Mission Through & Through (Pt.3)
The Story of God Shapes the Church's Theology, Vocation, and Hermeneutic
**This is the third of four posts of the paper I presented at my network’s national retreat. In the first two posts, I argued that the church is in the midst of a crisis and that the way through must be a return to a robust missional theology (part 1). In the second post, I highlighted the first theological axiom the church must return to—God is a missionary God (part 2). In this third post, I begin to highlight a second theological foundation: the story of God.
Theological Axiom 2: God's Story Shapes the Church’s Life Together.
The second theological axiom the missional church must recapture concerns the centrality of the story of God. The story is ground zero for all theology and hermeneutics. As our friend Chris Gonzalez has stated, “The story of God is not an app on your phone; it is the operating system that controls all of the apps.” The story of God is not simply a neat evangelistic tool nor a fun way to talk about the Bible. It orients and controls all the aspects of the church’s faith and practice. It grounds our understanding of (1) theology, (2) vocation, and (3) biblical interpretation.
(1) The story serves as the foundational theological paradigm through which we view other doctrines.
The story grounds the church’s theology. If God’s acts reveal his being, then the missional story reveals the missionary acts. We only learn about this missionary God of the Bible as he is revealed to us in light of the missional metanarrative. The Bible is the record of God’s missionary activities. Moreover, since the entire drama reveals the missionary actions of God,1 a move must be made from a theology of mission to a missional theology. Theology exists because mission exists; therefore, “We are in need of a missiological agenda for theology rather than just a theological agenda for mission; for theology, rightly understood, has no reason to exist other than critically to accompany the missio Dei.”2
Not only should we develop theology from the lens of mission because the Bible is a missionary document, but also because theology is the product of mission. Martin Kahler has famously stated that ‘mission is the mother of theology.’ The church began to ‘do’ theology as it interacted with its various missional contexts. The early church did not necessarily learn theology to do mission as much as it developed its theology as it went out on mission. Theology became necessary for the contextualization of the Gospel. The theology that developed and becomes canon acts as descriptive; however, there is much prescriptive contextualization that the church must do in each new context.
One way we do this is by allowing ecclesiology to be interpreted through the lens of missiology, not vice versa. The mission must shape the church; the church cannot shape the mission. Take, for example, the doctrine of eldership, which usually falls under the larger systematic category of ecclesiology. When one prioritizes ecclesiology over missiology, mission often gets relegated to the periphery or incidental to the roles of the elders; it becomes one aspect of their duty. Many good theological books on eldership often describe the roles of elders as the following: caring (knowing), leading, protecting, and feeding the sheep. Interestingly, mission is either left out of these four roles, or some might add a fifth mission category.3 However, rather than view mission as one of the roles of an elder, all of the roles should be viewed through mission. God gifted the church with elders to shepherd the people of God into his mission in their respective contexts. In other words, elders care for the flock, not simply so that each member is valued and appreciated, but also so the weak may persevere in the mission. Elders lead the church into mission in their context, not simply leading them into becoming a better version of themselves. They protect the church from heresy and from people seeking to divide it so that the witness of the Kingdom might be preserved. They feed the church so the flock will know God’s mission in the world and their role within it, not simply know what is ‘truth.’ Elders are the missionary leaders of the church who lead, protect, care, and feed God’s people to be equipped to participate in the missio Dei. Thus, it is not so much that the church has elders to help them become more godly but that God has elders to lead the church to be missional.
(2) The story grounds the church’s missionary vocation.
Within the unfolding missional drama, the church possesses a specific role. If the church is ignorant of their role, how in the heaven can they ever embody and enact the story in which they have been called to participate? The only way the church can take up its vocation is to understand the role they are called to play within the drama. The church, then, must become more cognizant of God’s missional story, for "Only as we grapple prayerfully and rigorously with God's story of redemption, as it is revealed to us in the whole of the Bible, will we be fully equipped to live out our calling as disciples of Jesus Christ."4 To live out our vocational calling as God’s present-day missional community, the church must know who it is (identity precedes mission), and the missional direction and placement of the church within God’s story determine the church’s identity. Michael Goheen states, “It is important to read the Bible as one story [because] it enables us to understand our identity as God's people as we see our role in the story…Our identity as God's people comes from that missional role in the biblical story.”5 If stories determine identities, and identities (being) produce mission (acts), then if the church gets the story wrong, they also get their identity and, consequently, their mission wrong. We all derive our identity from some story, and when that story is not the true story, we will inevitably act out some alien story in the name of Jesus. Lesslie Newbigin warns, “If this biblical story is not the one that really controls our thinking then inevitably we shall be swept into the story that the world tells about itself. We shall become increasingly indistinguishable from the pagan world of which we are a part.”6 Without grounding our identity in the true story, the church will eventually lose its distinct identity. Thus, the church can only learn who it is and what it is called to do within the biblical story.
