Mission Through & Through (Pt. 2)
Part 2: God is a Missionary God, and the Church is a Missionary People
**In the first post, I proposed that the way out of the crisis the church finds itself in will not be through methodological structures but through a robust missional theology. In this post, I present the first of two theological foundations the church must return to to navigate the crisis.
Theological Foundation 1: God is a missionary God; therefore, the church is intrinsically a missionary people.
This statement may sound simple and redundant to many, but it grounds the Christian faith, and few leaders have seriously done theological business with it. It is the doctrine that, in many ways, birthed the missional movement. Missional theology’s unique niche is grounding the missio Dei within the trinity, not the church. This placement of mission within God himself radically reshapes most, if not all, of what the Evangelical church believes about Christianity. I will briefly examine two aspects of the above foundation.
(1) The missionary nature of God is inherent to the inner (ad intra) life of God—the immanent trinity.
‘God is a missionary God’ is an oft-repeated theological mantra that often is not adequately understood or, better, properly located. The question becomes, how missionary is God? I want to assert, and I am in no way the only one to do so, that mission is intrinsic to the life of God; it is his nature to become missionary. Bosch notes that “Mission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God.1 Before the church engages in mission, it is first intrinsic to the very life of God. Just as love is intrinsic to God, so also God is missionary.
Theologically, the missionary nature of God is grounded within the immanent Trinity—who God is in Himself, not just the economic Trinity—how God acts and relates to his creation in time and space. God’s missionary life is inherently part of his inner-relational life, not just how he reveals and relates himself to his world. John Franke warns that we should understand a necessary correlation between God’s being (immanent) and God’s acts (economic). He writes, “While the acts of God in history are the basis of the doctrine of the Trinity, they are also indicative of God's ongoing internal life…This suggests a theological principle: God is as God acts.”2 His being and acts are neither confused nor disconnected, so how God acts towards his creation (economic) reveals God’s being (immanent). He acts as missionary because he is missionary. Because God’s missionary nature is grounded in the immanent trinity, mission cannot be ancillary or secondary to his being. John Flett states, “God is a missionary God because his deliberate acting in apostolic movement toward humanity is not a second step alongside—and thus in distinction to—his perfect divine being. In his economy, in his movement for the human, God lives his own eternal life.”3 God lives his life through his primary, intrinsic missionary activity through his movement toward his creation, which is first evidenced in creation itself. Mission is not a derivative movement; it is intrinsically part of his divine life.
Why is this important? Namely, where one locates God's missionary nature has significant implications for the church. The greater the division between the being and acts of God, the greater the bifurcation between the church and mission. If mission is not primarily intrinsic to the immanent life of God but merely how he relates to his creation, mission becomes secondary and derivative to the church's life. John Flett notes, “As no breach characterizes the relationship of God’s being to his act, so no corresponding breach should determine the life of his community.”4 The life of God is to be lived out in his people; therefore, there must be no breach between the church being missionary and its acts as missionary. Mission cannot be relegated to secondary or incidental. The missionary life of God must be lived out in the church's life. Yet when there is a rupture in the act and being of God, it results ‘in a breached community characterized by a prioritized contemplative being and a derivative missionary act.”5 Although seen as beneficial, mission becomes incidental to the life and purpose of the church. It becomes ‘a second step in addition to some other, more central way of being the church.’
For some, the ‘first step’ and central way of being the church is to create a deep community of love within the body, or for others, it is to institute contemplative disciplines to commune with God, both of which are necessary and good. However, if mission is intrinsic to the life of God, then mission cannot be incidental to the church's life. If God’s movement for the world is how he lives his divine life, then the way the church lives its participatory life must be in movement toward the world. When the church does not center mission, it lives out of step with the very life of the triune God. Stephen Holmes writes, “A church that refuses the call to mission is failing to be the church God calls it to be just as fundamentally as a church that refuses the call to be loving. Just as purposeful, cruciform, self-sacrificial sending is intrinsic to God’s own life, being sent in a cruciform, purposeful and self-sacrificial way must be intrinsic to the church being the church.”6 The local church must view its entire life as missionary, or it is failing just as much as a church that fails to love.
The takeaway: We cannot relegate mission to incidental to the lives of our churches. As good as emotional health, contemplative practices, and deep community are, they cannot replace the central, dynamic movement of the life of God to the world through the church. All of these practices are important as much as they build up the missional witness of the church. They cannot be understood as equal parts of the church’s life. They are all part of the church’s witness and first step toward the world.
