A Light to the Nations

The Missional Church and the Biblical Story

Goheen, Michael W.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441214461
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

There is a growing body of literature about the missional church, but the word missional is often defined in competing ways with little attempt to ground it deeply in Scripture. Michael Goheen, a dynamic speaker and the coauthor of two popular texts on the biblical narrative, unpacks the missional identity of the church by tracing the role God's people are called to play in the biblical story. Goheen shows that the church's identity can be understood only when its role is articulated in the context of the whole biblical story--not just the New Testament, but the Old Testament as well. He also explores practical outworkings and implications, offering field-tested suggestions for contemporary churches.

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The Church’s Identity and Role

Whose Story? Which Images?

Why Ecclesiology Is So Important

Imagine there’s no heaven . . .

You may say I’m a dreamer

But I’m not the only one

I hope someday you’ll join us

And the world will be as one

In his iconic ballad of the 1970s, John Lennon imagines a better world, one without the war, injustice, strife, poverty, inequality, brokenness, and pain he sees in this world. He yearns—you can hear the longing in his voice—for a world that “will be as one” in peace and justice, for “a brotherhood of man,” for an end to greed and hunger, for people to share all the world in peace and harmony. All barriers to shalom will be removed, including a selfish and otherworldly Christianity, other religions that promote and sanction violence, and nations that sacrifice billions of dollars on arms to the idol of guaranteed security.

Lennon recognizes that if his dream is to become a reality in this world, it cannot remain as mere words and ideas: it must be made visible in a community, a company of people who already “imagine” as he does and are willing to embody and direct their lives by this dream. In saying, “I’m not the only one,” Lennon is identifying himself explicitly with just such a people: the countercultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a growing body of folk who (he believes) have already begun to display in their lives the peace and justice he longs for. He invites others to embrace his dream and swell the ranks of those who live it. This community of which Lennon sees himself a part is a “come-and-join-us” people who, by their words and lives, offer an attractive alternative to the violent, greedy, self-centered culture dominant in their day.

With historical distance, however, we know that the large majority of those who identified with this countercultural movement—the hippies of the 1960s and 1970s—ultimately became the “yuppies” of the 1980s, rejected the idealism of their nonconformist youth, and embraced an ideology that put affluence ahead of all else. And we know how destructive this ideology has since proven to be, in its effects on global peace and justice. Lennon’s vision was a beautiful dream and a noble ambition, but if there was never any hope that it could be realized, it seems cruel to offer it as a possibility.

The problem is that injustice and selfishness are lodged deeply in the inner recesses of the human heart. The members of the youthful countercultural community of four or five decades ago could not embody the change they dreamed about because, for all their good intentions, the greed and brokenness they abhorred was as deeply rooted in their own hearts as it was in the religious, military, and political structures and institutions—the “establishment”—they repudiated. Thus for all their insight into the dangers of the conventional scientific worldview that had shaped the Western technocracy, the countercultural movement of the mid-twentieth century was not and could not be the vanguard of a new humanity that would embrace true peace and justice.1 They simply had no way to get there—only dreams and good intentions. There was no community that could live Lennon’s dream.

Yet surely everyone longs for the kind of world that Lennon describes. Is not the Christian church to be just the sort of society that the hippies of Lennon’s day dreamed of? How did it come to be that Lennon could consider “religion” itself—and for him, this surely included the Christian church—as one of the obstacles to achieving peace and justice for all? In seventeenth-century Europe, the long and costly wars between rival factions within the Christian church seemed to many to prove already that the church had nothing further to offer to a modern world: Christianity seemed to forfeit its opportunity to bring peace, justice, and social harmony. In the years since, the continuing violence of those who identify their causes by the religions they espouse—the violence evident in terrorism, genocide, and other such atrocities—presents a compelling argument that our world should not look for hope in the direction of traditional religious faith. And the parade of bogus secular messiahs during the last few centuries—science, technology, education, liberal politics, and free-market economics among them—have failed to deliver the golden world promised in the eighteenth century.2 Thus many people in our world have stopped dreaming of or hoping for a better world, in spite of Lennon’s urging them not to give up—“it’s easy if you try!” But Lennon was certainly right about one thing: such hopes and dreams are believable only if there is the life of a community that already makes such things visible here and now in their corporate lives.

This is precisely why ecclesiology is so important! God made a promise back at the beginning of the biblical story that he would bring about just such a new world. He chose and formed a community to embody his work of healing in the midst of human history. It was to be a people who could truly say, “I hope some day you will join us” in manifesting the knowledge of God, and the joy, righteousness, justice, and peace of this new world that would one day cover the earth. In this community, one might see the beginnings of the sort of world that God had originally intended in creation, and which he still intended to bring about through his saving work at the end of history. During the historical period of the Old Testament, Israel was chosen to be that community, and God’s gift of law and wisdom to Israel expressed a pattern of life that was to make palpable this new world in the midst of ancient Near Eastern peoples. But the people of Israel continually failed in their task, failed to be the exemplary community that God intended, because the old world still ruled their hearts.

God renewed the people of Israel continually, but he promised in the prophets that one day he would act decisively to finally renew them, deal with their sin, and form them into a new society of restored people. This he did in Jesus the Christ and by the Spirit. And that is the good news: at the cross God won a decisive victory over all that Lennon abhorred. The new world he longed for begins at the resurrection. Jesus sent his newly gathered “Israel” (soon to include gentiles), empowered by the Spirit, into the midst of cultures in every part of the world, as a tangible and visible sign that God’s new world was indeed coming. The words and actions, the very lives and communal life of Jesus’s followers, are to say: “We are the preview of a new day, a new world. Because one day the world really will live as one. Won’t you come and join us?”

This is why the church has been chosen and given a taste of salvation. This is who we are.

Ecclesiology and Our Missional Identity

Understanding and expressing the role and identity of the church in this way has come to be termed “missional.” The term, though relatively new as a description of the church, is now used widely across confessional traditions. The employment of the term “missional” includes the superficial along with the profound, the culturally captive alongside the richly biblical. But the popularity of “missional” language suggests that something has struck a chord with many Christians.

The terminology of “mission” among many Christians still connotes the idea of geographical expansion, an overseas activity based on human initiative, by which the good news is taken abroad to those who have not yet heard it. Usually that movement proceeds in one direction: from the West to other parts of the world. A missionary is an agent of evangelistic expansion, and a mission field is any area outside the West where this activity is being done.

Events in the late twentieth century have rendered this view of mission obsolete. Perhaps the most important of these developments was the dramatic growth (in numbers of people, vitality, and missionary vision) of the third world church and a corresponding decline of the church in the West. The older view of “mission” does not fit the world of the twenty-first century. This is not to say, however, that the project of taking the good news to those in other cultures who have not heard should be discarded. Indeed, it should not! But to be missional is more than this.

The word “missional” is understood in a different way when it is used to describe the nature of the church. At its best, “missional” describes not a specific activity of the church but the very essence and identity of the church as it takes up its role in God’s story in the context of its culture and participates in God’s mission to the world. This book is an attempt to describe “mission” as the role and identity of the church in the context of the biblical story.

The imagery of “mission” is an apt representation of what the twenty-first-century church sh...