Your Mind's Mission
Sometimes I wonder if the church only wants me for my body. It’s always looking for people who will attend, serve or lead its programs. Sometimes I think it just wants my heart so I will emote during worship, will share vulnerably with my small group and (more recently) will seethe over injustice. Not infrequently, I’m convinced the church would settle for my soul so I can be counted as a conversion.
The church seems to love my body, my heart and my soul, but I feel a little demeaned by this relationship. Ever so slightly objectified. You see, I have more to offer—and so do you.
I have a mind, and I want to use it.
Using our minds, we can study both subatomic particles and cosmos-spanning structures. We can imagine how things are, how things might have been and how things should be. We can create artifacts that can transform cultures or weapons that can terminate civilizations. We can design strategies that dignify the oppressed or exploit the poor. We can communicate our deepest desires or our shallowest thoughts. We can proclaim the truth, or we can tell lies. We can know God—or just know about him.
Some churches try to minimize our minds. Pray, don’t plan. Memorize, don’t imagine. Accept, don’t investigate. Experience, don’t think. Avoid higher education if possible because it will introduce you to subversive and scary new perspectives. But what if we could invite Jesus Christ to shape our intellectual capacities around his person and his priorities, to harness our thoughts and our imagination to delight in his revelation (both general and special), to use our brains for his glory?
Jesus, the Source of Missional Thinking
What if the full capabilities of our minds could be deployed on his mission? What if, in addition to going, praying or giving, God intends for us to think—with depth, sophistication and creativity—as we confront the pervasiveness of violence and the persistence of poverty, the complexity of Bible translation and the ubiquity of unreached people groups, the arrogance of unconsidered atheism and the energy of resurgent Islam, the seductive lure of consumerism and the narcotic bait of privatization? Christian mission needs to be enriched and informed by our best thinking.
Christian mission requires us to develop a missional mind: one shaped by God’s Word, focused on God’s purposes and engaged in the beauty and the brokenness of God’s world. Otherwise, praying without thinking is willfully ignorant intercession. Action without reflection is only a reflexive twitch. Passion without reason leads to fanaticism. Mission without the Christian mind undermines itself. Mark Noll, professor at Notre Dame University, observes, “If evangelicals do not take seriously the larger world of the intellect, we say, in effect, that we want our minds to be shaped by the conventions of our modern universities and the assumptions of Madison Avenue, instead of by God and the servants of God.”[1]
A bigger Jesus. We pursue our mind’s mission because we want to know Jesus.
I gave Jesus my allegiance during my freshman year in college. I remember few sermons more than a week or two—even ones that I have preached. But I still remember a talk given by Jonathan Wu at an InterVarsity Bible and Life Conference over twenty-five years ago. He introduced me to a Jesus I had never heard of. He wasn’t just the Jesus who cured the sick and forgave the sinner. He wasn’t just the Jesus who seemed worried about my prayer life (and who showed disturbing interest in my sex life). He wasn’t even just the Jesus who identified with the poor, upbraided the powerful and spoke in pleasant aphorisms. He was the Jesus who made everything, ruled over everything and intended to redeem everything. He was the Jesus of Colossians 1:15-20:
[Jesus] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through the blood, shed on the cross.
Jesus rules over everything. He made everything: seraphim and supernovae, cherubim and chickadees, archangels and archipelagos, angels and anemone, demons and deserts. Holy or ordinary (“heaven” and “earth”), natural or supernatural (“visible and invisible”), individual or systemic (“rulers” and “powers”)—Jesus made it (v. 16), sustains it (v. 17) and designed it to find its purpose in serving him (v. 16). Nothing in the universe (or beyond it) exists apart from him or his concern.
The slightly claustrophobic faith of my youth—concerned mostly with character and conduct, prayers and practices, holiness and hormones—exploded into a universe-size belief system that embraced the whole of my life. Jesus designed all parts of our existence to glorify him. We can study and think about nearly everything for his sake. The secular-sacred distinction evaporated. Noll writes, “Taking this strand of New Testament teaching seriously reveals the world in a new light. There simply is nothing humanly possible to study about the created realm that, in principle, leads us away from Jesus Christ.”[2] I felt an immense sense of relief.
In fact, studying can lead us toward Jesus. He made it, and it reveals something of his character (Romans 1:20). John, asserting that Jesus created all things, identifies Jesus with the Word (the Logos) (John 1:1). He adapts a term used by Stoic philosophers to identify the rational, logical, comprehensible principle of the universe. If we know anything, John suggests, we know it because the Logos made everything. Jesus is the foundation of a Christian epistemology (the study of why and how we know anything).[3] He is the “-ology,” the logic and comprehensibility behind every area of study—God (theology), life (biology), earth (geology), souls (psychology), human interaction (sociology) and so forth. Jesus makes scientific experimentation possible because he makes the universe logical, orderly and comprehensible. The humanities exist because humanity reflects his intelligibility, creativity and imagination. Jesus the Creator and Sustainer is why we believe all truth is God’s truth.[4]
I had a particularly vivid worship experience in junior year high school chemistry class. We were studying orbitals,[5] and I saw the periodic table of elements floating in front of me. (It wasn’t a vision. It was hanging above the chalkboard.) As we studied how orbitals determine the shape of the periodic table, I remember thinking, This is beautiful. Then I recalled Johannes Kepler’s words describing the task of science, “We are thinking God’s thoughts after him.” Then my soul leapt in worship: The God I love made this! I worshiped his creativity, power and aesthetic expression. My chemistry classes became a daily call to worship, and the chemistry textbook a worship manual (as did my biology textbook two years later).[6] Through my high school newspaper adviser, Howard Spanogle, I discovered the sacrament of writing truthfully, prophetically and beautifully.[7] Soon, humanities became like morning prayer, and English a vesper service.[8]
Every square inch. Jesus claims all of creation, not only as its Creator but also as its Redeemer. The Christian missionary impetus begins not with the Great Commission b...