The Mission of God and the Witness of the Church (eBook)

Introduction

The Mission of God

There is a renaissance of scholarship and teaching on the mission of God today. Popular authors and speakers are attempting to help Christians live on mission. Mission agencies and church planting networks are training new gospel ministers to start missional churches. Missiologists and biblical scholars are exploring missional readings of the Bible along with the concept of the missio Dei—that is, the mission of God.

Despite all the discussion of mission, a cloud of confusion has descended on the church and academy about what exactly the mission of God is and what the church’s role is in it. This stems in part from the fact that mission is a slippery word. It has become a catchall word for Christian activity of any kind. When an important word like mission becomes so elastic that its meaning is cloudy, significant questions arise.

One such question is, What is the relationship of proclamation ministries such as evangelism, discipleship, and church planting to mercy ministries and efforts to serve the poor, the orphan, and the widow? Even more complex is the question of whether God’s mission is just about redeeming mankind or perhaps something larger, even as large as restoring the entire cosmos. This confusion demands that we go back to the Scriptures for answers.

Defining Mission

The English word mission is not much used in the Bible.1 That should not, however, lead us to think that the concept and practice of mission are absent in Scripture.

For our study, I will use the following definition for the mission of God: God’s revelatory work intended to establish a divine-human communion within creation. Or, as the apostle John puts it in perhaps the most well-known and shared verse in the Bible, “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). God reveals himself in sending his Son, the Savior, in time and space (i.e., creation), so that mankind might have eternal life, which John defines as knowing God (John 17:3). All of this radiates from God’s love for the world. Let’s look more closely at the three key terms in our definition: revelatory work, divine-human communion, within creation.

Revelatory Work

First, notice that God’s mission includes an activity: God’s revelatory work. Mission is first and foremost something in which God engages: it is from God, through God, and for God. He—not society, government, or even the church—is the primary definer and actor in the missio Dei. Before humanity is ever invited into mission, God is at work, revealing himself in revelatory word and saving deed.

You may wonder whether the word revelation adequately explains all that God does in creation and redemption. That may be because we have too low a view of divine revelation. When God speaks, the cosmos is born (Gen. 1). The good news proclaimed is “the power of God for salvation” (Rom. 1:16), and faith comes by hearing (Rom. 10:17) the word of Christ. When we behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus, we are changed from glory to glory (2 Cor. 3:18; 4:4–6). Truly, all that God says and does can be summed up in the word revelation—so much so that Jesus declares that his very glory is revealed in his death on the cross (John 12:23–25). God’s revelation, in fact, creates and redeems.

This revelatory aspect of God’s mission is often connected in mission studies with the Greek verb apostellō, which means “send.” An apostle (noun: apostolos) was literally a “sent one.” The Latin verb mittere corresponds to apostellō. The noun form is missio, from which we get our English word mission. Apostellō captures the idea of sending on mission. English speakers might talk about sending an ambassador on a diplomatic mission. For our purposes, throughout Scripture we will see God actively revealing himself through sending. He sends the Son to create and redeem the world by the Spirit, whom he likewise sends. He sends his people, from our first parents to the prophets to the apostle Paul, into the world, as witnesses to his revelation. Each sending is meant to reveal who God is and what he is like. This naturally begs the question, Why is it so important for God to reveal himself?

Divine-Human Communion

If revelation is the activity of mission, communion is the aim of mission, specifically a loving communion between humanity and the living God. This is mission’s goal. Perhaps a second Greek word, a noun, will help us understand this aspect of God’s mission: telos. Telos means the desired end. Telos tells us why something is done, why it is important, or what we want to achieve. When coupled with what we have already seen, this helps us recognize that all sending (apostellō) has a purpose (telos). A king sends an ambassador for a reason. A humanitarian mission seeks certain outcomes. This is true, likewise, when God sends.

God reveals himself for communion both in the work of creation and in redemption. At creation, before the fall, the Spirit hovers over the waters to breathe life into the world, and the Word of God speaks everything into existence. Why? The triune God intends to bring humanity into communion with him as children and co-regents. This is also the aim of God’s mission in redemption. The cross of Christ is ground zero of a new creation where restored fellowship is made possible as the Spirit of God breathes new life into humanity.

This relational goal of mission is critical to remember. The sending dimension of mission is often the sole focus of missional readings of Scripture. As a result, what is highlighted is simply the church’s activities in the world. We truncate God’s mission, however, if we neglect the relational heart that undergirds God’s sending. This results in two problems.

First, an overly weighted focus on the sending dimension of mission explains why some sections of the Old Testament appear not to apply to God’s mission. We clearly see the sending activity in the book of Jonah as missional but fail to see how the Song of Solomon or Hosea, declaring God’s plan for communion with humanity, fits into the missio Dei. The relational dimension of God’s mission helps us make more sense of genres like wisdom and poetry in our biblical theologies of mission.

Second, when we neglect the relational dimension, we don’t know what to do with the church beyond involvement in missional activities. But, if God’s very aim in his mission is to establish divine-human communion, then the church cannot be reduced to a sending agency. Some twentieth-century scholars contended that the church has no special role in God’s mission; instead, God may fulfill his mission through government and popular uprising more than through the church. Even evangelical scholars have made statements like “it is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world, but that God has a church for his mission in the world. Mission was not made for the church; the church was made for mission.”2 In this way of thinking, the church exists for mission, not the other way around. I will argue the opposite. The revelatory activity of God (and those he sends) is to create and redeem a people for communion.

Within Creation

The final part of our definition alerts us to the fact that there is a setting for mission. Nonhuman creation has a role in the mission of God. Whether in the garden (Gen. 1–3) or the garden city (Rev. 21–22), the Lord has never intended a bodiless, noncontextual existence for humanity. The cosmos was God’s idea; it was to be where his mission would unfold. It has served as the stage on which the great drama of creation, fall, exile, and restoration take place. In eternity future, the new creation will be the everlasting dwelling place of the Lamb and his bride.

The cosmos, whether Edenic, fallen, or renewed, is not the ultimate end of the mission of God; nevertheless, it is the context. Scott Hafemann unpacks this order of relationship when he writes, “Mankind is not created to provide for the world; the world is created to provide for mankind.”3 The creation is good, it is from God, and it exists to host God’s designed communion with humanity.

So the missio Dei has an activity, a purpose, and a context: revelation for communion in creation. These three key terms and their amplifications will become clearer as we move through the narrative of Scripture. If what I have said is correct, we should see this theme naturally emerge from the text as early as the creation narrative (Gen. 1–2), carry right on through into the new creation (Rev. 21–22), and appear everywhere in between.

One facet to our theme that we should prepare for at the outset is that early in the Scriptures we encounter...