Christian Mission in the Modern World

John Stott, Christopher J.H. Wright

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780830898930
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christlicher Dienst

Jesus sends us into the world just as the Father sent him. And yet thousands of years later Christians continue to disagree on what this involves. Some believe that the focus of Christian mission is evangelizing and "saving souls." Others emphasize global justice issues or relief and development work. Is either view correct on its own? John Stott's classic book presents an enduring and holistic view of Christian mission that is just as needed today. Newly updated and expanded by Christopher J. H. Wright, Christian Mission in the Modern World provides a biblically based approach to mission that addresses both spiritual and physical needs. With his trademark and unparalleled clarity and conviction, Stott illuminates how the Great Commission itself not only assumes the proclamation that makes disciples, but also teaches obedience to the Great Commandment of love and service. Wright has expertly updated the original book and demonstrates the continuing relevance of Stott's prescient thinking. This balanced approach to mission offers timeless guidance for current and future Christians to embrace Jesus' unconflicted and holistic model of ministry.

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MISSION

John Stott

All Christians everywhere, whatever their cultural background or theological persuasion, must think at some time or other about the relation between the church and the world. What is a Christian’s responsibility toward non-Christian relatives, friends and neighbors, and indeed to the whole non-Christian community?

In reply to these questions most Christians would make some use of the term mission. One can hardly discuss church-world relations and omit the concept of “mission.” But there would be a wide divergence in our understanding of what our “mission” is, of what part “evangelism” plays in mission, and of what part “dialogue” plays in evangelism. I fear further that we would diverge from one another not only in our understanding of the nature of mission, evangelism and dialogue, but also in our understanding of the goal of all three. Possibly the terms conversion and salvation would figure somewhere in our definition of goals, but again there might be little consensus regarding the meaning of these words. My task, then, is to take this cluster of five words—mission, evangelism, dialogue, salvation and conversion—and to attempt to define them biblically, starting in this chapter with mission, and then devoting a chapter to each of the remaining four.

In recent years, relations between ecumenical and evangelical Christians (if I may use these terms as a convenient shorthand, for I recognize that they are by no means mutually exclusive) have hardened into something like a confrontation. I have no wish to worsen this situation. However, I do believe that some current ecumenical thinking is mistaken. But then, candidly, I believe some of our traditional evangelical formulations are mistaken also. Many ecumenical Christians do not seem to have begun to learn to live under the authority of Scripture. We evangelicals think we have—and there is no doubt we sincerely want to—but at some times we are very selective in our submission, and at others the traditions of the evangelical elders seem to owe more to culture than to Scripture. My chief concern, therefore, is to bring both ecumenical and evangelical thinking to the same independent and objective test, namely, that of the biblical revelation.

The first word we have to consider is mission. Before attempting a biblical definition it may be helpful to take a look at the contemporary polarization.

Two Extreme Views

The older or traditional view has been to equate mission and evangelism, missionaries and evangelists, missions and evangelistic programs. In its extreme form this older view of mission as consisting exclusively of evangelism also concentrated on verbal proclamation. The missionary was often caricatured as standing under a palm tree, wearing a pith helmet and declaiming the gospel to a group of ill-clad “natives” sitting respectfully around him on the ground. Thus the traditional image of the missionary was of the preacher, and a rather paternalistic kind of preacher at that. Such an emphasis on the priority of evangelistic preaching sometimes left little room for any other kind of work to be counted as “real mission,” including even schools and hospitals. Most adherents of the traditional view of mission, however, would regard education and medical work as perfectly proper, and indeed as very useful adjuncts to evangelistic work, often out of Christian compassion for the ignorant and the sick, though sometimes as being unashamedly “platforms” or “springboards” for evangelism—hospitals and schools providing in their patients and pupils a conveniently captive audience for the gospel. In either case the mission itself was understood in terms of evangelism.