(2) The church is intrinsically missionary.
This has already been hinted at above. Yet, to dig deeper, we need to understand the missionary life of God directly flows to his people, such that the church is also intrinsically missionary. David Bosch puts it aptly, “The Christian faith, I submit, is intrinsically missionary…This dimension of the Christian faith is not an optional extra: Christianity is missionary by its very nature, or it denies its very raison d’être.”7 The church does not exist for itself, nor does it simply exist for others. It exists to fulfill God’s missional purposes in and for the world. Christopher Wright famously states, “The church does not have a mission; the mission has a church.”8 It is imperative to note that the church serves the mission, not vice versa. Therefore, the church is not free to make up its mission in the name of Jesus, nor can it cherry-pick a verse to determine its mission and, thereby, declare itself “Biblical.” The mission has already been determined by the triune God deep within the divine council, and the church must align its mission with the missional purposes of God. Simply put, the church’s mission is to live its life together in Jesus as his witnesses for those who do not yet know him. Or, as Barth states, “The church exists in being sent and in building up itself for the sake of its mission.”9 If there is no mission, there is no true church, or as Bosch states, “A Church without mission or a mission without the church are both contradictions.”10
The church’s union with Christ also demands an intrinsic missionary identity. As great as the Reformed teachings are on this central doctrine, being united to Christ is not simply about the benefits that are ours through our union with him but also about being united to his mission in the world. Lesslie Newbigin reminds us that there is no participation in Christ without participation in his mission.11 To be united to the living God demands participation in his life and movement in and for the world.
One passage to examine in this vein is John 15, where John commands us to abide in Christ. Abiding is John’s way of referring to our union with Jesus. Abiding in the vine is often understood as static, being still and fellowshipping with Jesus. It is often taught that we need to be dependent upon Jesus, fellowshipping with him in Word and prayer, or some form of relational reality. As accurate as this may be, an essential element of this passage is overlooked. To abide in Christ demands that we go in Christ. Abiding in Christ is a dynamic missional movement, such that to remain in Christ is to go in Christ. John 15.16 states, “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you.” The disciples constitute a dynamic, moving vine, a community of love moving toward the world in dependence upon Jesus, filled with his love.
Moreover, this fruit-bearing is not limited to ceasing from sin. Newbigin understands ‘bearing fruit’ as “simply the life of Jesus being made visible in the midst of the life of the world.”12 Gorman states that “the ‘fruit’ of chapter 15 is the ongoing missional presence and activity of Jesus—his works—in his disciples.”13 To abide in Christ demands that the new covenant people of God make the new creational world a present reality in their life together in their respective contexts. Abiding in Jesus is a missional activity because abiding requires abiding in his mission.
If you have enjoyed reading Mission Forward, please share it with anyone and everyone you think it would serve. Mission Forward exists to advance God’s mission forward in and for the world as the church takes up its missionary vocation and learns to read the Bible from a missional perspective.
David Bosch, Transforming Mission, 390.
John Franke, Missional Theology, 12.
John G. Flett, The Witness of God, 197.
Ibid, 196.
Ibid, 34
Stephen R. Holmes, Trinitarian Missiology: Towards a Theology of God as Missionary, International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 8 Number 1 January 2006.
Bosch, Transforming Mission, 374. Vatican II also declared: “The pilgrim Church is missionary by her very nature, since it is from the mission of the Son and the mission of the Holy Spirit that she draws her origin, in accordance with the decree of God the Father.” Ad Gentes 2
Christopher Wright states, “It is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world, as that God has a church for his mission in the world. Mission was not made for the church; the church was made for mission – God’s mission. See The Mission of God,
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1, ¶62, p. 725.
Bosch, Transforming Mission, 374.
Lesslie Newbigin, Household of God, 146.
Newbigin, The Light has Come, 197.
Gorman, Abide and Go. He concludes his examination on John 15 by stating, “John 15, then, expresses a robust theology and spirituality of abiding in Jesus, not as a private and vacuous mysticism, not even as a sectarian love-feast, but as a communal mysticism that is, paradoxically, this-worldly and missional—and transformational, both for those engaging in and those benefiting from the missional activity.”
Love this!