What Is the Mission of the Church?

Making Sense of Social Justice, Shalom, and the Great Commission

Kevin DeYoung, Greg Gilbert

• Verlag: Crossway
• Jahr: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781433526930
• Thema: Theology & Religion
• Thema: Christian Ministry

Social justice and mission are hot topics today: there's a wonderful resurgence of motivated Christians passionate about spreading the gospel and caring for the needs of others. But in our zeal to get sharing and serving, many are unclear on gospel and mission. Yes, we are called to spend ourselves for the sake of others, but what is the church's unique priority as it engages the world?

DeYoung and Gilbert write to help Christians "articulate and live out their views on the mission of the church in ways that are theologically faithful, exegetically careful, and personally sustainable." Looking at the Bible's teaching on evangelism, social justice, and shalom, they explore the what, why, and how of the church's mission. From defining "mission", to examining key passages on social justice and their application, to setting our efforts in the context of God's rule, DeYoung and Gilbert bring a wise, studied perspective to the missional conversation.

Readers in all spheres of ministry will grow in their understanding of the mission of the church and gain a renewed sense of urgency for Jesus' call to preach the Word and make disciples.

PART 1

Understanding Our Mission

A Common Word in Need of a Careful Definition

If everything is mission, nothing is mission.
—STEPHEN NEILL

IF YOU'RE READING THIS BOOK, you’re probably a Christian. And if a Christian, you probably take some kind of interest in the church. And if you’ve been involved in a church, you’ve probably wondered from time to time, “What are we trying to accomplish anyway?” Maybe as a pastor you’ve asked yourself, “With everyone interested in their own program and passionate about their own cause, are we even aiming at the same thing?” Maybe as a Christian businessman or stay-at-home mom you’ve thought, “I know we are supposed to glorify God. But under that big umbrella, what does God want our church to be doing?”

At their root, these questions all ask the same thing: What is the mission of the church?

The question is deceptively complex and potentially divisive. For starters, what do we even mean by mission? And if that can be settled, we then face more difficult questions. Is the mission of the church discipleship or good deeds or both? Is the mission of the church the same as the mission of God? Is the mission of the church distinct from the responsibilities of individual Christians? Is the mission of the church a continuation of the mission of Jesus? If so, what was his mission anyway?

Related to these questions are others: What should be the church’s role in pursuing social justice? Are we right to even use that phrase, and what do we mean by it? Does God expect the church to change the world, to be about the work of transforming its social structures? What about the kingdom? How do we build the kingdom of God? Or are we even capable of building the kingdom? How does the kingdom relate to the gospel? How does the gospel relate to the whole story line of the Bible? And how does all of this relate to mission?

Despite all these questions, there is a lot that evangelicals can agree on when it comes to mission: the gospel is, at the very least, the good news of Jesus’s death and resurrection; proclamation is essential to the church’s witness; heaven and hell are real; people are lost without Jesus; bodies matter as well as souls; and good deeds as the fruit of transformed lives are not optional. But if we are to find a lasting and robust agreement on mission praxis and mission priorities, we must move past generalities and build our theology of mission using the right categories and the right building blocks. In other words, as we grasp key concepts like kingdom, gospel, and social justice, we will be better able to articulate a careful, biblically faithful understanding of the mission of the church. And just as important, we’ll be able to pursue obedience to Christ in a way that is more realistic, freeing, and, in the long run, fruitful.

What Is Mission?

Before going any further in answering the question posed in this book’s title, we should acknowledge the difficulty in the question itself. A big part of the problem in defining the mission of the church is defining the word mission. Because mission is not a biblical word like covenant or justification or gospel, determining its meaning for believers is particularly difficult. We could do a study of the word gospel and come to some pretty firm biblical conclusions about “What is the Gospel?”—and we will, later in this book!¹ But mission is a bit trickier. On the one hand the Latin verb mittere corresponds to the Greek verb apostellein, which occurs 137 times in the New Testament. So mission is not exactly extrabiblical. But as a noun, mission does not occur in the Bible, which makes the question of this book more difficult.

The answer to the question, “What is the mission of the church?” depends, to a large degree, on what is meant by “mission.” One could make a case that glorifying God and enjoying him forever is the mission of the church, because that is our chief end as redeemed believers. Someone else might argue that loving God and loving neighbor is the best description of our mission, because those are the greatest commandments. And someone else might borrow from the nineteenth-century hymn and argue that trust and obey is the essence of our mission, because that is the great call of the gospel message. In one sense we would be foolish to argue with any of these answers. If mission is simply a synonym for living a faithful Christian life, then there are dozens of ways to answer the question, “What is the mission of the church?”

