing, we are merely participants in what God is doing. If this principle is true, the essential question remains: Is everything God is doing revealed paradigmatically in the missio of Son and Spirit? If so, we can hardly speak wrongly of everything God and the church do by calling it mission.

In contrast to the usual objection, Wolfgang Günther states:

[Missio Dei] offers an umbrella, as it were, under which all the different biblical motives for mission and the corresponding different directions in our churches have their rightful place but are at the same time relativized. God’s mission is so all encompassing that all who take part in it can only ever take up one small part of it.15

These words are reminiscent of David Bosch, the theologian who spelled out the implications of missio Dei for evangelical Christianity in his landmark work, Transforming Mission:

We do need a more radical and comprehensive hermeneutic of mission. In attempting to do this we may perhaps move close to viewing everything as mission, but that is a risk we will have to take. Mission is a multifaceted ministry, in respect of witness, service, justice, healing, reconciliation, liberation, peace, evangelism, fellowship, church planting, contextualization, and much more. And yet, even the attempt to list some dimensions of mission is fraught with danger, because it again suggests that we can define what is infinite. Whoever we are, we are tempted to incarcerate the missio Dei in the narrow confines of our own predilections, thereby of necessity reverting to one-sidedness and reductionism. We should beware of any attempt at delineating mission too sharply.16

It was indeed a risk that Bosch took, in that he dared to accept what missio Dei meant for the nature of the whole church itself: “There is church because there is mission,”17 “it is the missio Dei which constitutes the church,”18 and ultimately, therefore, “Christianity is missionary by its very nature, or it denies its very raison d’être.”19 It follows, then, that we should call all that the church does “mission,” regardless of the risk of misuse it entails or the change of vocabulary it requires.

The shift in theology proper continues to reverberate through the theological disciplines. These aftershocks are proving extremely generative and, reciprocally, refining the concept of missio Dei. As Bosch indicated, ecclesiology was foremost among the fields forever changed for those who would accept the implications of missio Dei. The widespread acceptance that the church, by virtue of missio Dei, is missionary in its very nature has led to a fundamental reorientation of the church’s self-understanding, its motives for participation in mission, and its view of the gospel vis-à-vis the kingdom message of Jesus. This has found expression in the “missional church” movement, which requires a brief explanation of the semantic evolution that produced the term “missional.” Darrell Guder, one of the leading missional church thinkers, explains:

This terminological experimentation is, to be sure, driven by all that we have learned in the twentieth century as we became more aware that the Christian movement was in fact a global reality, a “world missionary community” (Mackay). Understanding this “great new fact of our time” has encouraged the gradual shift away from ecclesial thinking that centers upon the church, especially the Western church, as an end in itself, and instead toward understanding the identity and purpose of the church within God’s mission, subordinate to and focused upon God’s purposes. The term “missional” was introduced in order to foster this more radical way of thinking about the church and, more generally, of doing theology. It was, as we stated in the Gospel and Our Culture network’s research project published in 1998, an attempt to unpack the operative assumption that “the church is missionary in its very nature.”20

Guder notes that the term has begun to suffer a fate similar to “missio Dei” regarding its overuse and subsequent vacuousness. Moreover, “missional” has become “a cliché, a buzz word” in pop Christianity, further diminishing the value of the word for many.21 In fact, that is a problem that confronts the entire missional church movement, as its impulse toward contextualization has caused it to be lumped together with the “emergent church” phenomenon. For many who so freely sling these labels about, “missional” and “emergent” seem merely to connote a culturally relevant or, less flatteringly, a “cool” way to be the church.22

Still, “missional” appears to have finally filled the terminological void over which the semantic arguments above languished. That is to say, the adjective “missional” denotes the “dimension” of the entire church that corresponds to the missio Dei, leaving “missionary” for the properly “sending” activity (“intention”) of the church. More generally, missional is “simply an adjective denoting something that is related to or characterized by mission, or has the qualities, attributes or dynamics of mission. Missional is to the word mission what covenantal is to covenant, or fictional to fiction” (emphasis original).23 Given this development, we might now rather say that God is missional in nature, and therefore the church is missional in nature, reserving missionary for the persons and activities related to the church’s particular sendings.

In any event, the missional church movement is one of the most prominent aftereffects of missio Dei’s rise. In essence, it is the outworking of what it means for a congregation to be sent as the Son was sent in its context, apart from the issue of sending missionaries to other contexts. Ecclesiology has taken a turn for the participatory, thereby challenging ever greater numbers of the church’s members to consider what being a part of this missional body means for their own lives. Becoming part of a church as an end in itself is, thankfully, a dying model in many corners.

