Discovering the Mission of God

Best Missional Practices for the 21st Century

Mike Barnett, Mike Barnett

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780830859856
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Biblical Foundations Book Award"God cannot lead you on the basis of information you do not have." —Ralph WinterWhat is God's mission in the world? For anyone passionate about discovering God's heart for the nations, Discovering the Mission of God will reveal his plans for you. Written by 21st-century field workers, scholars and church leaders, this book weaves together the basic components of God?s global mission and challenges readers to identify where they fit in the mission of God.Discovering the Mission of God explores the mission of God as presented in the Bible, expressed throughout church history and in cutting-edge best practices being used around the world today. Drawing from a new generation of scholar-practitioners, this comprehensive reader provides global perspective, recent missiological research, case studies, recommended further readings and relevant discussion questions at the end of each chapter.Contributors include: Bryan E. BeyerKaren O'Dell BullockR. Bruce CarltonGary R. CorwinDon DentRobert EdwardsNathan EvansDavid GarrisonH. Al GilbertKevin GreesonJim HaneyJ. Scott HolsteR. Alton JamesPatrick LaiWilliam J. LarkinChristopher R. LittleAlex LucStan MayClyde MeadorA. Scott MoreauD. Kurt NelsonHoward NorrishMeg PageJohn PiperRobert L. PlummerJerry RankinNik RipkenTom SteffenEd StetzerJohn Mark TerryLaNette W. ThompsonGreg TurnerPreben VangJoel. F. WilliamsChristopher J. H. WrightWilliam R. YountDiscovering the Mission of God is an indispensable resource for anyone wanting a better picture of what God is doing in the world and how to find one's place in God's global plan.

Part One

The Mission of God
in the Bible

In the beginning was the Word. . . . The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:1,14). The mission of God is as basic as this—God sent his Son, the Word, to reveal himself to his creation. He outlines this mission throughout his written revelation: from beginning to end, from Genesis to Revelation. Why do we so often miss this primary message of the Bible? How can we overlook this preoccupation of God to be on mission to reach all peoples on earth? Perhaps, at its core, this is a function of our self-centeredness. Like the Israelites before us, we pilfer the mission of God and make it our own.

As you read these chapters on the mission of God in the Bible, remember that this is God’s mission, not ours. He is the one on mission. Learn from him. What is his mission? How does he accomplish it? What patterns repeat themselves throughout this mission of God? Where does the power for the mission come from? And how do these lessons from the Bible inform our role in God’s mission today? The Bible is our best textbook, our primary training manual for the mission of God. Learn your mission lessons well in this first part of your discovery journey.

See also the following e-chapters in the Discovering the Mission of God Supplement e-book:

• Israel’s Mission to All Peoples—Timothy M. Pierce
• The Love of God—Gordon Fort
• The Power and Presence of the Holy Spirit—James M. Hamilton Jr.
• Letter from the Field—Brother John

1

Word of God and Mission of God

Reading the Whole Bible for Mission

Christopher J. H. Wright

A Short Personal Journey

I remember them so vividly from my childhood—the great banner texts around the walls of the missionary conventions in Northern Ireland where I would help my father at the stall of the Unevangelized Fields Mission, of which he was Irish Secretary after spending twenty years in Brazil. “Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature,” they urged me, along with other similar imperatives in glowing Gothic calligraphy. By the age of twelve I could have quoted all the key ones: “Go ye therefore and make disciples . . .” “How shall they hear . . . ?” “You shall be my witnesses . . . to the ends of the earth.” “Whom shall we send? . . . Here am I, send me.” I knew my missionary Bible verses. I had responded to many a rousing sermon on most of them.

By the age of twenty-one I had a degree in theology from Cambridge, where the same texts had been curiously lacking. At least it is curious to me now. At the time there seemed to be little connection at all between theology and mission in the minds of the lecturers, or of myself, or, for all I knew, in the mind of God. “Theology” was all about God—what God was like, what God had said and done, and what mostly dead people had speculated on such questions. “Mission” was about us, the living, and what we’ve been doing since Carey (who, of course, was the first missionary, we so erroneously thought). Or more precisely, mission is what we evangelicals do since we’re the ones who know the Bible told us (or some of us, at least) to go and be missionaries. “The Bible” was somewhere in the middle—the object of critical study by theologians and the source of motivational texts for missionaries.

