Few words are as beloved in church vocabulary as the word “mission,” yet few words are as routinely, theologically misused as the word “mission.” If asked to give a simple definition of “church mission,” people would likely answer with some version of the following two options: (A) Mission is going out into the community and the world to help others, or (B) Mission is actively making disciples in the community and the world by spreading the gospel of Christ. The first builds on Jesus’ commandment to “love our neighbor as ourselves” and the admonition that whenever we do good deeds “unto the least of these in the Kingdom of God” it is as if we are doing them to Christ himself. The second option builds on the missionary impulse of the early church as found in the Great Commission to “go and make disciples in all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19).
Now at the risk of over-generalization, the first option is strongly emphasized in progressive churches while the second option is commonly found in more evangelical churches. The first puts an emphasis on “faith is what we do,” and encourages us to be active in living out our faith as evidenced by our good works for those in need. The second emphasizes “faith is what we believe” and challenges us to be active in articulating our faith to others, so that they too may come to possess a faith that is easily articulated and shared with others.
Walter Brueggemann is an eloquent, cantankerous, prophetic theologian whom I admire. He is an Old Testament scholar, but also a man skilled in rebutting our modern tendency to water down the Christian faith. Brueggemann reminds us that God is not a quaint, easily-comprehended God; that God is often hidden, opaque, and certainly not prone to self-revelations at our beck and call. Unfortunately, our language about God and mission often forgets that fundamental fact. Here’s three sentences from Brueggemann that I promise you’ll have to read slowly at least two or three times:
Liberals, embarrassed by the otherness of the biblical idiom, have kept control of matters through rationalistic speech that in the end affirms that “God has no hands but ours,” issuing in burdensome self-congratulations. Conservatives, fearful of speech that is undomesticated, have insisted on flattening biblical testimony into the settled categories of scholasticism that freezes truth … Neither liberal rationalism nor scholastic conservatism will yield any energy or freedom for serious, sustained obedience or for buoyant elemental trust.
Mission is not just what we do (“God has no hands but ours”), nor is it what we believe and convince others to believe (“flattened biblical testimony that freezes truth”). Mission is ourencounter with God that leads to testimonies of words and deeds. God comes to us, seeking us out to shake us, comfort us, inspire us, discipline and train us. God in Christ does this on God’s own terms, not ours. Yet it is done out of God’s covenant love and compassion for us. To give testimony about this (in word and deed) is to live a life of integrated faith, in which what we believe undergirds how we live with others. Both liberals and conservatives are called to do this type of “mission testimony” because in doing real Christian mission, we are the church. So in the coming weeks, think about how you’ve encountered God and how you define “mission” in your own life, and join us for worship in October as we humbly consider this subject together.