MissionShift - Part 1

I'm reviewing the first section of the book MissionShift: Global Mission Issues In The Third Millennium. Ed Stetzer tweeted several weeks ago that he would give a copy of the book to anyone who would agree to review the book and join an online conversation on his blog. Never one to pass up a free book, I jumped at the offer. 

I was intrigued by the topic of mission and missiology. The first thing I noticed is that the book is published by B&H Academic. This is an academic work. I probably wouldn't have picked this book up to read on my own. However, if you willing to wade through the sometimes lengthy and complex discourse, this is a very informative and useful book. It speaks directly to the issues facing the church today and can act as a framework to help us interact, adapt, confront and transform culture.

The book is designed around three essays and then a series of responses to each:

1. Mission Defined and Described by Charles Van Engen describes Mission in the Past
2. The Gospel in Human Contexts by Paul Hiebert describes Mission in the Present
3. The Future of Evangelicals in Mission by Ralph Winter describes Mission in the Future

My assignment this week is to respond and reflect on the first essay, including the responses by Keith Eitel, Enoch Wan, Darrell Guder, Andreas Kostenberger, Ed Stetzer and David Hesselgrave. Quite a task for guy who has never studied missiology! I will try to keep my comments concise and to the point.

As Proverbs 17:27-28 says: Whoever restrains his words has knowledge, and he who has a cool spirit is a man of understanding. Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise; when he closes his lips, he is deemed intelligent.

Being a history major, I enjoyed Van Engen's comments about how mission has been defined differently over the years. He quotes Sidney Rooy: "If, like David Bosch, we define mission as missio Dei ["the mission of God"], we can say that this signifies the revelation of God as the One who love the world God has created, who is concerned for this world, and who has formed the church to be a subject called to participate in the historical project of establishing the kingdom of God....Truly, each generation must define mission anew."

I enjoyed the section on the Biblical meaning of the word mission. The word mission is rarely used in either the Old or New Testaments. "What is emphasized regularly is the concept of being sent, with an emphasis on the authority and purpose of the sender."

• The church is sent by her Lord.
• The covenant people of God are sent by God to the nations who are not yet part of the people of God.
• Jesus refers to Himself as the one who is sent: "I must proclaim the good news about the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because I was sent for this purpose." (Luke 4:43)
• The followers of Jesus are also sent to proclaim the coming of the kingdom of God, to invite all peoples to become Jesus' disciples and responsible members of His church. (Matthew 28:18-20)
• We need to continually remember that sending is an integral part of mission. Jesus Christ is the Sender, "whose authority defines, circumscribes, limits, and propels Christian mission."

During the Constantinian era, the concept of Christian mission changed drastically.

• The Decree of Milan in 313 AD recognized Christianity as an officially permitted religion
• In 325 Christianity became the favored religion
• In 380 Christianity became the official religion
• By 392 Christianity became the only tolerated religion [in the Holy Roman Empire]
• "In a brief span of eighty years, Christianity went from being a persecuted religion to the persecuting religion." In addition to the church, the empire [nation-state] became an agent of mission represented by persons designated by the emperor.
• In this era the mission of the church was extended through conquest, forcible imposition of the faith, destroying pagan religions, and mass baptisms.
• In the Constantinian model of mission, there was confusion between the temporal and spiritual. The Emperor represented the "kingdom of God" which led to a confusion of church and state.

In the late 1700s William Carey suggested a different way of understanding mission. His approach was rooted in the Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-20 and assumed the following:

• Salvation was individualistic, primarily concerned with a spiritual and personal relationship with Jesus Christ
• The primary calling of the church's mission was geographic. Christians were called to go.
• New converts should be gathered into churches resembling the sending churches and missions
• New individual converts should be extracted from their non-Christian contexts, gathered into Christian mission stations, and taught culture and civilization of the missionaries.

