SCM Studyguide: Christian Mission. Stephen Spencer
work of God and of the kingdom’ (Cray et al. 2004, p. 80).
The assumption in all this is that the mission of God is primarily concerned with forming these various kinds of church meeting: mission is growing the Church. This is actually stated at different points in the report, such as in the introduction: ‘the church is the fruit of God’s mission . . . creating new communities of Christian faith is part of the mission of God to express God’s kingdom in every geographic and cultural context’ (ibid. p. xii).
But is it? Some of the initiatives, such as alternative worship services and network churches, have been described as maintenance rather than mission, a kind of chaplaincy to those who cannot bring themselves to attend traditional churches any more. It is questioned whether such initiatives have drawn new people into the life of the Church. Some of the other initiatives have been described as serving the wishes of the world rather than God, serving coffee and cake rather than Christ. Other initiatives, like the school-based congregations, have often been supported by parents who wish to win a place for their child in a church school, but when the child starts at the new school the parents, more often than not, stop coming to the church. They seem to lack commitment, which questions whether real mission has taken place. Overall, there appear to be a number of uncomfortable features of ‘fresh expressions of church’ when these initiatives are viewed as mission. (See further Hull 2006. For discussion of a church-centred view of mission see Chapter 5.)
Mission as public witness
A third point of view seeks to have the best of both worlds. It agrees that mission is not primarily about bringing people into church, which is putting the cart before the horse. But nor is mission about the Church losing itself in wider struggles for a better world: if Christ is not named and not known in missionary work then Christian mission does not take place. He is the way, the truth and the life and only through him can true salvation be achieved. Mission is about proclaiming Christ in the world and churches need to follow his example and be bold and adventurous in this. They are to gear their activities to spreading the news about Jesus along the highways and hedgerows of society: mission is proclamation. A recent advocate of this view was Lesslie Newbigin, who in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society called for the churches in the West to engage in the mission task of proclaiming the gospel as ‘Public Truth’: ‘in Christ we have been shown the road. We cannot treat that knowledge as a private matter for ourselves. It concerns the whole human family’ (Newbigin 1989, p. 183). An example of this kind of proclamation would be recent attempts to increase the provision of state-funded church schools across Britain with their explicit commitment to teaching the Christian faith. (For discussion of church/state mission see Chapter 7.)
Who is right? The differences between these three influential views are profound. There are other significant points of view as well, not least the traditional evangelical view which sees evangelism as the defining feature of mission (see Stott 1986; see also Kirk 2006; for discussion see Chapter 8). Other distinct views from Christian history also demand attention. One thing is certain, that there is a general lack of agreement about the nature of mission. David Bosch, in his encyclopedic survey of thinking about mission, Transforming Mission, published 25 years ago and still definitive for the subject as a whole, stated that the loose use of the word ‘mission’ in the last half-century masked a crisis (Bosch 1991, p. 1): he believed there had been a terrible failure of nerve over mission (ibid., p. 7) and that the churches were not sure any more what it was really all about. Twenty-five years later, with mission understood in an ever increasing number of ways in the churches, reflecting an increasingly pluralist society, it seems the crisis is far from over. Furthermore, the word itself has been adopted by industry and commerce to describe its own variegated attempts to make money, with ‘mission statements’ appearing in every corporate reception area. It has become an overused and undervalued word.
What, then, are the churches to do within this ‘deep, but dazzling darkness’? In one place Bosch recalled that in Chinese the word ‘crisis’ is spelt with two characters, one standing for ‘danger’ and the other for ‘opportunity’. This suggests that when events take a dangerous turn a moment of opportunity has arrived: new initiatives can be taken, new directions found, hope restored. In this new century the crisis of mission is still upon us, but so is a moment of opportunity.
It seems increasingly clear that local churches need to explore and reflect on the right way to reach out to their surrounding communities. This means they need to ask a basic theological question about the nature of mission, a question which needs to be answered before secondary questions about practice and strategy can be faced. Is mission primarily concerned with engineering church growth, or is the joining of wider struggles for a better world the right way forward, or is the proclamation of the gospel in the public arena the overriding calling?
This Studyguide presents a range of answers to this question. It begins by laying out some of the theological groundwork that is needed before looking for an answer, beginning with an exploration of the root meaning of the word ‘mission’ and its home in the doctrine of the Trinity. It identifies underlying principles of Jesus’ own mission in Galilee. It then examines the main historic types of mission in the Christian tradition, seeing how they were forged in the cross-currents of history and culture and how they continue to be expressed by different Christian communities in the present, and it asks how consistent they are with the principles of Jesus’ own mission. In these ways it seeks to present the resources that any student will need to work out their own answer to the question ‘What is Christian mission today?’
| Discussion questions How would you describe the essential nature of Christian mission? Which passages of Scripture would you use to expound it? |
Further reading
Bosch, David J. (1991), Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, Orbis
Cray, Graham, et al. (2004), Mission-Shaped Church: Church Planting and Fresh Expressions of Church in a Changing Context, Church House Publishing
Hull, John M. (2006), Mission-Shaped Church: A Theological Response, SCM Press
Kirk, J. Andrew (2006), Mission Under Scrutiny: Confronting Current Challenges, DLT
Newbigin, Lesslie (1989), The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, SPCK
Oats, Stephen B. (1982), Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King Jnr, HarperCollins
Stott, John (1986), Christian Mission in the Modern World, Kingsway
Note: The titles in the ‘Further reading’ lists through this book are publications mentioned in the text and a few others. The lists provide starting points for exploration of the relevant topics but are not intended to be comprehensive guides to all the relevant literature. Such guidance needs to be sought through the bibliographies found in the titles that are listed.
2. Origins of a Word Mission as Missio Dei
When a walker becomes lost in the fells, they are wise to turn around and look back along the route from which they have just come. This will involve pausing on the journey, which may be frustrating, but it allows them to work out the direction in which they are heading. In a similar way this Studyguide is an attempt to help those engaged in mission to pause and turn and look back along the route from which they have come, so that they may have a clearer idea of where they are going.
A good way of beginning to do this is to ask how the use of the word ‘mission’ itself has evolved. An analysis of its genealogy reveals that before the sixteenth century it was not used to describe an aspect of church life but was found in a different context, to describe relationships within the holy Trinity. The Latin word ‘missio’, meaning ‘to send’, was used to describe the sending of the Son by the Father, and also of the sending of the Holy Spirit by the Father and the Son (Bosch 1991, p. 390). An early example is from the eucharistic prayer of Hippolytus, whose earliest extant version is in Latin and dates from the years 215–17 AD. In this prayer the Father is thanked for his beloved Son Jesus Christ ‘whom in your good pleasure you sent from heaven into the womb of a virgin . . .’ (in Evans and Wright 1991, p. 15). Another example comes from the Latin Vulgate translation of Romans