“Mission is what we do.” That was the assumption—supported, of course, by clear biblical commands that were taken seriously by at least some people in the church. Mission was a task that some specially called folks got involved with. I had little concept at that time that mission should have been the very heartbeat of theology and the key to knowing how to interpret the Bible (hermeneutics).

Many years later, including years when I was teaching theology as a missionary in India, I found myself teaching a module called “The Biblical Basis of Mission” at All Nations Christian College, an international mission-training institution in England. The module title itself embodies the same assumption. Mission is the noun, the given reality. It is something we do, and we basically know what it is. And the reason why we know we should be doing it—the basis, foundation, or grounds on which we justify it—must be found in the Bible. As good evangelicals we need a biblical basis for everything we do. What, then, is the biblical basis for mission? Roll out the texts. Add some that nobody else has thought of. Do some joined-up theology. Add some motivational fervor. And the class is heartwarmingly appreciative. Now they have even more biblical support for what they already believed anyway, for these are All Nations students after all. They only came because they are committed to doing mission.

There is the task (mission). Here are some folks who are going to do it (the missionaries). And here are the bits of the Bible that might encourage them (the missionary texts). That is what everybody seemed to mean by the biblical basis of mission.

This mild caricature is not in the least derogatory in intent. I believe passionately that mission is what we should be doing, and I believe the Bible endorses and mandates it. However, the more I taught that course, the more I used to introduce it by telling the students that I would like to change its name from “The Biblical Basis of Mission” to “The Missional Basis of the Bible.” I wanted them to see not just that the Bible contains a number of texts which happen to provide a rationale for missionary endeavor, but that the whole Bible is itself a “missional” phenomenon.

The Bible as the Product of God’s Mission

A missional understanding of the Bible begins with the Bible’s very existence.[1] For those who affirm some relationship (however articulated) between these texts and the self-revelation of our creator God, the whole canon of Scripture is a missional phenomenon in the sense that it witnesses to the self-giving movement of this God toward his creation and toward us, human beings who have been made in God’s own image but who are wayward and wanton. The writings which now comprise our Bible are themselves the product of, and witness to, the ultimate mission of God.

The very existence of the Bible is incontrovertible evidence of the God who refused to forsake his rebellious creation, who refused to give up, who was and is determined to redeem and restore fallen creation to his original design for it. . . . The very existence of such a collection of writings testifies to a God who breaks through to human beings, who disclosed himself to them, who will not leave them unilluminated in their darkness . . . who takes the initiative in re-establishing broken relationships with us.[2]

Furthermore, the processes by which these texts came to be written were often profoundly missional in nature. Many of the biblical texts emerged out of events, struggles, crises, or conflicts in which the people of God engaged with the constantly changing and challenging task of articulating and living out their understanding of God’s revelation and redemptive action in the world. Sometimes these were struggles internal to the people of God themselves; sometimes they were highly argumentative (polemical) struggles with the competing religious claims and worldviews that surrounded them. So a missional reading of such texts is definitely not a matter of first finding the “real” meaning by objective interpretation (exegesis), and then cranking up some “missiological implications” as a sermon (homiletic) supplement to the text itself. Rather, a missional reading will observe how a text often has its origin in some issue, need, controversy, or threat that the people of God needed to address in the context of their mission. The text in itself is a product of mission in action.

This is easily demonstrated in the case of the New Testament.[3] Most of Paul’s letters were written in the heat of his missionary efforts: wrestling with the theological basis of the inclusion of the Gentiles, affirming the need for Jew and Gentile to accept one another in Christ and in the church, tackling the baffling range of new problems that assailed young churches as the gospel took root in the world of Greek polytheism, confronting incipient heresies with clear affirmations of the supremacy and sufficiency of Jesus Christ, and so on. And why were the Gospels so called? Because they were written to explain the significance of the evangel—the good news about Jesus of Nazareth, especially his death and resurrection. Confidence in these things was essential to the missionary task of the expanding church. And the person to whom we owe the largest portion of the New Testament, Luke, shapes his two volumes in such a way that the missionary mandate to the disciples to be Christ’s witnesses to the nations comes as the climax to volume one and the introduction to volume two.

