The Story That Chooses Us

A Tapestry of Missional Vision

George R. Hunsberger

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781467443067
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Over the course of several decades, missiologist George Hunsberger has written numerous essays on crucial themes for the church's recovery of its missional identity and practice. The Story That Chooses Us brings these essays together for the first time.The book as a whole presents a composite sense of the missional identity and faithful witness to which the church is called in contemporary Western society. Hunsberger engages with well-known missiologist Lesslie Newbigin throughout his work as he carefully discerns biblical and theological roots for a contemporary vision of missional theology. The recurring themes in Hunsberger's essays provide both theological mooring and practical guidance for churches following Christ on the missional path.

Calling

Representing the Reign of God

1998

This is a time for a dramatically new vision. The current predicament of churches in North America requires more than a mere tinkering with long-­assumed notions about the identity and mission of the church. Instead, as many knowledgeable observers have noted, there is a need for reinventing or rediscovering the church in this new kind of world.1

Two things have become quite clear to those who care about the church and its mission. On the one hand, the churches of North America have been dislocated from their prior social role of chaplain to the culture and society and have lost their once-privileged positions of influence. Religious life in general and the churches in particular have increasingly been relegated to the private spheres of life. Too readily, the churches have accepted this as their proper place.2 At the same time, the churches have become so accommodated to the American way of life that they are now domesticated, and it is no longer obvious what justifies their existence as particular communities. The religious loyalties that churches seem to claim and the social functions that they actually perform are at odds with each other. Discipleship has been absorbed into citizenship.3

The churches have a great opportunity in these circumstances, however. The same pressures that threaten the continued survival of some churches, disturb the confidence of others, and devalue the meaning of them all can actually be helpful in providing an opening for new possibilities. Emerging into view on the far side of the church’s long experience of Christendom is a wide vista of potential for the people of God in the postmodern and post-­Christian world of North America. The present is a wildly opportune moment for churches to find themselves and to put on the garments of their calling, their vocation.

The Chinese character for signifying the idea of “crisis” combines two other characters, the one for “danger” and the other for “opportunity.” Crisis is made of both, and so too is the current situation of the church. Dangers lurk on all sides for churches, but probably the greatest dangers lie within. Long-­established routines and long-­held notions have a strong hold on any community, and a church is no exception. These routines and notions constitute a way of seeing what the church is and what it is for and in turn inform how a church operates from day to day. Such assumed patterns are brought into question, however, when the church recognizes that it has been demoted from its prior social importance and may have accommodated away something of its soul. The church must then ask, Are our structures and our assumptions about the church’s nature and purpose no longer suited to the time and place in which we currently live? Might it be that both our organization and presuppositions have been dislodged from their moorings in the biblical message?

These are difficult questions for the church of any age and place because they involve the complicated calling of the church to both relevance and faithfulness. The church may fit well into its social environment, but unwarranted accommodation may cause it to lose touch with its biblical warrant. Or the church may adhere too strictly to scriptural forms of expressing its faith that were intelligible to the cultures of biblical times, and in the process neglect to translate the biblical warrant into an incarnation relevant to the church’s current time and place. The struggle to be both faithful and relevant is constant for every church. It is the church’s calling to embody the gospel’s “challenging relevance.”4

How is the church to give relevant expression and faithful embodiment to the gospel? The present crisis over the church’s identity and mission is wrapped up in that question.

A Place or a People?

One way to illustrate and pose this question for the church today is to contrast the church’s notion of itself in terms dictated by a functional Christendom with newer biblical and theological rumblings in this century concerning the church’s nature. In lectures in 1991, shortly before his untimely death, mission theologian David Bosch of South Africa put it this way.5 The churches shaped by the Reformation were left with a view of the church that was not directly intended by the Reformers, but nevertheless resulted from the way that they spoke about the church. Those churches came to conceive the church as “a place where certain things happen.” The Reformers emphasized as the “marks of the true church” that such a church exists wherever the gospel is rightly preached, the sacraments rightly administered, and (they sometimes added) church discipline exercised. In their time, these emphases may have been profoundly missional since they asserted the authority of the Bible for the church’s life and proclamation as well as the importance of making that proclamation accessible to all people. But over time, these “marks” narrowed the church’s definition of itself toward a “place where” idea. This understanding was not so much articulated as presumed. It was never officially stated in a formal creed but was so ingrained in the churches’ practice that it became dominant in the churches’ self-­understanding.