One of the ways the story depicts the church's identity is through the metaphor of “fishers of men.” In Matthew 4.19, Jesus calls the disciples, Peter and Andrew specifically, and promises to make them "fishers of men." When Jesus employs this metaphor, he is often understood to be using a pun or double entendre. It is as if Jesus is saying, “Hey Peter and Andrew, I know you are fishermen, but come follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” This scene is often interpreted as Jesus calling his disciples to be mere evangelists who will tell everyone about him. It is not as much as this is not true, but it is not a complete picture of what Jesus is doing. The whole story is not being accounted for in this traditional interpretation.
Where did Jesus come up with the metaphor “fishers of men?” Because we do not know the story, we do not grasp what Jesus is saying. This metaphor is a direct allusion to Jeremiah 16.16. In Jeremiah 16.14-15, Jeremiah promises the nation a future return from Babylon and describes this return to Israel as a new exodus. This new exodus will far surpass the old one, such that no one will even talk about the redemption from Egypt. They will only be talking about this new second exodus from Babylon. Then verse 16 states, “Behold, I am sending for many fishers, declares the LORD, and they shall catch them. And afterward I will send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain and every hill, and out of the clefts of the rocks.”7
In connecting Jeremiah 16.16 with Matthew 4.18-19, Gentry and Wellum write, “When Jesus says to Peter and Andrew that he will make them “fishers of men,” he is referring directly to Jeremiah 16:16, and he is saying that he will use his followers to bring the exiles home.”8 Jesus is not simply being pithy, nor is he implying that the disciples will help him tell everyone how to get to heaven. He is conveying to his disciples that the time of the second exodus is at hand. The means by which Yahweh will gather the elect people out of exile and lead a second exodus is through the sending of fishermen and hunters. This is highly instructive for understanding what Jesus is calling the disciples to do. The gathering of the eschatological people of God is about to begin, and the disciples will be the fishermen who will reach the exiles. The call to be a fisher of men is not as much as a call to learn the techniques of good fishermen so we can be good evangelists; it is a call to see that we are now in the time of the story where God is going to use fishermen and hunters to bring all of God’s people back to the temple to be with God. But why does Jeremiah use the imagery of fishermen and hunters? Maybe it speaks to the skills of these trades; however, it is more likely referring to geography. The fishermen who will go out on the seas across the world to catch fish, and hunters who will find all the elect exiles who are seemingly hidden. So, whether the exiles are on the water, in the mountains, or hiding in caves, God will send people, the church, to gather them to himself. Being a fisher of men speaks more to the time of the story being fulfilled in Christ through the church to bless the nations than it speaks to learning the underwater rock structures to know where to cast your bait to catch the northern pike! Without a grasp of the story, the church cannot fulfill its missional identity to be fishers of men.
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.
“The whole Bible renders to us the story of God’s mission through God’s people in their engagement with God’s world for the sake of the whole of God’s creation.” Christopher Wright, The Mission of God, 51.
Bosch, Transforming Mission, 504-508
For example, see Biblical Eldership by Alexander Strauch, The Shepherd Leader by Timothy Z. Witmer, and Gospel Eldership by Rob Thune. All three of these books depict the roles of elders in these categories. Thune, however, does add mission as a fifth role when he says elders are to function missionally. Mission, though, is still one of the roles, not necessarily defining and shaping the other four.
T. Desmond Alexander, From Paradise to the Promised Land: An Introduction to the Pentateuch (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2002), 314.
Michael Goheen states, See The Urgency of Reading the Bible as One Story, Theology Today, Volume 64 (2008): 475, 477.
Newbigin, “Biblical Authority.” Unpublished Archive Article DA29.3.17.1, Birmingham, UK, undated.
Commenting on verse 16 Gentry and Wellum write, “Verse 16 employs some unusual figures of speech to depict and portray the effort and length to which the Lord goes to bring back all the exiles. A comparison is drawn between fishing and hunting and bringing back the exiles. Those who fish and hunt require patience, strategy and time to catch their prey. In a similar way, God will expend considerable patience, strategy, and time to catch his “prey,” i.e., the exiles.” See Peter J. Gentry and Stephen J. Wellum, Kingdom Through Covenant (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), 489.
Gentry and Wellum, Kingdom Through Covenant, 490.