Seminary PL8: Thinking Missionally

This is the eighth post in the Pastoral Leadership part of my Seminary in a Nutshell series. The first six were:

• Categories of Leadership
• Styles and Traits of Leaders
• How does God lead
• The Mission, Great and Small
• Identifying Mission
• Casting Vision
• Vision Statements

1. The last four posts have been about strategic planning. The typical process begins by clarifying the mission of your church in a way that leads to a sense of vision for its immediate future. Often the core values of the church or organization are also clarified before the church sets specific goals to work toward. Thus far we have been looking at the first two steps--clarifying mission and setting vision.

In this post and the next, I want to mention two key factors a church should take into account when working through this process. Again, many will intuitively connect these dots, but it is worth mentioning them explicitly. The first has to do with the divine opportunities of your church's context. The second has to do with the specific strengths of your church and ministry. Today's post is about the missional opportunities of your church's context.

2. One of the "books" of this Seminary in a Nutshell series has to do with mission. In theory, that entire topic would come into play in strategic planning. For example, one post in that series will have to do with demographics--what do the people who surround your church look like? While there are plenty of churches where the people drive in from some distance, there is something peculiar about a church that has no connection with its immediate environment.

The key to thinking missionally is to think about what God is doing rather than what your church or ministry wants to do. God is on a mission to reconcile the world to himself (2 Cor. 5:18-20), and the church is his agent in the world to bring it about. While we may talk about "our" mission, we are really about God's mission.

A key question in strategic planning is thus, "What is God already doing here?" What is God already doing in our community to reconcile it to himself? What is God already doing in our church? The missional question is, "How can our church join God in the mission that he is already doing here?"

What does our community look like? What are the greatest needs of our community? What people groups are not being reached in our community? What tools does our church already have that we can use to good effect?

3. It is unlikely that your church can do everything or reach everyone. Certainly you do not want anyone to feel unwelcome. Certainly you must not exclude anyone from the reach of your mission. Certainly there is no aspect of being in the kingdom that you want to leave completely out.

But focus multiplies the effort. A well known pastor in my denomination was once convicted that his church was almost completely Caucasian while his community was incredibly diverse. To put it in missional terms, he realized that his church was not participating in the mission of God in the community to which it belonged. He engaged in a mission to see his church look more like his community.

Then, as the congregation had increasingly come to look like the community, he made sure that the leadership of the church began to look like the community as well. Finally, he himself turned over the senior leadership and transitioned to another ministry.

In the city where I live, there are dozens and dozens of churches. Different churches serve different groups of people. There is a "college church." It certainly wants to reach everyone it can, but it simply is not as likely to minister to "blue collar" individuals in the city. Yet there is another growing church that does an incredible job ministering to that cross section of the city.

We are not arguing for complacency here. We are not arguing that a church segregate itself. There are great dangers in a church "excusing" itself from groups that should be its primary mission. So the college church I mentioned has worked hard to minister to the community immediately to its north, which tends to be quite different than the college community immediately to its south.

So there is a tension here. The mission of God in your church's community may not look like your church currently looks. That should tug on the church's conscience, and it should strongly consider strategic goals to change that fact. Yet a church cannot do everything and should focus its ministry. And you can't minister to anyone if you destroy the church trying to change it.

There thus has to be a balance. Is it worth splitting a church over the mission? If those that leave are weeds rather than wheat, maybe it is (Matt. 13:24-30). But God cares for the souls of those who might leave too, and sometimes it is the leader who is in the wrong, not the objectors. There is a time for the pastor to "wipe the dust off her feet" and move on too (Matt. 10:14). Or it may be time to wait, to continue to minister faithfully until a window opens for movement. Or there may be opportunity to work more subtly, creating a parallel ministry that can be integrated later.

It is also a fact of human nature that people cohere the most when they consider themselves part of the same group on the same mission (a slightly reworked version of the so called "homogeneous principle"). The pastor who integrated his congregation led his congregation to own the vision of a church that looked like its community. Although the church is now diverse, they still see themselves as a single church with a common identity and vision.

4. The bottom line of this post is that a church and its leadership should think missionally as they formulate their vision, while also taking into account the realities of their situation. The mission of your church, if it is legitimate, will always be a subset of God's mission. What is God doing in your community and how can your church get on board? This should be the primary question, not "What do we want to do?" or "Who do we want to be?" Rather, the question is what God wants to do with your church.

How might God use your church as part of his mission for your community? How might God use your church to minister to those already part of its congregation? How might God use your church to minister to the world?

Next Week: Pastor as Leader 9: Evaluating Strengths

E9. The Church participates in God's mission to the world.

This is the ninth post on the Church in my ongoing series, theology in bullet points. The first unit in this series had to do with God and Creation (book here), and the second unit was on Christology and Atonement.