This perception of the church gives little attention to the church as a communal entity or presence, and it stresses even less the community’s role as the bearer of missional responsibility throughout the world, both near and far away. “Church” is conceived in this view as the place where a Christianized civilization gathers for worship, and the place where the Christian character of the society is cultivated. Increasingly, this view of the church as a “place where certain things happen” located the church’s self-­identity in its organizational forms and its professional class, the clergy who perform the church’s authoritative activities. Popular grammar captures it well: you “go to church” much the same way you might go to a store. You “attend” a church, the way you attend a school or theater. You “belong to a church” as you would to a service club with its programs and activities.

This view corresponds well to the basic notion of mission that has existed under Christendom. On the one hand, the Reformers and their immediate successors believed that the commission Jesus left with the apostles — to disciple the nations — was fulfilled in the first century. Therefore it was no longer required of the church. The colonial expansion of European nations raised new questions about this belief as the churches of Europe encountered peoples who had never heard the gospel. When the question of evangelizing these peoples began to press itself, another strongly held belief of the time came into question as well. In Christendom Europe, civil magistrates were obligated to ensure the spiritual well-­being of all citizens of their realm, so it was natural to assume that they would bear the same role vis-­à-­vis the new peoples brought under their dominion. This arrangement began to break down when voluntary missionary societies emerged. Many of those societies were ultimately adopted into the life of the churches, but mission continued to be conceived as something that happens at a great physical or social distance. The missionary movement throughout the nineteenth century altered little the western churches’ self-­conception as a place where certain things happened.

In the twentieth century, Bosch went on to say, this self-­perception gave way to a new understanding of the church as a body of people sent on a mission. Unlike the previous notion of the church as an entity located in a facility or in an institutional organization and its activities, now the church is being reconceived as a community, a gathered people, brought together by a common calling and vocation to be a sent people. This understanding arose out of global reflections on the church’s nature particularly in the light of the worldwide missionary movements of the previous several centuries and the fruit of that work in the existence of new churches throughout the world. From the mid-­twentieth century on, biblical and theological foundations for such a communal and missional view of the church have blossomed.

Reflections among numerous missionary agencies and denominational mission boards following World War II underscored this perspective. During the middle of the twentieth century, the colonial worlds of the European nations were dismantled, and newly independent nations arose throughout the so-­called Third World. Those churches previously called “younger churches” now pressed toward their own independence from the missions and churches of the West. A now-global church recognized that the church of any place bears missional calling and responsibility for its own place as well as for distant places. The church of every place, it realized, is a mission-­sending church, and the place of every church is a mission-­receiving place.

As a result of these developments, a shift from an ecclesiocentric (church-­centered) view of mission to a theocentric (God-­centered) one took place. Mission as a church-­centered enterprise characterized mission thinking earlier in the twentieth century. Mission had been considered to be activities arising out of the church with an aim to extend the church or plant it in new places. The church sent the mission out and defined its character. The expansion of the church into new locales was thought to be its guiding goal. In many respects this shift represented an advance for the church because it acknowledged a global sense of mission. But this approach tended to reinforce the dichotomy between the churches of the West and the so-­called younger churches planted in other parts of the world.

By mid-­century, the emphasis in mission thought shifted toward a theocentric approach that, in contrast, stressed the mission of God (missio Dei) as the foundation for the mission of the church. The church became redefined as the community spawned by the mission of God and gathered up into that mission. The church was coming to understand that in any place it is a community sent by God. “Mission” is not something the church does, a part of its total program. No, the church’s essence is missional, for the calling and sending action of God forms its identity. Mission is founded on the mission of God in the world, rather than the church’s effort to extend itself.

Theocentric mission theology recovered the trinitarian character of mission. As Lesslie Newbigin indicated at the time, missionary practice must be grounded in the person and work of Christ, seeded by “trust in the reality and power of the Holy Spirit,” and rooted in a practical faith that discerns “God’s fat...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Gospel: The Story That Chooses Us
• Challenge: The Newbigin Gauntlet
• Dilemma: A Vendor-Shaped Church
• Calling: Representing the Reign of God
• Community: Truly and True
• Warrant: Announcing the Reign of God
• Encounter: Sitting on Both Sides
• Place: Discerning Local Vocation
• Posture: Renewing a Public Voice
• Formation: Cultivating Ways of Christ
• Index of Subjects and Names
• Index of Scripture References