Issues in Missions Today: 39.3 ‘Mission is
Everything?’
We
come to Point 3 in my list of 20 questionable statements needing clarification
in our imaginary ‘Missions 101’ class:
Point 3: ‘Mission is really everything the Church does in
ministry. It is preaching, translating, teaching, church planting,
compassion ministries, development work--everything.’
Mission work does, unquestionably, ‘creep’; it easily
expands into everything. In this point,
the error appears more immediately obvious than in the previous two points in
this basic introduction to themes in missions.
Yet the inability of so many to distinguish between a mission and the mission
of the Church is a common problem. We
can turn most anything into a mission, including cleaning out the gutters on an
autumn afternoon. Missionaries, too, get
involved in virtually every activity under every name, sometimes so remotely
related to the spread of the Church and the Gospel that one wonders how we ever
got to this point.
What the mission of the Church is, however, is
a different matter. Just as one tries to
bring some clarity to the matter at the congregational level, mission
theologians, speaking loosely, sometimes join the debate to confuse matters all
the more. The pressures on everyone are
(1) to appreciate everyone’s gifts and contributions to ministry; (2) to
encourage good works among and by God’s people; (3) to affirm a holistic
mission; and (4) not to let all this distort the original focus in missions as
understood from Scripture. The phrase
‘holistic mission’ is meant to convey what ‘holistic medicine’ does: aid that
meets physical, psychological, and spiritual needs.
On
the positive side, we might give some attention (in our Missions 101 course) to
considerations of (1) ‘calling’ to ministries; (2) ‘gifting’—the church as a
body with its Spirit-gifted members; (3) a Biblical definition of ‘the Gospel’;
and (4) an historical and theological discussion of mission activities,
especially in the Evangelical tradition.
Such topics in the Missions course will have to rely on previous work
done by the students in the prerequisite courses already identified: Biblical
Theology and two courses in Church History.
A
common and accurate response to this third point for the missions course is the
statement by Stephen Neill that ‘If everything is mission, then nothing is
mission.’[1] Michael Goheen reminds us of Leslie
Newbigin’’s distinction between ‘dimension’ and ‘intention’ in missions in this
regard:
Because the Church is
the mission there is a missionary dimension of everything that the Church
does. But not everything the Church does
has a missionary intention…. An action of the Church in going out beyond the
frontiers of its own life to bear witness to Christ as Lord among those who do not
know Him, and when the overall intention
of that action is that they should be brought from unbelief to faith.[2]
Goheen
explains further with an example: worship may have a missional dimension, but
witness to unbelievers is not the intention of worship (otherwise, I might add,
it fails to be worship and becomes manipulative entertainment—a criticism that
might be raised of the seeker-sensitive movement from which Evangelical
churches are still recovering). We
might, incidentally, note with this example that an important discussion to
have is whether the local church should be missional in ‘dimension’ only or
also in ‘intention’—and what that would mean.
I fear that the Anglican Church in North America, formed in response to
heresies in the Episcopal Church, is so concerned about right worship, doctrine,
and ethics and for establishing itself through church planting in North America
that it’s vision for intentional mission in fulfillment of the Great Commission
is taking a back seat to the formation of its Evangelical identity.
Newbigin’s
explanation entails some further points that need to be drawn out. One distinction often made in mission circles
is that between centripetal (pulling inward) and centrifugal (pushing outward)
mission. The Orthodox Church emphasizes
the unity of the Church and the worship of the Church, thus placing an emphasis
on centripetal missions. Israel’s
mission among the nations in the Old Testament is often depicted as
centripetal. The book of Acts, on the
other hand, tells the story of the early Church in terms of centrifugal missionary
activity. Newbigin’s definition favours
a centrifugal understanding: going ‘beyond the frontiers of its own life.’
At
least since Lausanne I, an understanding of missions as holistic has
dominated. Holistic missions may be
correct (after all, the word is ‘missions,’ not ‘mission’), but those analyzing
the matter need to begin by realizing that there is great pressure to assume
and affirm it. In our Missions 101
course, we would want to examine its history and Biblical and theological
arguments. In fact, no student should
graduate from any programme of study in an Evangelical college or seminary
without an understanding of the remarkable history of the missionary movements
in the Evangelical tradition. In the
prerequisite course of Church History 102 in the curriculum developed in these
posts, students would have studied holistic, Evangelical mission alongside mass
Evangelism movements in different periods from the Clapham community in England
to the anti-slavery and prohibition movements in America to Neo-Evangelicalism
and the Lausanne statements. In Missions
101, they could study examples of
holistic missions (e.g., the Salvation Army, mission agencies with long-standing,
holistic emphases, such as SIM).[3]
The
mission course might also, however, critically examine whether holistic
missionary emphases in Evangelicalism also place pressure on the Church to see
everything as mission—and therefore nothing as uniquely mission. The course might further engage questions of Church
and society, exploring where the Church’s activism in holistic concerns simply
becomes social activism per se. And the
course might valuably explore all this in terms of mission that seeks to make
social change through institutions, operations (getting the task done apart
from institutions), and intentional communities.[4]
I do
not want to dispute this emphasis on holistic missions—or mission as
transformation. The Gospel is ‘good
news’ not only because of the message but also because this message has to do
with everything. It is life-transforming. It cannot
be limited to proclamation: evangelism, teaching, and Bible translation. The new community of God in Christ, the
church, is more than a ‘preaching post,’ as someone once described a large,
international church in Addis Ababa to me where I, too, used to preach on
occasion. (I had never heard that phrase
before, but I have since seen it everywhere as churches understand themselves
as a Sunday service first and a community second.)
Yet
we must realize that holistic mission cannot—must not—undercut the proclamation
of the Gospel that leads to transformed lives and established, mature churches in community after community. Compassion ministries need to be Christ
focussed (and not merely be acts of love without a witness—a point a ministry
like Samaritan’s Purse tries to take
seriously), and they must not replace or undermine efforts at mobilizing a
force of disciple makers (‘make disciples of all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you,’ Mt. 28.19-20).
True, to use Newbigin’s distinctions, certain activities
with a missional dimension, such as compassion ministries, should not become
manipulative, exercises of power serving a missional intention. It is possible to give water in the name of
Jesus or an apostle without forcing the faith down someone’s throat as
well. (And true Christian missionary
activity is always a matter of witness and winsomeness and never coercive or manipulative
behaviour.) Conversion is never forced,
and love is not love if it comes with strings attached. That said, our various missions, our various
activities with missional dimensions, need to cohere with the mission of the Church. The
Church’s missional intention is to bring the Gospel to the nations (Mk. 13.10;
Mt. 24.10) that they may know Christ and Him crucified (1 Cor. 2.2), the power
of the resurrection (Phl. 3.10), confessing Him as LORD (Rom. 10.9), becoming
like Him in their death that they might attain to the resurrection of the dead
(Phl. 3.11).[5]
[1] Stephen Neill, Creative Tension (London: Edinburgh
House Press, 1959), p. 81.
[2] Michael Goheen, Introducing Christian Mission Today:
History and Issues (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014), p. 82.
[3] In particular, students could read
articles from the journal Transformation,
an Evangelical-leaning journal for holistic mission published by the Oxford
Centre for Mission Studies.
[5] A balance in our understanding of
missions is important. As Michael Goheen
says, ‘A church that is not evangelizing and is unconcerned about missions to
people who have never heard betrays the gospel.
A church that reduces mission to evangelistic activities narrows the
scope of the gospel. And at the same
time it removes the full context in which witnessing words should find their
place. Each aspect needs the
other.’ Ibid., p. 85.
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