This traditional view is far from being dead and buried. Sometimes it goes along with a very negative view of the world of culture and society. The world is like a building on fire, it may be said, and a Christian’s only duty is to mount a rescue operation before it is too late. Jesus Christ is coming at any moment; there is no point in tampering with the structures of society, for society is doomed and about to be destroyed. Besides, any attempt to improve society is bound to be unproductive since unrenewed people cannot build a new world. A person’s only hope lies in being born again. Only then might society conceivably be reborn. But it is too late now even for that.

Such world-denying pessimism is a strange phenomenon in those who say they believe in God. But then their image of God is only partially shaped by the biblical revelation. He is not the Creator who in the beginning gave humanity a “cultural mandate” to subdue and rule the earth, who has instituted governing authorities as his “ministers” to order society and maintain justice, and who, as the Lausanne Covenant puts it, because he is “both the Creator and the Judge of all people,” is concerned for “justice and reconciliation throughout human society.”1

At the opposite extreme to this unbiblical concept of mission as consisting of evangelism alone there is the viewpoint that has been advocated in the ecumenical movement since the 1960s. This is the view that God is at work in the historical process, that the purpose of God’s mission, of the missio Dei, is the establishment of shalom (Hebrew for “peace”) in the sense of social harmony, and that this shalom (which is identical with the kingdom of God) is exemplified in such areas as the battle against racism, the humanization of industrial relations, the overcoming of class divisions, community development, and the quest for an ethic of honesty and integrity in business and other professions.

Moreover, in working toward this goal God uses people both inside and outside the church. The church’s particular role in the mission of God is to point out where God is at work in world history, to discover what God is doing, to catch up with it and to get involved in it ourselves. For God’s primary relationship is to the world, it was argued, so that the true sequence is to be found no longer in the formula “God-church-world” but in the formula “God-world-church.” This being so, it is the world that should set the agenda for the church. Churches must take the world seriously and seek to serve according to its contemporary sociological needs.

What are we to say about such identification of the mission of God with social renewal? A fourfold critique may be made.

First, the God who is Lord of history is also the Judge of history. It is naive to hail all revolutionary movements as signs of divine renewal. After the revolution the new status quo sometimes enshrines more injustice and oppression than the one it has displaced.

Second, the biblical categories of shalom, the new humanity and the kingdom of God are not to be identified with social renewal. It is true that in the Old Testament shalom (peace) often indicates political and material well-being. But can it be maintained, as serious biblical exegesis, that the New Testament authors present Jesus Christ as winning this kind of peace and as bestowing it on society as a whole? To assume that all Old Testament prophecies are fulfilled in literal and material terms is to make the very mistake that Jesus’ contemporaries made when they tried to take him by force and make him a king (John 6:15). The New Testament understanding of Old Testament prophecy is that its fulfillment transcends the categories in which the promises were given. So according to the apostles the peace that Jesus preaches and gives is something deeper and richer, namely, reconciliation and fellowship with God and with each other (for example, Ephesians 2:13-22). Moreover, he does not bestow it on all people but on those who belong to him, to his redeemed community. So shalom is the blessing the Messiah brings to his people. The new creation and the new humanity are to be seen in those who are in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17); and the kingdom has to be received like a little child (Mark 10:15). Certainly it is our Christian duty to commend by argument and example the righteous standards of the kingdom to those who have not themselves received or entered it. In this way we see the righteousness of the kingdom, as it were, “spilling over” into segments of the world and thus to some extent blurring the frontiers between the two. Nevertheless the kingdom remains distinct from godless society, and actual entry into it depends on spiritual rebirth.

Third, the word mission cannot properly be used to cover everything God is doing in the world. In providence and common grace he is indeed active in all people and all societies, whether they acknowledge him or not. But this is not his “mission.” “Mission” concerns his redeemed people, and what he sends them into the world to do.

Fourth, such preoccupation with social change sometimes leaves little or no room for evangelistic concern. Of course we must give earnest attention to the hunger, poverty and injustices of the world. But we cannot then fail to have comparable concern or compassion for people’s spiritual hunger, or fail to care about the millions who are perishing without Christ. The Lord Jesus Christ sent his church to preach the good news and make disciples, and we must not become so absorbed with legitimate social goals and activity that we fail to obey that command.