All of this church-talk is naturally taking place within the traditionalist vein of the earlier dichotomy. Church is a working assumption in the ongoing conversation. Sadly, the Church Growth Movement that rose to prominence among traditionalists, in part as a reaction to the secularizing trends of the humanist vein, stayed disconcertingly close to ecclesiocentrism.24 Yet, missional church thinkers represent a long-overdue, grassroots re-convergence of traditionalist and humanist concerns. Many churches have begun to advocate a vision of “shalom” or total well-being on a global, societal scale in conjunction with the church’s vital participation in God’s realization of that reality, which is called the kingdom of God. Figure 1, reproduced from a recent missions textbook,25 is indicative of the way in which evangelical theology is currently resolving the tension between the narrow, traditional use of “mission” on one hand and the somewhat novel understanding of God’s extra-ecclesial work in terms of “mission” on the other.

This represents a critical shift from a dialectic to a synthetic understanding of missio Dei, progress beyond the initial conflict that stood at the heart of the formula. While a holistic understanding of missio Dei was present in embryonic form in the theology of many Willingen participants, the dichotomy that emerged subsequently between traditionalists and humanists prevented its acceptance on a broad scale. We are now beginning to see a church-wide discovery of the whole mission of God, exemplified in Jesus’ total witness to the in-breaking reality of the kingdom.

Another potentially monumental shift is evident in the current discussions of missio Dei. It is a move to a substantive teleology, signaling a step beyond the early intersections of ecclesiology with eschatology and salvation-history with Trinity. This shift is reflected in a subtle, albeit natural, change in the usage of “mission” in English-language missiological discussion, which echoes broad cultural usage of the term:

Many organizations talk about their mission. There are missions to explore space, diplomatic missions, mission statements of businesses, and fact-finding missions. All of these rely on the core idea of mission—the sending of someone or something to do a job.26

While many have explained mission in terms of an over-simplified etymological notion of “sending,” the emerging sense of mission in contemporary usage is focused on the purpose, goal, or aim—in short, the telos—that drives the sending. It has been common to refer to “God’s purposes” in the discussion of missio Dei. For instance, Hartenstein’s initial formulation cited above refers explicitly to the “holistic aim” of participation in the sending of the Son; a conceptual union of Trinity and telos. Recently, however, teleology is becoming constitutive of the meaning of the missio Dei itself. In other words, while the sending of the Son is still paradigmatic and determinative for mission, and while the historical conceptual development discussed above still stands behind today’s ubiquitous reference to “God’s mission,” the concept of missio Dei has broadened theologically beyond discussion of the Trinity.27 This is distinct, however, from the humanist camp’s abstraction of “sending” from the Gospel accounts in order to generalize it as a universal principle. It is, instead, a theological reflection upon the reason for the sending of the Son—that which stands behind and fuels the mission. In summary, to speak of the missio Dei is to denote its purpose.

In a way, the movement to a less exclusively trinitarian idea of God’s mission is an echo of the much-debated historical discord between the formal disciplines of Biblical and Systematic Theology. Mission seems to have presented itself as a contender for the ever-elusive “center” that Biblical Theology seeks, yet it is with tremendous difficulty that Trinity, the pinnacle of Systematic thought, should serve as such.28 The purpose manifest in missio Dei, however, is proving most promising. Thus, Christopher J. H. Wright’s watershed work, The Mission of God, puts mission to work for Biblical Theology, contending that the biblical narrative’s “whole worldview is predicated on teleological monotheism” (emphasis added).29 “The Bible presents to us a portrait of God that is unquestionably purposeful,” says Wright, and mission is best understood as “a long-term purpose or goal that is to be achieved through proximate objectives and planned actions.”30

On this basis, Wright sets out to develop and employ a “missional hermeneutic,” which is the latest significant upshot of missio Dei.31 While Wright’s is the first major monograph on the subject, he is notably preceded by Richard Baukham’s outline of a mission-centered narrative hermeneutic, which has a substructure justifiably described as teleological, in that “a metanarrative of this kind has a definite future goal towards which it moves.”32 These attempts at constructing a missional hermeneutic are merely another manifestation of the affirmation that “everything is mission.” If mission is an adequate conceptual category for all God’s activity, it naturally follows that we may read the entire narrative of Scripture through the lens of God’s purposeful movement toward his ends. Moreover, “missional” becomes the descriptor for the framework that holds together all the theological disciplines in proper relation to God’s agenda, which ultimately gives them their significance and which they serve.33

A teleological definition of mission naturally raises the question of what God’s telos is. Even assuming that “the kingdom” is the goal, as much of the literature appears to do, our subsequent description of the kingdom continues to be subject to a variety of interpretations, as it was from the beginning of missio Dei’s emergence. But this is not the place to begin exploring the many possible articulations of God’s purposes for the world. For now, suffice it to note this most recent step in the conceptual evolution of missio Dei.

