Skip to main content

Issues Facing Missions Today 63: Being God's Missional Church

These notes are offered for churches that wish to reflect together on what it might mean for them to be God's missional people.  The main point seems to be that, while God does send out individual missionaries, the people of God--the church or Church--are meant to be God's missional people as well.  The four key Old Testament texts bring this emphasis to the New Testament missional texts: as God's people, we engage in the work of God's mission in the world.  Note how strongly the themes of holiness and righteousness are present: mission is not just a message of God's salvation in Jesus Christ--which it is--but it is also the presentation to the world of a transformed, holy, and righteous life of God's people, a community of God.

The Missional Church: Four Old Testament Mission Texts

Introduction

Mission is the unfolding of God’s OT promises, a story unfolding in Jesus and through the people of God

I.               Matthew 28.16-20
A.    Isaiah 66.18-23 (story of sin, exile, and restoration: survivors going to the nations to bring back the exiles, declare God’s glory, include the nations, establish worship)
B.    Isaiah 2.1-5 (nations coming to God’s people to learn righteousness)
C.    Matthew:
1.     Disciples go to the nations (Mt. 24.14)
2.     Make disciples
a.     Baptizing (repentance, forgiveness, Trinity)
b.     Teaching (Jesus’ commandments)
3.     Jesus’ presence

II.             Luke 2.32; 24.47; Acts 1.8; 28.28 (beginning and end of each volume)
A.    Isaiah 49.6 (God’s servant to restore exiled Israel and be a light to the Gentiles)
B.    Luke:
1.     Repentance and forgiveness of sins
2.     Mission in the power of the Holy Spirit (as Jesus)
3.     Witnesses (of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, ascension)
4.     From Jerusalem to Samaria to ends of the earth

III.            John 20.21-23
A.    Ezekiel 37.9 (with Genesis 2.7)
B.    John:
1.     Peace
2.     Mission as representing Jesus, who represents the Father, to the world
3.     Sent
4.     Made alive by the Holy Spirit
5.     Offer forgiveness of sins 

IV.           1 Peter 2.9-10; Revelation 5.9-10
A.    Exodus 19.5-6
B.    1 Peter:
1.     Chosen race, royal priesthood, holy nation, people for God’s possession
2.     So that you might proclaim the excellencies of Him
3.     Who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light
C.    Revelation:
1.     Witnesses to Jesus’ ransom of all the nations. 
2.   Kingdom and priests to reign on the earth
Conclusion
Mission is a task of the ‘people of God’—not just missionaries—the c/Church is God’s missionary people to the world

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Alasdair MacIntyre and Tradition Enquiry

Alasdair MacIntyre's subject is philosophical ethics, and he is best known for his critique of ethics understood as the application of general, universal principles.  He has reintroduced the importance of virtue ethics, along with the role of narrative and community in defining the virtues.  His focus on these things—narrative, community, virtue—combine to form an approach to enquiry which he calls ‘tradition enquiry.’ [1] MacIntyre characterises ethical thinking in the West in our day as ethics that has lost an understanding of the virtues, even if virtues like ‘justice’ are often under discussion.  Greek philosophical ethics, and ethics through to the Enlightenment, focussed ethics on virtue and began with questions of character: 'Who should we be?', rather than questions of action, 'What shall we do?'  Contemporary ethics has focused on the latter question alone, with the magisterial traditions of deontological ('What rules govern our actions?') and tel...
Post a Comment
Read more

Was Jesus’ Criticism of the Pharisees’ Ethic Its Legalism or Lawlessness?

The popular understanding of the Pharisees is that they were legalists.  This is not, however, Jesus’ criticism of their ethics, even though the charge of Pharisaic legalism comes from a (mis)reading of the Gospels.  The Pharisees are cast in popular imagination as the quintessential example of legalists, overly focussed on rules and promoting works in order to attain righteousness apart from God’s grace.  The latter view, that Judaism overall and the Pharisees in particular advocated works righteousness, has been loudly criticised in light of numerous texts in second temple Judaism, celebrating God’s grace in choosing the Jews, not self-righteous works. [1]   Be that as it may, the Pharisees have remained the foil to Christian ethics precisely over their purported legalism—a focus on unloving, unforgiving rules and regulations that also places norms above, purportedly, higher moral principles.  Jesus’ ethic is contrasted as an ethic of forgiveness, mercy, love...
Post a Comment
Read more

Early Christian Views on Wealth, Possessions, and Giving

[The following post continues notes and studies on the issue of wealth, poverty, and Christian ethics.  It originally appeared in an online publication: Rollin G. Grams, 'Early Christian Views on Wealth, Possessions, and Giving,'   Explorations (Fall, 2010), an online publication of the Robert C. Cooley Center for the Study of Early Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.  Online:  https://www.scribd.com/document/41882213/The-Cooley-Center-Articles-Early-Christian-Views-on-Wealth ]  For several reasons, study of early Christianity in Protestant circles is on the rise.  Ecumenical dialogue, for instance, requires a return to the common ground of Christian writers prior to the great schisms of the Church throughout history.  Also, an increasing interest in worship and spiritual disciplines has sent some Protestants on pilgrimage to more ancient and liturgical forms of the church.  Recent challenges to long-standing Christian practices...
Post a Comment
Read more