We are now in the third and final unit: The Holy Spirit and the Church. The first set of posts in this final unit on the Spirit and the Church was on the Holy Spirit.
_______________________________
The Church participates in God's mission to the world.

1. If the Church has as its highest and central task the worship of God, the Church has as its primary mission the reconciliation of the world to God. This task is, ultimately, God's mission rather than the mission of the Church itself. It cannot succeed without the Holy Spirit, who prepares the way for the hearing of the good news. God has made Christ the means of reconciliation. The atoning death of Christ is the ground of reconciliation.

But the primary method by which God is reconciling humanity to himself is through the Church. God has chosen "the foolishness of proclamation" as the normal method to save humanity (1 Cor. 1:21). [1]

2. Paul expresses the mission God had given him in 2 Corinthians 5:20: "We are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us." What is this ministry? Paul and his co-workers had a "ministry of reconciliation" (5:18). In the Great Commission, Jesus charged his disciples to "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations" (Matt. 28:19).

This proclamation of the good news is one of the key tasks of the Church. Within the body of Christ, some are especially gifted to proclaim the good news. Ephesians 4:11 calls them "evangelists," and in the early church this was a primary task of the apostles. The apostles were those "sent" by the risen Jesus to give witness to the fact that he had risen from the dead indeed and been enthroned as king of the cosmos.  

3. What is the good news, the gospel? In Matthew, Mark, and Luke--the "Synoptic Gospels--the good news is the "kingdom of God" (e.g., Mark 1:14-15). [2] While he was on earth, Jesus preached the coming return of God's reign to the earth. This coming reign, which began in his ministry, would set things right in the world.

With the death and resurrection of Jesus, the role of Jesus as the king of the coming kingdom came into focus. It is the kingdom of our God and of his Christ (Rev. 12:10). The heart of the gospel for Paul is the fact that Jesus is the king of the cosmos and that he is coming again to return righteousness to the world. [3]

So the good news includes the implications of Christ's reign. The gospel is the good news that Jesus has been enthroned as king and all that his enthronement entails.

This enthronement includes salvation. The good news includes the possibility of eternal salvation for humanity. It includes good news for the poor who will not be poor in the kingdom of God. It includes good news for the creation, which will be liberated along with humanity.

4. The coming kingdom of God is good news for the poor, certainly when the kingdom is fully here. Christ has inaugurated the kingdom of God, but it is not fully in place and will not be until he returns. Nevertheless, while he was on earth Jesus modeled that the good news is good news for the poor now as well as in the future. [4]

Therefore, the good news that Jesus is king Messiah not only means that individuals can have eternal life and that the Church is called to proclaim this good news to the world. It also means that the Church is called to bring "good news to the poor, liberty to the captives, sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed" (Luke 4:16-21) Evangelism is the practice of proclaiming the good news to the world. That good news in the New Testament is not only that all can be saved. It is also that injustice will cease.

Any view of evangelism that does not have the lordship of Jesus as its primary message is off focus. And any view of evangelism that does not include "social justice" is an anemic understanding of the good news. Social justice is the biblical value of bringing the love of God to bear on the social and economic contexts of society. It is rooted in the Old Testament Law, reiterated in the Old Testament Prophets and Writings, pronounced definitively in the message of Jesus, and empowered in the New Testament by the Holy Spirit.

The Bible nowhere sees these two aspects of the good news in conflict with one another. The Bible never treats the resources of the Church in competition with one another, as if we must make a choice between saving souls and helping people. God calls the Church to do both, and no doubt he calls some more to be ministers of the one form of reconciliation and others more to be ministers of the other.

So while it is true that eternity is more important than our current social and economic circumstances, the Bible leaves no room for the Church to ignore social justice in the name of eternal salvation. And, in any case, those who think they are likely to see souls saved when their life situation is ignored are more likely hindrances to the good news than true evangelists.

5. Romans 8 indicates that salvation will go beyond human eternity, for most of the New Testament pictures eternity taking place on a new earth. The gospel is thus also good news for the creation. In the Garden of Eden, God gave Adam and Eve the task to care for the garden (Gen. 2:15; cf. 1:28).

More than ever in history, humanity is now in a position both to care for God's world and to harm it. It is not the primary task of the Church to take care of the creation, but the Church demonstrates that it is redeemed humanity when it fulfills God's original intention that humanity be good stewards of the earth. Therefore, the authentic Church will be a positive force for the care of God's creation.

6. At any time and place, it will be more or less possible for the Church to influence its surrounding society for good. This is rarely a matter of force. Force does not truly change others, for change is a matter of the heart and the inside rather than the outside. In cases of concrete harm, the Church may exert pressure for change.

Nevertheless, the true Church always influences the world to become better. We should not assume that, at any time and place, our contexts are destined to get worse and worse or better and better. At times the Church will have a significant impact on the world becoming a better place. At others, we will watch the surrounding society deteriorate around us.