Conclusion

What began as a contextually driven search for answers has led to one of the most significant theological developments of our time. There are perhaps other concepts that could have functioned to recenter the church in a similar way. Yet, it was immersion into the global vision that world missions uniquely engenders that called the church to account in the middle of the last century. In that sense, the conceptualization of missio Dei is itself another affirmation that mission is the mother of theology.

It was the need to reconsider what it means to be sent as the Son was sent, in his way for his purposes, that afforded a renewed theocentrism, a chastened ecclesiology, and a reframing of “everything” in relation to God’s being and act revealed in the sending of Son and Spirit. Undoubtedly, whenever a single formula attempts to designate what “everything” is about there must be tremendous repercussions. Many will continue to feel that missio Dei and its adjectival neologism “missional” are too provincial, too entrenched in the special concerns of missiology, to provide an adequate framework for “everything.” In the ensuing dialogue about the adequacy of our words, it is vital to remember that terminology is not what is truly at stake. Rather, it is the need somehow to speak about the concepts that should shape Christianity’s very worldview. Our capacity to obfuscate essential theological tenets is undisputed; our tendency to see ourselves and our world wrongly, undeniable. Whatever words we choose, we must not fail to speak about who God is in light of the sending of Jesus and the Spirit and what that means for everything we are and do.

Glossary of Key Words

colonialism – n. (a) the expansion of influence from one society to another with the aim of control, whether by literal colonization or by political and cultural domination; (b) specifically referring to the expansion of Western civilization during the 18th-20th centuries

ecclesiocentrism – n. (a) literally, church-centeredness, i.e., the placement of primary importance upon the church; (b) in missiology, the view that Christian mission has its source, sustenance, and culmination in the church

eschatology – n. (a) the theological study of the “end” (eschaton), referring to the “last day” as envisioned in the biblical narrative; (b) realized eschatology refers to the realization, to one degree or another, of end events in the present time, as in the realization of the kingdom of God in human history

humanist view – n. in this paper, the perspective of those who understand missio Dei to refer to a principle of God’s action in the world without necessary reference to the sending of Son and Spirit, thus affording humanity’s social and political agendas preeminence in the description of God’s mission

missio Dei – n. (a) a Latin phrase literally translated as mission of God or sending of God, the meaning of which varies depending upon the theological disposition of the speaker; (b) originally, the sending of the Son and Spirit; (c) in other usage, the principle of God’s immediate involvement in the improvement of the human situation through secular political and historical processes; (d) in recent English usage, the purpose or goal of God

missional – adj. (a) describing something that is related to God’s mission in an essential way; (b) often connotes the corrective assertion that something should not be understood apart from God’s mission, as in “missional church”

missionary – n. (a) a sent person; (b) in traditional usage, a person sent to carry out the purposes of God or the church, usually cross-culturally; adj. (c) of or related to persons sent, as in “missionary endeavor”; (d) sometimes used synonymously with missional, where the notion of being sent in the usual sense is absent, as in “the church is missionary is it very nature”

missions – n. (a) the church’s work of “sending,” whether near or far, for the purpose of participation in God’s mission, synonymous with mission work, as in “domestic missions” or “domestic mission work”; (b) sometimes synonymous with missio ecclesiae, a Latin phrase literally translated as mission of the church, which denotes the categorical difference between the church’s activity and God’s activity; (c) sometimes reserved for particular activities such as evangelization and church planting

salvation history – n. (a) a concept developed in Biblical Theology to express the relationship between secular history and history as the Bible tells it in terms of God’s saving acts; (b) denotes the continuous, epochal account of God’s work in history understood by virtue of particular moments of redemption or revelation recorded in the Bible; (c) functionally synonymous with postmodern usage of “biblical narrative” or “metanarrative,” which express a unified story not in terms of modernist “history” but in terms of a worldview that places all history in relation to its particular epistemological claims

teleology – n. (a) the theological study of purpose (telos); (b) specifically, the study of the purposes of God, especially in relation to his mission

theocentrism – n. (a) literally, God-centeredness, i.e., the placement of primary importance upon God; (b) in missiology, the view that Christian mission has its source, sustenance, and culmination in God

traditionalist view – n. in this paper, the perspective of those who understand missio Dei to define mission as particularly God’s, though never without reference to the church’s participation in that mission, thus maintaining the church’s traditional instrumentality

Greg McKinzie (http://gregandmeg.net/greg) is a missionary in Arequipa, Peru, where he partners in holistic evangelism with Team Arequipa (http://teamarequipa.net) and The Christian Urban Development Association (http://cudaperu.org). He is a graduate (MDiv) of Harding Graduate School of Religion. He can be contacted at gemckinzie@gmail.com.