A Biblical Synthesis?

From the traditional view of mission as exclusively evangelistic and the current ecumenical view of it as the establishment of shalom, we ask whether there is a better way, a more balanced and more biblical way of defining the mission of the church, and of expressing the relationship between the evangelistic and social responsibilities of the people of God.

The need for such a balanced relationship was recognized within the ecumenical movement itself. At the Uppsala Assembly of the World Council of Churches in 1968, its recently retired secretary general, Dr. W. A. Visser ’t Hooft, made the following fine statement in an opening address:

I believe that, with regard to the great tension between the vertical interpretation of the Gospel as essentially concerned with God’s saving action in the life of individuals, and the horizontal interpretation of it as mainly concerned with human relationships in the world, we must get out of that rather primitive oscillating movement of going from one extreme to the other, which is not worthy of a movement which by its nature seeks to embrace the truth of the Gospel in its fulness. A Christianity which has lost its vertical dimension has lost its salt and is not only insipid in itself, but useless for the world. But a Christianity which would use the vertical preoccupation as a means to escape from its responsibility for and in the common life of man is a denial of the incarnation, of God’s love for the world manifested in Christ.2

Sadly, the issue was not clarified at that conference and remained a divisive issue among ecumenicals and evangelicals alike. The old polarization continues.

All of us should be able to agree that mission arises primarily out of the nature not of the church but of God himself. The living God of the Bible is the sending God. Some have even applied the word centrifugal, normally used of the church reaching out in mission, to God himself. It is a dramatic figure of speech. Yet it is only another way of saying that God is love, always reaching out after others in self-giving service.

So God sent forth Abraham, commanding him to go from his country and kindred into the great unknown, and promising to bless him and to bless the world through him if he obeyed (Genesis 12:1-3). Next he sent Joseph into Egypt, overruling even his brothers’ cruelty, in order to preserve a godly remnant on earth during the famine (Genesis 45:4-8). Then he sent Moses to his oppressed people in Egypt, with good news of liberation, saying to him, “Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring forth my people . . . out of Egypt” (Exodus 3:10). After the exodus and the settlement he sent a continuous succession of prophets with words of warning and of promise to his people. As he said through Jeremiah, “From the day that your fathers came out of the land of Egypt to this day, I have persistently sent all my servants the prophets to them, day after day; yet they did not listen to me” (Jeremiah 7:25, 26; compare 2 Chronicles 36:15-16). After the Babylonian captivity he graciously sent them back to the land, and sent more messengers with them and to them to help them rebuild the temple, the city and the national life. Then at last “when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son”; and after that the Father and the Son sent forth the Spirit on the day of Pentecost (Galatians 4:4-6; compare John 14:26; 15:26; 16:7; Acts 2:33).

All this is the essential biblical background to any understanding of mission. The primal mission is God’s, for it is God who sent his prophets, his Son, his Spirit. Of these missions the mission of the Son is central, for it was the culmination of the ministry of the prophets, and it embraced within itself as its climax the sending of the Spirit. And now the Son sends as he himself was sent. Already during his public ministry Jesus sent out first the apostles and then the seventy as a kind of extension of his own preaching, teaching and healing ministry. Then after his death and resurrection he widened the scope of the mission to include all who call him Lord and call themselves his disciples. For others were present with the Twelve when the Great Commission was given (see, for example, Luke 24:33). We cannot restrict its application to the apostles alone.

