Howdy, and welcome to Part 3 of my paper investigating the integration of Theology & Mission.
I hope that anyone who has taken the time to read through so far has found a more holistic Trinitarian theology (not merely a sending one, or one focused too much on one Person) to be helpful. I hope it encourages us to know the communal Godhead is always wholly involved with us and with Creation. I also hope that it will inform our own actions as Humanity as well as the Church.
May the shalom of the Holy Trinity, the peace of the Lord Christ, go with you, wherever the Spirit may send you.
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II. The Implication
The Church as both object and agent
of the Triune Mission has two responses missio
Dei: First, the Church
worships God; and second, the Church seeks the shalom of the city in which it resides, with the purpose of making
disciples. The second response has
been somewhat described above. The
exhortation by the prophet Jeremiah (29.7) comes to a nation that has found
itself brought to a strange context, Babylon. Strange may be an understatement—the people of God had been broken, defeated, and displaced from their homeland by the Babylonians. They were the enemy. And yet, Jeremiah’s word from the LORD
told them to actively seek out the life and blessing of Babylon!
What
this gives the Church today is a decree that God is about blessing all nations
through his people. God does not
say, “Take over the government of Babylon and make the Law their law.” God tells Judah, “Live as my people in
their city, for their benefit, and you too will be given shalom.” This message meshes with the earlier-quoted
“great commission.” Jesus told his
disciples to “Go and make disciples.”
“Go” is not an imperative, but literally translated would say, “as you
are going about” (my translation).[1] It implies that the disciples will all
go about living their lives, but as they
do, they must make disciples.
Add to this Philippians 1.27:
“Only, live your life in a manner
worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that, whether I come and see you or am
absent and hear about you, I will know that you are standing firm in one
spirit, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel.” (NRSV)
The verb translated “live your
life” implies one who is involved in social, political, and economic realms of
the society in which they live. To
live worthy of the gospel of Christ, to live in a way that will allow the
Church to make disciples, the Church must engage society in all of its realms
and forms.
The
other response of the Church to the missio Dei is one with which the Church has always been familiar, but which could
use fresh perspective. In this realm John
Piper has gained great popularity—his book connecting missions and worship has
sold over 185,000 copies—even being quoted in a popular Christian rap song by
the artist Lecrae,[2] by this
proclamation: “Missions is not the ultimate goal of the Church.
Worship is. Missions exist because worship doesn’t.”[3] As the rest of this paper has shown,
Mission is part of the Trinity’s very nature, and therefore exists because of
God—not because of some lack of Worship within Creation.
Bosch provides an image by which the
Church may understand the connection of Mission and Worship: “an ellipse with
two foci.”[4] An ellipse is an elongated circle, an oval. In mathematical terms, the size and
shape of an ellipse are determined by it two separate points of focus. In the same way, Worship and Mission
create two points of focus for the Church that determine the shape of her
faith. Bosch gives more depth to
the image by adding motion: “The
church gathers to praise God, to
enjoy fellowship and receive spiritual sustenance, and disperses to serve God wherever its members are.”[5] Worship and mission both influence the
Church in how she acts out her faith,
and placing one higher than the other (as Piper does) does neither
justice. If any church community
focuses upon Worship for the sake of Worship (“We worship because we were made
to”) or on Mission for the sake of
Mission (“We must obey the ‘great commission’” or “We just need to help
people”), then that body’s vision will go to that focal point and no
further. All else will necessarily
become peripheral. Worship will
build upon itself to support more Worship—an unstable foundation where most of
a church’s energy goes into Sunday worship, i.e. many megachurch services. Mission will have to provide meaning
for more Mission, removing depth and robustness from the Body, and becoming a
set of works and stratagems.
However,
what if the Church allowed each of these focal points to highlight the distant
direction of her faith? Light coming from any one point travels two different paths from two different angles when any human focuses upon it with their two eyes:
It is that different perspective, that other path, that gives the image
depth, dimension and substance.
What if Worship and Mission both were markers for the Church to find a
greater, more far-sighted vision?
That far-sighted vision is the eschatological Kingdom and Reign of God,
and Worship and Mission are the evidences of it in the here and now. They are the signposts by which we must navigate to bring the Kingdom into reality today.
A
Church that recognizes this can then act it out in a number of ways. First, worshipping Christians will
recognize the intimate link means that their Worship affects their daily lives,
and their daily lives affect their Worship. Take the story of Jesus in Mark 11, when Jesus cleansed the
temple: Jesus, incensed, flipped
the temple structures on their head and completely stopped the economic
transactions taking place in this place of Worship. Jesus emphatically states through his action that “without
justice there could be no worship.”[6]
The
Church can also respond by bringing narratives, stories, into the center of
Worship. The worship meals in
Corinth consisted of small gatherings around the table of someone’s home. The meals were followed by each
participant giving whatever “word” or story had been given to them: They, in essence, would share a
testimony.[7] Not a story of one’s conversion, as
many Western Christians define "testimony" today, but a testimony to the power of God at
work in their daily life. The
Church today already continues its retelling of the “big story”—the one about
God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, Israel, covenant, exile, incarnation, crucifixion,
resurrection, and ongoing redemption—but the Church should also encourage its
participants in worship to share the “new chapters of the story that are being
written in lives, communities, and nations throughout the world.”[8]
Elaine
Heath, in The Mystic Way of Evangelism, shows how mystic Christians have
understood evangelism in the past—that it is in fact a holistic Mission, not
merely a statement that can fit on a pamphlet: "Evangelism is
intrinsically relational, the outcome of love of neighbor, for to love our
neighbor is to share the love of God holistically. The proper context for
evangelism is authentic Christian community, where the expression of loving
community is the greatest apologetic for the gospel."[1] The first use of the word from which we
get “mysticism” actually describes the “mystery” of the revelation of the
Triune God in Jesus Christ (see Colossian 1.26-7).[2] For these Christians, their life was “a
continual movement of the heart seeking to transcend the limitations of the
individual standpoint” and to participate in life communally with the Triune
God.[3] The church needs to re-learn this
lesson today, as Heath explains in greater detail.
Our
understanding of Mission must come from our understanding of the Trinity, and,
if it does, then we will see a Church in loving community with all Humankind,
with all created things, seeking the shalom of all so that all may worship. If the Church can do this, then “that
language of Love, understood by all, will be pouring forth its unconscious
eloquence. It is the man who is
the missionary, it is not his words.
His character is his message.”[4]
[1] The word for “go” is in the
Greek a circumstantial participle of time.
[2] “Send Me” by Lecrae, After the Music Stops (Reach Records, 2006).
[3] John Piper, Let the Nations be Glad! The Supremacy of God in Missions
(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1993), 17.
[4] Bosch, 395.
[5] Ibid., 395.
[6] Kreider,
Alan and Eleanor Kreider, Worship &
Mission After Christendom (Scottsdale: Herald Press, 2001), 33.
[7] Ibid., 101.
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