Bibliography

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Bauckham, Richard. Bible and Mission: Christian Witness in a Postmodern World. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003.

Bosch, David J. Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. American Society of Missiology Series 16. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991.

Engelsviken, Tormod. “Missio Dei: The Understanding and Misunderstanding of a Theological Concept in European Churches and Missiology.” International Review of Mission 92, no. 367 (October 2003): 481-97.

Flett, John G. “Missio Dei: A Trinitarian Envisioning of a Non-Trinitarian Theme.” Missiology: An International Review 37, no. 1 (January 2009): 5-18.

Gospel and Our Culture Network. “eSeries No. 2.” The Gospel and Our Culture. http://www.gocn.org/resources/newsletters/2009/01/gospel-and-our-culture.

Guder, Darrell. “Missio Dei: Integrating Theological Formation for Apostolic Vocation.” Missiology: An International Reiview 37, no. 1 (2009): 63-74.

Günther, Wolfgang. “The History and Significance of the World Mission Conferences in the 20th Century.” International Review of Mission 92, no. 367 (October 2003): 521-37.

Kinnamon, Michael and Brian E. Cope. The Ecumenical Movement: An Anthology of Key Texts and Voices. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.

Moreau, A. Scott, Gary R. Corwin, and Gary B. McGee. Introducing World Missions: A Biblical Historical and Practical Survey. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004.

Neill, Stephen. Creative Tension. London: Edinburgh House Press, 1959.

Richebächer, Wilhelm. “Missio Dei: The Basis of Mission Theology or a Wrong Path?” International Review of Mission 92, no. 367 (October 2003): 588-605.

Wright, Christopher J. H. The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006.

Preparing to go to the mission field as a recent graduate student, I was compelled to consider subscribing to academic journals. These journals are the natural way to stay plugged into conversations that have become important for the ongoing formation of a soon-to-be practitioner such as myself. In my experience, if we learn anything from professional training, it is that we are very far from finished learning. Even the most modest amount of ministry experience confirms this, inciting us to find conversation partners that can speak to the realities we confront in the service of the kingdom. Some of these realities are very practical; some are very theological. And sometimes hard-won wisdom suggests that there is little difference between the two. Whatever their nature, these formative conversations have, for all of us, taken place within a specific context, a church tradition with its own voice in the discourse. Shockingly, however, there has existed no means (since 1996,1 at least) for missiological conversation partners from my own tradition to take their place at the table alongside my other subscriptions.

My consternation at this situation was compounded by the Stone-Campbell Movement’s (SCM) potentially rich contribution to the field. While my own experience is limited to the Churches of Christ (a cappella), I can assert as a matter of history that the SCM has been deeply involved in missions, and no few of its higher-learning institutions have taken part in the emergence of the sub-discipline of missiology in the last century. Yet, with a few notable exceptions (one of whom, I am pleased to say, is among our first contributors), the SCM’s chorus of voices has not been heard by the wider missiological community. And we are, I suggest, all the poorer for it, because it is the interchange that enables us to grow. It should probably be said at this point that there is little of brand loyalty in all this talk of tradition. Rather, it reflects the lesson, which the heirs of Stone and Campbell have learned the hard way, that a historical self-consciousness is far more productive than the presumption of autonomy and traditionlessness. Those working on the present project, though we are fundamentally committed to the mission of God, do so from within the SCM, aware that it affects how we hear and speak, in joyful communion with others in the same tradition, eager to engage generatively with those who hear and speak differently. This is the vantage from which we appreciate the SCM’s missiological contribution and also hope and pray to see it enriched by other perspectives.

As far as ministry experience goes, we also realize that it is not merely academic voices that long for an outlet but also those of seasoned practice. If we are really going to attempt to mine the riches of a tradition, why not go all the way, even at the risk of unconventionality? This impulse coincides with recent expressions in both missiology and theology that point toward a far more holistic vision of God’s mission in the first place. That is to say, by acknowledging previously unrecognized arenas of and participants in mission, a way has opened for us to bring new and exciting conversation partners to the table. Though the dialect from context to context is often somewhat different than scholar-speak, it is certainly no more incomprehensible (likely far less so, in fact), and we are all called, in the end, to the very missionary task of learning to communicate with one another. In short, we’re excited at the prospect of a medium through which any reflective participant in God’s mission can speak. So much, then, for a traditional academic journal.

