Serving a Movement

Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City

Timothy Keller

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780310520580
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

In Serving a Movement, best-selling author and pastor Timothy Keller looks at the nature of the church’s mission and its relationship to the work of individual Christians in the world. He examines what it means to be a “missional” church today and how churches can practically equip people for missional living. Churches need to intentionally cultivate an integrative ministry that connects people to God, to one another, to the needs of the city, and to the culture around us. Finally, he highlights the need for intentional movements of churches planting new churches that faithfully proclaim God’s truth and serve their communities.

This new edition contains the third section of Center Church in an easy-to-read format with new reflections and additional essays from Timothy Keller and several other contributors.

Part 1

MISSIONAL COMMUNITY

Chapter 1 THE SEARCH FOR THE MISSIONAL CHURCH

The word missional first became popular after the 1998 publication of the book titled Missional Church, and in the years since, it has been adopted and used widely.¹ Many are asking, “How can we really be missional?” An entire generation of younger evangelical leaders has grown up searching for the true missional church as if for the Holy Grail. Seemingly a dozen books come out each year with the word missional in their title, but a survey of these books reveals that the word has significantly different meanings and is used in different ways by different authors, organizations, and churches — leading to much confusion about what, exactly, the term missional means.

Before the term missional exploded throughout the Christian world, it was primarily used in mainline Protestant and ecumenical circles in a manner closely associated with the Latin phrase missio Dei. The phrase was originally coined to convey the teaching of Karl Barth about the action of God in the world. According to Lesslie Newbigin, the term missio Dei became prominent after the 1952 world mission conference in Willingen, Germany. It was a way of referring to the idea that God is active in the world, working to redeem the entire creation, and that the church’s task is to participate in this mission.²

In his influential 1991 book Transforming Mission, David Bosch explained that the term missio Dei was firmly grounded in Trinitarian theology. Bosch noted that in the past, mission was largely viewed as a category of soteriology (as a way to save souls) or as a category of ecclesiology (as a way to expand the church). In contrast, the concept of missio Dei implied that mission should be “understood as being derived from the very nature of God . . . put in the context of the doctrine of the Trinity, not of ecclesiology or soteriology.”³ The Trinity is, by nature, “sending.” The Father sends the Son into the world to save it, and the Father and the Son send the Spirit into the world. And now, said Bosch, the Spirit is sending the church. In short, God does not merely send the church in mission. God already is in mission, and the church must join him. This also means, then, that the church does not simply have a missions department; it should wholly exist to be a mission.

At first glance, this seemed to be a strong and sound theology of mission. As time went on, however, it meant the church actually came to be seen as less relevant. Lesslie Newbigin wrote these words in the late 1970s: “If God is indeed the true missionary, it was said, our business is to not promote the mission of the church, but to get out into the world, find out ‘what God is doing in the world,’ and join forces with him. And ‘what God is doing’ was generally thought to be in the secular rather than in the religious sectors of human life. The effect, of course, was to look for what seemed to be the rising powers and to identify Christians’ missionary responsibility with support for a range of political and cultural developments.”⁴

Harvey Cox of Harvard Divinity School wrote, “What God is doing in the world is politics . . . Theology today must [therefore] be that reflection-in-action by which the church finds out what this politician-God is up to and moves in to work along with him.”⁵ In many mainline and ecumenical circles, mission came to mean working with secular human rights movements or rising left-wing political organizations. The results, Newbigin wrote, were “sometimes bizarre indeed. Even Chairman Mao’s ‘little red book’ became almost a new Bible.”⁶ Newbigin, who was one of the key people involved in the forming of the World Council of Churches, became increasingly concerned that the concept of the missio Dei left little need for the church. The church could not meet human needs as well as social service agencies could, nor could it change society as well as political parties and organizations could. So in this view, the church became inconsequential.