But isn’t it wise to aim for a more precise definition of such a common word? We’ve never met a Christian who was against mission. In fact, every church we’ve ever known would say they are passionate about mission. So shouldn’t we try to be clear what we are all for? Christians have long seen the importance of carefully defining other theological words like Trinity, essence, and inerrancy.² Theology will not go far without careful attention to distinctions and definitions. So why not work toward a definition of mission? Christians often talk about mission trips, mission fields, and mission work, so it would seem to be a good idea at least to attempt to define what we are talking about. Granted, word meanings can change, and it may not be possible to rein in the definition of mission after fifty years of expansion. But it seems to us that a more precise definition is necessary, if for no other reason than the conviction that Stephen Neill’s quip is spot-on: “If everything is mission, nothing is mission.”³

But where to start with a definition? In his influential book Transforming Mission, David Bosch rightly argues, “Since the 1950s there has been a remarkable escalation in the use of the word ‘mission’ among Christians. This went hand in hand with a significant broadening of the concept, at least in certain circles.”⁴ It used to be that mission referred pretty narrowly to Christians sent out cross-culturally to convert non-Christians and plant churches. But now mission is understood much more broadly. Environmental stewardship is mission. Community renewal is mission. Blessing our neighbors is mission. Mission is here. Mission is there. Mission is everywhere. We are all missionaries. As Christopher Wright puts it, disagreeing with Stephen Neill’s quote, “If everything is mission . . . everything is mission.”⁵ The ambiguity of the term mission is only augmented by the recent proliferation of terms like missional and missio Dei. It’s no wonder Bosch concludes a few pages later, “Ultimately, mission remains undefinable.”⁶

But perhaps a common definition is not yet a lost cause. Before giving up on a definition, Bosch acknowledges that mission, at least in traditional usage, “presupposes a sender, a person or persons sent by the sender, those to whom one is sent, and an assignment.”⁷ Though his broader theology of mission is quite different from what we will propose in this book, and though he doesn’t like many of the ways this traditional understanding was employed, Bosch is on to something here. At its most basic, the term mission implies two things to most people: (1) being sent and (2) being given a task. The first point makes sense because mission comes from a Latin word (mittere) meaning “to send.” The second point is implied in the first. When sent on a mission, we are sent to do something—and not everything, either, but rather we are given a particular assignment. On a street level, people basically know what mission means. For example, the old TV show Mission: Impossible always involved a specific goal that Peter Graves was supposed to accomplish. Companies spend millions every year honing their “mission statements,” and fast-food restaurants even post “Our Mission” on the wall to assure us they’re fanatically focused on serving us the best burgers in town. Even in the world around us, everyone understands that a mission is that primary thing you set out to accomplish. Most every organization has something, as opposed to other things, that it does and must do, and it understands that thing to be its mission. We think the same is true of the church.

In his study of mission in John’s Gospel, Andreas Köstenberger proposes a working definition along the same lines: “Mission is the specific task or purpose which a person or group seeks to accomplish.”⁸ Notice again the key concepts of being sent and being given a task. Likewise, John Stott has argued that mission is not everything the church does, but rather describes “everything the church is sent into the world to do.”⁹ We are convinced that if you ask most Christians, “What is the mission of the church?” they will hear you asking, “What is the specific task or purpose that the church is sent into the world to accomplish?” This is our working definition of mission and what we mean to ask with the title of this book.

A Correction to the Correction

Our sincere hope is that this book can be a positive contribution to the mission discussion so prevalent and so needed in the evangelical world. We want to be positive in tone. We want to build up rather than tear down. But inevitably, a fair amount of our work in these chapters will be corrective as well.

Some of what we want to correct is an overexpansive definition that understands mission to be just about every good thing a Christian could do as a partner with God in his mission to redeem the whole world.¹⁰ But we are not antimissional.¹¹ More and more, missional simply means being “on mission”—conscious of how everything we do should serve the mission of the church, being winsome and other-centered and Good Samaritan–like with those outside the community of faith, and having a sanctified strategy of being intentional and “attractional” for those who don’t know Christ. It is often shorthand for “get out of your holy huddle and go engage your community with the gospel.” We are all for that. Every Christian should be. We are not out to tar and feather any Christian who dares put -al on the end of mission. Even less do we want to cast aspersions on many of our friends who happily use the word and usually mean very good things by it.

Nevertheless, it is not wrong to probe the word missional. It’s a big trunk that can smuggle a great deal of unwanted baggage. Being suspicious of every mention of the word is bad, but raising concerns about how the word is sometimes used is simply wise.

With that in mind, we register a few concerns about how missional thinking has sometimes played out in the conversation about the church’s mission:

1. We are concerned that good behaviors are sometimes commended but in the wrong categories. For example, many good deeds are promoted under the term social justice, when we think “loving your neighbor” is often a better category. Or, folks will talk about transforming the world, when we think “faithful presence” is a better way to describe what we are trying to do and actually can do in the world. Or, sometimes well-meaning Christians talk about “building the kingdom” or “building for the kingdom,” when actually the verbs associated with the kingdom are almost always passive (enter, receive, inherit). We’d do better to speak of living as citizens of the kingdom, rather than telling our people that they build the kingdom.

2. We are concerned that in our newfound missional zeal we sometimes put hard “oughts” on Christians where there should be inviting “cans.” You ought to do something about human trafficking. You ought to do something about AIDS. You ought to do something about lack of good public education. When you say “ought,” you imply that if the church does not tackle these problems, we are being disobedient. We think it would be better to invite individual Christians, in keeping with their gifts and calling, to try to solve these problems rather than indicting t...