The Great Commission

This brings us to a consideration of the terms of the Great Commission. What was it that the Lord Jesus commissioned his people to do? There can be no doubt that most versions of it (for he seems to have repeated it in several forms on several occasions) place the emphasis on evangelism. “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation” is the familiar command of the “longer ending” of Mark’s Gospel, which seems to have been added by some later hand after Mark’s original conclusion was lost (Mark 16:15). “Go . . . and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them . . . and teaching them” is the Matthean form (Matthew 28:19, 20), while Luke records at the end of his Gospel Christ’s word “that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations” and at the beginning of the Acts that his people would receive power to become his witnesses to the end of the earth (Luke 24:47; Acts 1:8). The cumulative emphasis seems clear. It is placed on preaching, witnessing and making disciples, and many deduce from this that the mission of the church, according to the specification of the risen Lord, is exclusively a preaching, converting and teaching mission. Indeed, I confess that I myself argued this at the World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin in 1966, when attempting to expound the three major versions of the Great Commission.

Today, however, I would express myself differently. It is not just that the Commission includes a duty to teach baptized disciples everything Jesus had previously commanded (Matthew 28:20), and that social responsibility is among the things that Jesus commanded. I now see more clearly that not only the consequences of the Commission but the actual Commission itself must be understood to include social as well as evangelistic responsibility, unless we are to be guilty of distorting the words of Jesus.

The crucial form in which the Great Commission has been handed down to us (though it is the most neglected because it is the most costly) is the Johannine. Jesus had anticipated it in his prayer in the upper room when he said to the Father, “As thou didst send me into the world, so I have sent them into the world” (John 17:18). Now, probably in the same upper room but after his death and resurrection, he turned his prayer-statement into a commission and said, “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you” (John 20:21). In both these sentences Jesus did more than draw a vague parallel between his mission and ours. Deliberately and precisely he made his mission the model of ours, saying “as the Father sent me, so I send you.” Therefore our understanding of the church’s mission must be deduced from our understanding of the Son’s. Why and how did the Father send the Son?

Of course the major purpose of the Son’s coming into the world was unique. Perhaps it is partly for this reason that Christians have been hesitant to think of their mission as in any sense comparable to his. For the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the world, and to that end to atone for our sins and to bring us eternal life (1 John 4:9, 10, 14). Indeed, he himself said he had come “to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). We cannot copy him in these things. We are not saviors. Never­theless, all this is still an inadequate statement of why he came.

It is better to begin with something more general and say that he came to serve. His contemporaries were familiar with Daniel’s apocalyptic vision of the Son of Man receiving dominion and being served by all peoples (Daniel 7:14). But Jesus knew he had to serve before he would be served, and to endure suffering before he would receive dominion. So he fused two apparently incompatible Old Testament images, Daniel’s Son of Man and Isaiah’s Suffering Servant, and said, “The Son of man . . . came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). The ransoming sin-offering was a sacrifice that he alone could offer, but this was to be the climax of a life of service, and we too may serve. “I am among you,” he said on another occasion, “as one who serves” (Luke 22:27). So he gave himself in selfless service for others, and his service took a wide variety of forms according to people’s needs. Certainly he preached, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God and teaching about the coming and the nature of the kingdom, how to enter it and how it would spread. But he served in deed as well as in word, and it would be impossible in the ministry of Jesus to separate his works from his words. He fed hungry mouths and washed dirty feet; he healed the sick, comforted the sad and even restored the dead to life.

Now he sends us, he says, as the Father had sent him. Therefore our mission, like his, is to be one of service. He emptied himself of status and took the form of a servant, and his humble mind is to be in us (Philippians 2:5-8). He supplies us with the perfect model of service, and sends his church into the world to be a servant church. Is it not essential for us to recover this biblical emphasis? In many of our Christian attitudes and enterprises we have tended (especially those of us who live in Europe and North America) to be bosses rather than servants. Yet it seems that it is in our servant role that we can find the right synthesis of evangelism and social action. For both should be for us, as they undoubtedly were for Christ, authentic expressions of the love that serves.

Then there is another aspect of the mission of the Son that is to be paralleled in the mission of the church, namely, that in order to serve he was sent into the world. He did not touch down like a visitor from outer space, or arrive like an alien bringing his own alien culture with him. He took to himself our humanity, our flesh and blood, our culture. He actually became one of us and experienced our frailty, our suffering and our temptations. He e...