The initial impulse to hold academia and practice in tension was but the first glimmer of a much greater endeavor to overcome false dichotomies between theory and practice. For that is what these dichotomies ultimately are: false. While we have grown accustomed to, even rewarded by, our niches and specializations and gifts, we only ever engage in monologues when we are trapped within the confines of our provincial subcultures. We manage to talk about “scholarship” and “practical ministry” as though they are competing forces, employing seemingly incompatible languages, each implicitly asserting the superiority of its epistemological norms. Scholar or minister, theory or practice, academic (journal) or popular (magazine), footnotes or endnotes, but never both, and so the great divide becomes indisputable and, perhaps, unbridgeable.

This caricature of “we” cannot really withstand experience, of course, as we all know professor-practitioners or minister-scholars. Yet, the dichotomy persists somehow as young editors begin to cobble ideas together and find that they “have to” cater to a niche audience. Why? Because publishing, perhaps in simpler terms than any other endeavor, reveals the actual state of the disunion and does so in terms of bald disinterest. Perhaps Sir Thomas More put it best when he said, “Low brows find everything heavy going that isn’t completely low brow. High brows reject everything as vulgar that isn’t a mass of archaisms.” We don’t speak each other’s language, and when it comes to actually listening to one another, it shows. “What could your academic prattle do for my actual situation on the ground,” says the practitioner. “What could your earthy anecdotes contribute to my studied reflection,” says the scholar. Of course, what the professor-practitioner and the minister-scholar know is that the answer to both questions is, a great deal. And what the missionary knows is that the real issue is communication, not relevance.

Yet, the niching of the publishing industry has only served to reinforce the natural barriers to communication across fields of expertise, and this plays right into the hands of postmodern consumerism, meaning there is also an economic incentive urging us not to challenge readers who know what they like. Needless to say (one might wish), the mission of God calls this sort of provincialism to account, issuing a vocation to the people of God to speak cross-culturally as both learners and sharers, not least when it comes to speaking within the Christian community about the mission itself. What this all means for the project we have come to call Missio Dei is not that we invent a mystical method of translation that makes the low brow palatable to the high brow and vice versa but rather that we set aside the boxes and create a hybrid, a journal that is about holding in creative tension the voices of the Christian subcultures that must be heard in a truly holistic dialogue about God’s mission.

Missio Dei is, therefore, neither academic nor popular, neither theological nor practical. It is a place for interchange. There will be unapologetically academic contributions, with latinisms and technical jargon and dense footnotes. There will be stories, anecdotes, and essays, with easy-to-read prose and contractions and an utter lack of secondary sourcing. There will be artistic expression as well, both lyric and graphic. There will be even more than all this. But let it be said that this is not an effort to provide “something for everyone.” It is, unequivocally, an effort to bring everyone into one conversation about the mission of God, in the deep mutuality that belongs to the people of God, for his kingdom and his glory.

It is perhaps dangerously close to cliché to name a journal Missio Dei. Yet, there is something about the idea of missio Dei that remains fundamentally important for those of us advocating this discourse. It is, in that sense, always the fitting banner for missiological conversation. At the same time, there is something about the present moment that incites us to say once more, in words writ large, that this is God’s mission. These are times when it seems especially evident how exciting it is to be involved in what God is doing. All over the world, in the midst of a riotous variety of expression, the church is rediscovering God’s mission and, therefore, her own. This emerging awareness, accompanied by a rearrangement of frameworks and priorities, indeed, a reexamination of fundamental assumptions, beckons the whole church to community discourse.

Naturally enough, that discourse must begin with—and often return to—a conversation about the mission of God itself. Can God’s mission, as a theological concept, bear the weight that many would presently place upon it? Is it, as an expression, really just one way among many of saying what we all mean—a place holder, stylish one decade and antiquated the next? Or do we in fact mean very different things? And more fundamentally, is it really conceivable that Christianity sidelined and distorted something as central and essential to its very identity as even cautious advocates would suggest “the mission of God” to be? These questions, broadly sketched as they are, merely hint at the tangle of issues that comprise the ongoing discourse about the many concepts and practices rooted in a reality that has come to be identified as missio Dei—the mission of God.

Our first issue is themed “Rediscovering Missio Dei” as well, because we felt it would be valuable for readers to engage with the concept straightaway, encased as it is within one of those esoteric Latin phrases that make ideas feel inaccessible to some and irrelevant to others. Either way, we need to overcome a lot of (probably justified) shoulder shrugging and eye rolling by getting to the marrow of the matter quickly. There, we pray, a generative conversation will begin.