In The Open Secret, Newbigin criticized what he called the “secularization” of mission. He argued that conversions, the growth of the church, and the quality of Christian community were all critical and central to mission. Newbigin looked with favor on the theories of missiologist Donald McGavran, who taught that the purpose of mission was “church growth” in quality and quantity.⁷ Nevertheless, Newbigin retained the term missio Dei and its original theological concept of a missionary God. He insisted that the church needed to grow through evangelism yet be involved in service and in the struggle for justice in the world as well. Newbigin sought to uphold the basic idea of the missio Dei, but he tried to save it from the excesses and distortions of the ecumenical movement.

The Newbigin-Bosch Rescue

Lesslie Newbigin had been a British missionary in India for several decades. When he returned to England in the mid-1970s, he saw the massive decline of the church and Christian influence that had occurred in his absence. At the time he left England, Western society’s main cultural institutions still Christianized people, and the churches were easily gathering those who came to their doors through social expectation and custom. Churches in the West had always supported “missions” in overseas non-Christian cultures (such as India). There on the “mission field,” churches functioned in a different way than they did in Europe and North America. Churches in India did not merely support missions or even do missions — they were missional in every aspect. They could not simply process Christianized people as churches did in the West. Rather, every aspect of their church life — worship, preaching, community life, and discipleship — had to be a form of mission.

For example, on the mission field, visitors to a worship service could not be expected to have any familiarity with Christianity. Therefore the worship and preaching had to address them in ways both comprehensible and challenging. On the mission field, believers lived in a society with radically different values from those they were taught in church. This made “life in the world” very complicated for Christians. Discipleship and training had to equip believers to answer many hostile questions from their neighbors. It also had to spell out Christian personal and corporate behavior patterns that distinguished them and showed society what the kingdom of God was all about. In other words, away from the West, churches did not simply have a missions department; Christians were “in mission” in every aspect of their public and private lives.

When he returned to England, Newbigin discovered that the ground had shifted. The cultural institutions of society were now indifferent or overtly hostile to Christian faith, and the number of people who went to church had plummeted. Western culture was fast becoming a non-Christian society — a “mission field” — but the churches were making little adjustment. While many Christian leaders were bemoaning the cultural changes, Western churches continued to minister as before — creating an environment in which only traditional and conservative people would feel comfortable. They continued to disciple people by focusing on individual skills for their private lives (Bible study and prayer) but failed to train them to live distinctively Christian lives in a secular world — in the public arenas of politics, art, and business. All they preached and practiced assumed they were still in the Christian West, but the Christian West was vanishing.

This was a disastrous tactic. Western churches, Newbigin argued, had to put the same kind of thought and effort into reaching their alien, non-Christian culture as the churches in India, China, and the rest of the world did. Over the last twenty-four years of his life, Newbigin argued tirelessly and trenchantly that the church had to come to grips with the fact that it was no longer functioning in “Christendom.” Rejecting the common view that the West was becoming a secular society without God, Newbigin viewed it as a pagan society filled with idols and false gods.⁸ He especially criticized the ideology of the European Enlightenment and its idolatrous commitment to the autonomy of human reason that had led to the illusion of neutral, value-free, objective knowledge. This commitment to reason had seduced Western cultural leaders into believing we did not need God or any particular religious faith in order to have a well-ordered, just, and moral society. Critical to the church’s mission in the West, he said, was the unmasking of this false god by showing the futility of the “Enlightenment project” — the fruitless effort to find consensus on morality, right and wrong, justice, and human flourishing on the basis of secular reason.

In his books The Open Secret, Foolishness to the Greeks, and The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Newbigin fleshed out what mission to Western society could look like.⁹ It included a public apologetic against the autonomy of human reason that was overtly indebted to Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Polanyi but that incorporated the approach of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck as well. It also emphasized equipping believers to integrate their faith and work, changing society as they moved out into their vocations in the world, as well as emphasizing the importance of the Christian church as a “hermeneutic of the gospel.” Newbigin believed that the love, justice, and peace that ought to characterize the Christian counterculture were primary ways of bearing witness to God in a pluralistic society. With these last two emphases — the renewal of society and the church as a “contrast” community — Newbigin combines several of the cultural approaches we looked at earlier.