 The World Council of Churces was founded in 1948 in response to the "disastrous consequences of the church's silence and irrelevance in the crisis of Western Europe during the 1930's and the early 1940's." The WCC wanted to find a more relevant missiology and crystallized around the phrase missio Dei, "the mission of God." The WCC became characterized by:

• Radical secularization of mission
• A deep pessimism about the church as a viable agent of God's mission
• An emphasis on God's mission oriented toward, and centered in, the kingdom of God and the world rather than the church
• The world set the agenda for the church

This radical secularization of mission and caused S Neill to say, "When everything is mission, nothing is mission."

Reacting against the redefinition of mission by the WCC, Evangelical leaders came together in two major mission conferences in 1966 and later in Lausanne in 1974, Pattaya

• Calling people to mission for" unreached people groups" in places where they saw no viable church present. This led to many missionaries being sent to the former Soviet-bloc countries.
• An emphasis on the "10-40 Window", the least-evangelized area of the world where the greatest number of poor live.
• Evangelicals struggling to bring together evangelism and social action

 Van Engen concludes by calling for missional churches who are contextual, intentional, proclaiming, reconciling, sanctifying, unifying, and transforming. Van Engen footnotes Scherer at this point:

"Mission happens wherever the church is; it is how the church exists. Mission is the church preaching Christ for the first time; it is the act of Christians struggling against injustice and oppression; it is the binding of wounds in reconciliation; it the church learning from other religious ways and being challenged by the world's cultures....Mission is the local church focusing not on its own, internal problems, but on other human beings, focusing elsewhere, in a world that calls and challenges it."

I like that! Mission happens wherever the church is; it is how the church exists! I want to be that kind of church! I want to pray, trust, and work to create that kind of community here in Cedar Rapids. I want to be the church on the move that lives out the gospel and extends it to all people.

Silent No More!

Today is Martin Luther King Day. Ed Stetzer has a great post titled Letters from a Birmingham Jail over at edstetzer.com. I am summarizing his post.

The Letter from Jail is an open letter written on April 16, 1963, by Martin Luther King, Jr. King wrote the letter from the city jail in Birmingham, Alabama, where he was confined after being arrested for his part in the Birmingham campaign. King's letter is a response to a statement made by eight white Alabama clergymen on April 12, 1963, titled "A Call For Unity". The clergymen agreed that social injustices existed but argued that the battle against racial segregation should be fought solely in the courts, not in the streets.

Here is an excerpt from the letter:

I received a letter this morning from a white brother in Texas which said, "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but is it possible that you are in too great of a religious hurry? It has taken Christianity almost 2000 years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." All that is said here grows out of a tragic misconception of time. It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation... 

As I was reading during my quiet time this morning in Matthew 12, here are some of my thoughts and reflections.

"Appalling silence." As a witness to the transforming power of the gospel, has the church of Jesus Christ lost our voice? As the people of God, do we speak for those who can't speak for themselves? Do we stand silently as we see injustice run rampant? Are we willing to stand with the gospel in the places where it critiques and confronts our culture?

Jesus was willing to confront his religious culture. Jesus was counter cultural. When confronted by the Pharisees about law-keeping and boundary-drawing, Jesus responded with this:

And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. Matthew 12:7


Jesus was criticized for doing good and for healing on the Sabbath. He so thoroughly confronted the Pharisees legalistic system of religion that they went off to plot how to kill him. And what was Jesus response? Luke 12:15 says he withdrew and many followed him, and he healed all their sick.

Matthew writes that Jesus compassion and mercy reflects the heart of God and was foretold in Isaiah 42:1-4:

“Here is my servant whom I have chosen, the one I love, in whom I take great delight. I will put my Spirit on him, and he will proclaim justice to the nations."  Matthew 12:18

If we are silent the rocks will cry out! What does it mean in our culture at this time of history to proclaim justice and practice mercy? What would it look like to be a follower of Jesus who speaks for those who have no voice? Let's be silent not more!