THE MISSION OF GOD & BECOMING MISSIONAL

The term 'mission' or 'missions' can mean different things to different people.  Closely relatd is the English word 'missionary' which is derived from the Latin and is the equivalent of the Greek-derived word, 'apostle', and means 'sent one'.  Western Christendom (both Protestant and Catholic) is very familiar with these terms and generally speaking, missions is seen as one of a number of activities or programmes the church gets involved in.  For some churches, missions is broad in scope and may encompass all outreach activities whether locally or further afield.  For others it may equate to evangelistic endeavours overseas, especially cross-cultural outreach which would include church-planting, Bible training, Bible translation and, of course, the preaching of the gospel.  Importantly, it is carried out somewhere else, by specially called and trained 'missionaries', on the 'mission field'.

Just as it is vitally important for us to recognize that the whole of history throughout time is fundamentally a story of God's redemption of creation, it is also vital that we understand that for this redemptive story to take place, God has his own mission to bring it to pass.  What is exciting is to recognize that we have all been invited to be a part of God with a mission!  It is in his mission that God invites us to join him and be a part of writing his story.

As we grasp the fact that God is a missionary God who has sent himself through his son, Jesus Christ, we will also understand the missionary calling as God's people.  The church exists because of its mission and a church that is not "the church in mission" is no church at all.  This means that it is not that the church has a mission (perhaps expressed in a presentable mission statement) but that the mission of God has a church, which exists to be a sign and a witness to the nations, and a foretaste of God's dream for the world.

The vision of church expressed as missional communities within the broader context of seeing the kingdom of God come on earth fits very much with a revelation and desire which God has been developing within me for some years.  For the past 18 months I have been working on in a book soon to be published by YWAM – Riding the Fourth Wave: Every Believer finding their God-given place in the Great Commission (working title).  A key message of the book is for the church to return to its original missionary calling which is to be sent incarnationally into the world.  This will require a whole new way of thinking in line with a biblical worldview and the mission of God, breaking free from old dualistic paradigms of spiritual and secular which have disempowered the majority of believers and caused them to view missions solely as an activity or outreach programme of the church.  The title and substance of the book conveys my passion to see God’s kingdom come on earth as every believer is empowered as an agent of God’s mission, living as disciples missionally in their ordinary contexts and spheres of influence, in order that the full scope of the Great Commission mandate might be fulfilled through the discipling of nations. 

Christians and churches alike are gradually coming to the realization that the spiritual landscape has changed in the West to a post-Christian one.  I have a desire to be involved in the development of missional church communities where there is meaningful fellowship and which allows for effective and natural outreach into local communities (as opposed to attractional forms of evangelism which extract people from their cultural tribes into a church ‘tribe’).  During the seven years my family and I lived in China, we were not able to go to church for security reasons and had to substitute ‘going to church’ with something else.  It was as we met as a family in our home, and then with other missionaries, that we began to learn that we did not need the forms and methods of Sunday church to meet together with God.  Since that time, we have experienced ‘church’ in many settings and have become increasingly convinced that missional communities are a truer expression of church the way God intended.  We have sought for a deeper and more authentic expression of NT Christianity than what is normally found in most church contexts, the kind of church Jesus designed to change the world.  Having worked in a number of cross-cultural and overseas contexts as a missionary, I believe this has prepared me to help others adopt the thinking and ways of a missionary as they seek to enter into the lives of people who speak a different ‘language’ and embrace another cultural mindset.