Most important, Newbigin proposed something of a middle way (though he never used that term) with the missio Dei. In his critical review of Konrad Raiser’s book defending the approach of the World Council of Churches (Ecumenism in Transition: A Paradigm Shift for the Ecumenical Movement?), Newbigin wrote the following:

Raiser, of course, is absolutely right to protest against an ecclesiocentric concept of mission, as though the church were the author and the goal of mission. But this whole vision is too much shaped by the ideology of the 1960s with its faith in the secular, and in human power to solve problems. The thesis is heavily marked by a model . . . that interprets all situations in terms of the oppressor and the oppressed and that tends to interpret the struggles of the oppressed as the instrument of redemption. This model owed not a little to Marxist thought, and the collapse of Marxism as a world power has created a new situation with which the WCC has to come to terms.¹⁰

Newbigin rejected the direct identification of God’s redemption with any movement that improves socioeconomic well-being. He rightly said that the idea of defining mission as “what God is doing out in history” too closely draws its origins from the Marxist ideas of class struggle as the meaning of history. But then Newbigin sought to strike a note of balance:

The (literally) crucial matter is the centrality of Jesus and his atoning work on the cross, that work by which he has won lordship over the church and the world . . .

It is one of the most pressing tasks for the immediate future to rediscover a doctrine of redemption that sees the cross not as the banner of the oppressed against the oppressor but as the action of God that brings both judgment and redemption for all who will accept it, yet does not subvert the proper struggle for the measure of justice that is possible in a world of sinful human beings.¹¹

Here Newbigin takes the struggle for justice in the world out from the center of the meaning of redemption. Redemption is first of all the action of God in Christ, and this action calls for a decision. It must be accepted, not rejected.¹² And yet there is still a place for us to struggle for the “measure of justice” in this world.

In Transforming Mission, David Bosch further develops Newbigin’s idea of the missio Dei. In Bosch’s examination of Luke’s theology of mission, he sees a charge to proclaim Christ and the call for conversion, as well as to show God’s concern for justice for the poor. In his Believing in the Future, Bosch goes further in spelling out a vision for mission in a post-Christian West. He restates the core idea of the missio Dei— that God’s mission is to restore creation, and the church is called to participate in this mission. Bosch says that mission is not just “recruitment to our brand of religion; it is alerting people to the universal reign of God.”¹³ Then he suggests how this may be done. First, he says, we must avoid two opposing errors: (1) trying to re-create a Christian society (the mistake of medieval Christendom) and (2) withdrawal from society into the “spiritual realm” (the mistake of modernity).¹⁴ Second, we must learn how to publicly and prophetically challenge the idol of autonomous reason and its results.¹⁵ Third, we must take pains to make our churches into contrast societies, countercultures that show society what human life looks like free from the idols of race, wealth, sex, power, and individual autonomy.¹⁶ So we contextualize our message in ways that avoid syncretism on the one extreme and irrelevance on the other; we better equip the laity for their public callings; and we cultivate vital, life-shaping worship as the dynamic heart of mission. These steps show the world a countercultural model of society and shape people so that the gospel influences how they live in the world.¹⁷ Finally, we must model to the world as much unity between churches as is practically possible.

An insight animating all of this work is the idea of the cultural captivity of the church in the West. Bosch, like Newbigin, is especially critical of Enlightenment rationalism and its various effects in Western culture — materialism, consumerism, individualism, and the breakdown of community. He maintains that the church is too deeply shaped by the spirit of the age, in both its conservative and liberal forms. In its liberal form, it has bought uncritically into a secular account of things, de-supernaturalizing the gospel so that the Sp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Introduction
• A Note from Timothy Keller
• Part 1: Missional Community
• Part 2: Integrative Ministry
• Part 3: Movement Dynamics
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• About the Contributors