But we can also see in the Old Testament that many texts emerged out of the engagement of the Israelites with the surrounding world in the light of the God they knew in their history and in covenantal relationship. People produced texts in relation to what they believed God had done, was doing, or would do in their world. Genesis presents a theology of creation that stands in sharp contrast to the polytheistic creation myths of Mesopotamia. Exodus records the exodus as an act of Yahweh that comprehensively confronted and defeated the power of Pharaoh and all his rival claims to deity and allegiance. The historical narratives portray the long and sorrowful story of Israel’s struggle with the culture and religion of Canaan. Texts from the time of the Babylonian exile of Israel, as well as postexilic texts, emerge out of the task that the small remnant community of Israel faced to define their continuing identity as a community of faith in successive empires of varying hostility or tolerance. Wisdom texts interact with international wisdom traditions in the surrounding cultures, but do so with staunch monotheistic disinfectant. And in worship and prophecy, Israelites reflect on the relationship between their God, Yahweh, and the rest of the nations—sometimes negatively, sometimes positively—and on the nature of their own role as Yahweh’s elect priesthood in their midst. All of these are themes and conflicts that are highly relevant to missional engagement between God’s people and the world of nations.

The Bible, then, is a missional phenomenon in itself. The writings which now comprise our Bible are themselves the product of, and witness to, the ultimate mission of God. The individual texts within it often reflect the struggles of being a people with a mission in a world of competing cultural and religious claims. And the canon eventually consolidates the recognition that it is through these texts that the people whom God has called to be his own (in both Testaments) have been shaped as a community of memory and hope, a community of mission, a community of failure and striving.

In short, a missional hermeneutic proceeds from the assumption that the whole Bible renders to us the story of God’s mission through God’s people in their engagement with God’s world for the sake of God’s purpose for the whole of God’s creation. Mission is not just one of a list of things that the Bible happens to talk about, only a bit more urgently than some. Mission is, in that much-abused phrase, what it’s all about.

Reading the Scriptures with the Risen Jesus and the Apostle Paul

The Risen Jesus. Now to say, “Mission is what the Bible is all about,” is a bold claim. I would not expect to be able to turn any phrase that began, “The Biblical Basis of . . .” around the other way. There is, for example, a biblical basis for marriage; but ther...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One
• 1 Word of God and Mission of God
• 2 The Missionary Message of the New Testament
• 3 The Supremacy of God in Missions Through Worship
• 4 The Kingdom of God and His Mission
• 5 God’s Great Commissions for the Nations
• 6 Jesus Christ —the Living Word— and the Mission of God
• 7 The Heart of the Task
• 8 The Church in the Mission of God
• 9 The Power of the Gospel
• 10 The Passion of Christ and the Martyrs
• Part Two
• 11 The First Decades of the Mission of God
• 12 The Ante-Nicene Church on Missions
• 13 The Gospel Goes East
• 14 Moastics on Mission
• 15 Post-Reformation Missions Pioneers
• 16 The Great Century
• 17 The Global Century
• Part Three
• 18 The State of the Spread of the Gospel
• 19 Finishing the Task
• 20 Spiritual Warfare and the Mission of God
• 21 Apostles Even Now
• 22 Strategic Prayer for God’s Mission
• 23 Cultures and Worldviews
• 24 Tell His Story So That All Might Worship
• 25 Comprehensive Contextualization
• 26 Effective Bridging and Contextualization
• 27 Back to the Basics
• 28 Church-Planting Movements
• 29 Measuring Progress in the Mission of God
• 30 Breaking Bad Missiological Habits
• 31 Multiplying Leaders on Mission with God
• 32 Creative-Access Platforms
• 33 Biblical Lessons from the Persecuted Church
• 34 Women on Mission with God
• 35 Caring for God's Missionaries
• 36 The Trouble with Our Jerusalem
• 37 The Local Church and the Mission of God
• 38 Where Do You Fit in the Mission of God?
• Notes
• About the Contributors
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Endorsements