by Daniel Speer
The Church is called to serve God with excellence in all of life. The entirety of our stewardship over creation is part of our duty to God. Our family life, literary engagement, political thinking, and media usage are all part of the ministry of God’s cosmic kingdom. The spread of the gospel at home and abroad is also part of that work. As such, missions should receive the same careful reflective attention that we call for in applying theology to the rest of life. Unfortunately, many popular books and leaders in the missions world focus their attention on methods of outreach and bland moralisms aimed at numerical growth and social improvement but not life-transforming service to God.
Alan Hirsch and Mark Nelson address this problem directly in their wonderful book, Reframation: Seeing God, People, and Mission Through Reenchanted Frames. These authors argue that lingering assumptions from the modern era are frustrating our attempts to engage with God’s mission in the world. These assumptions lead to a reduced framework through which we try to live our lives, one that fails to inspire awe, much less a desire to do great things for a great God. Instead, the church ends up chasing lesser ambitions, trying to offer the world a marginally better, sanitized version of their life as it is. But that is not the Christian life.
Hirsch and Nelson insightfully remind us that the gospel draws out “the profound mystery of God’s inescapable presence,” which should “evoke wonder,” into our hearts and minds. As they note, “the Bible consistently teaches that the fear, or awe, of God is the gateway to the love and knowledge of God (e.g., Proverbs 9:10).”[1] Unfortunately, by adopting the bland moralistic therapeutic deism that Christian Smith identified as the main religious sentiment of modern American Christians, we have lost all respect for the mystery and awe that should characterize our service to God in our personal spiritual lives and in our missions work.[2]
As I play my part on the “front lines,” so to speak, of missions work among Free Will Baptists, I perceive the need to go back and fan the flame of why we do what we do. We need to reclaim a passionate and abiding love for the glory and wonder of Christ. Having anything else at the core of our desire to reach out and engage in missions is an exercise in futility. We need the wide-eyed wonder of His mission to be the driving force behind all of our missions effort in this world, resisting the constant tide of modernism and the reduced methodologies that emerge from it.
Living God’s Story
We must focus on our own spiritual need. How can we reclaim our deep appreciation for God’s glory revealed in Christ? Hirsch and Nelson give attention to the importance and power of story in our lives. In one telling section, the authors recount an event during the Bolshevik Revolution where cultural storytellers were rounded up and killed:
It seemed as though the Bolsheviks understood a real truth: if you take away a people’s story, they no longer know who they are. They lose any sense of values, or where they come from or where they are going. Remove a people’s story and you can put anything in its place. We need an unreduced and unleashed story to make sense of God, our lives, and the world. The influence of story over our identity, behavior, and calling cannot be underestimated. And our inability to invite people into the definitive story of life by extracting the myth, mystery, and imagination has resulted in a surrendering to the reduction of both truth and story, and a failure to comprehend what is really at stake.[3]
Central to God’s great mission in the world is an ongoing revelation, through the power of the Holy Spirit, of the big picture story of the glory of King Jesus Christ and God the Father Who sent Him. Jesus is reconciling all things unto Himself (Col. 1:20), and we are part of that kingdom work. His story (and by extension our inclusion into it) and His mission cannot be reduced to best practices without losing the heart of it in the process. Instead of attempting to lay this story on an examination table and dissect it to figure out how it works and how to replicate it, the story must be unleashed in our own lives and in the lives of those we disciple.
A Broader Understanding of Mission
Missionaries have rightly given many sermons on the Great Commission. In his book, Invitation to World Missions, Timothy Tennent draws out the important distinction between the missio Dei (the great mission of God in human history to redeem mankind) and missions (our role in that mission). This work is central in the Great Commission passages. In them, Jesus, Who is central to the missio Dei, sends out His disciples to all the world with a call to make disciples of all nations. As they spread out from Him, they engage in missions—our role in God’s mission of redemption.[4]
The mission statement of Free Will Baptist International Missions is “to labor together with the body of Christ to fulfill the great commission”—and for good reason. The church has now for some two thousand years continued in the same tradition that the disciples laid down when they went into all the world, making disciples of all nations.
While the Great Commission remains a key text for us to keep in mind when we consider missions, I believe that other places in Scripture help to reveal the full scale and scope of the mission of God in the world and our role in it.[5] One such place is found in the prophecy of Isaiah and its fulfillment some seven hundred years later in the early church within which we find a broader-based understanding of the mission of God and our role in it: namely, that Jesus is glorious, and His glory is for the nations. However, we will review that passage in next week’s post, in addition to exploring how Paul’s sermon in Pisidian Antioch expands on Isaiah’s prophecy and explains how the Gentiles are being brought into the kingdom of God to enhance the glory of Jesus.
[1] Alan Hirsch and Mark Nelson, Reframation: Seeing God, People, and Mission Through Reenchanted Frames (100 Movements, 2019), 75, Kindle.
[2] See Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
[3] Hirsch and Nelson, 80.
[4] Tennent calls for us to re-examine our rootedness in, and re-discover the awe of, the missio Dei: “Once the missio dei becomes the generative center of all missiological reflection, it changes the way we think and conduct ourselves as ambassadors of God’s mission in the world. We find ourselves transcending the competitive aggrandizement of a particular denominational work. Instead, we become heralds who embody the inbreaking of the New Creation. The triumphalism of human agency and ingenuity are replaced by a deepened humility and awe that God would use us, alongside Christians from all over the world, in the accomplishment of His unfolding plan of redemption in the world.” Timothy Tennent, Invitation to World Missions: A Trinitarian Missiology for the Twenty-first Century, (Kregel Academic and Professional, 2010), location 1039 of 7178, Kindle.
[5] See also Samuel H. Larsen’s series of lectures on the History of Missions originally given at Reformed Theological Seminary: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/history-of-missions-dr-samuel-h-larsen-RO9kg5FLx04/.
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