In either case, God's mission remains. God's mission is to reconcile the world to himself and then to see a redeemed humanity and creation flourish forever. God calls the Church to participate in that mission as agents of change.

Next Sunday: E10. The Church disciples and nurtures God's people.

[1] We have mentioned elsewhere the possibility that someone might be saved through Christ without having heard his name. Such a person would be judged "according to the light they have." However, this is not the ideal of the New Testament or the normal path to salvation. It cannot undermine the drive to go and preach the good news and surely the likelihood of turning to Christ is greater the more light one has. "Faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ" (Rom. 10:17).

[2] Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the "synoptic" Gospels because they present Jesus in such a way that you can set them side by side and see remarkable similarities in wording and order. It is the consensus of scholars that Matthew and Luke in fact used Mark as a written source.

[3] See Scot McKnight, The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011) and N. T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel is News and What Makes It Good (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2015).

[4] The Gospel of Luke especially emphasizes this dimension of Jesus' earthly ministry (e.g., Luke 4:16-21).

4. Innovation involves some trial and error. (1)

Previously on Seminary take-aways:
1. There are key moments of opportunity.
2. You need the right people.
3. Good leaders collaborate and navigate.

The first year of the Seminary was "Launch Year."

1. The first course in the Seminary curriculum is Missional Church. Long before Dr. Charles Arn became the first new faculty member, Russ Gunsalus, as Director of Graduate Ministry, was getting the band back together to work on the first course.

In February of 2008, Russ got Norm Wilson, Keith Drury, Dave Smith and me together at a retreat center in northern Indiana to brainstorm what this course would look like in concrete form. Bob Whitesel, who lived in the area at that time, also dropped by. At that time he was the only full-time faculty person in the Department of Graduate Ministry.

The team saw four main content items in this course: 1) evangelism, 2) service, 3) church planting and multiplication, and 4) global missions.

Evangelism
It was obvious that evangelism needed to be in this course, but we did not want it to be a narrowly defined evangelism. There is some internal Seminary joking about the church growth movement. Bob Whitesel of course was a student of Don McGavran, so any dismissive comment about the church growth movement being shallow immediately meets with strong push back from Bob about the real church growth movement and the depth of McGavran's theology.

But there were worries expressed in the creation of Wesley that it not become a "church growth seminary," in a pejorative sense. So in designing the Missional Church course, we did not want the course to have a narrow definition of evangelism as something along the line of Evangelism Explosion back in the 70s or a superficial sense of evangelism as leading people to pray the sinner's prayer.

(I might add that in the Summer of 2010, Wayne Schmidt and the faculty read through The Next Evangelicalism and had a lively discussion about the "homogeneous principle" that was so well known as part of the church growth movement. It's the idea that like is attracted to like and thus that churches grow more the less diverse they are.)

Service
We chose the word missional not only because it was a buzz word at the time but because the Wesleyan tradition has always been concerned with aspects of the gospel that today we would call "social justice." The Wesleyan tradition does not pit service to the needs of others against spiritual needs. The good news extends beyond salvation of the soul to salvation of the whole person in every domain, indeed to the redemption of the structures of society and even the creation.

BTW, Bob Whitesel wrote Waypoints about the time this course was being created, which has missional written all over it. He repeatedly emphasizes that a missional church contrasts with an attractional church. An attractional church is focused on how to bring people to itself. A missional church asks what God is doing in one's community and jumps on board with his mission.

Church Planting and Multiplication
When we were just proposing an MDIV in the summer of 2007, I met with all three General Superintendents in Indy to see if the Wesleyan denomination was in support of our Seminary venture. In fact, in a move that seemed unprecedented, all three later came to one of the Seminary Task Force meetings to show their support (Earle Wilson, Tom Arminger, Jerry Pence). Clearly they emphatically supported the venture. Somewhat reminiscent of Paul in Galatians 2:10--they only wanted us to remember church planting and multiplication.

The multiplication piece was also central on their minds because, as I understand it, the survival rate of plants that are part of a parent church (what Bob calls "internal plants") is much higher than plants that are out on their own.

Global Mission
We felt like there should be something on traditional missions in this course. Norm always kept us mindful of the global church in all our designing.

2. If everything went according to plan, the Missional Church course would first be offered in August of 2009. That was over a year later. On the retreat, we had come up with an outline for the course, and Norm Wilson was asked to take a first shot at filling in the concrete blanks. I'm sure Keith Drury was sitting back shaking his head while I fumbled around in the dark about this whole curriculum design piece. We knew what we wanted the general characteristics of the classes to be. But getting a real course into a form we were happy with was another thing.

For example, Norm had never taught an online class at that time, so inevitably his first drafts had a very onsite feel. Ironically, by the time the Seminary was going, we would end up with the opposite problem: our courses ended up so oriented around the online that we had trouble figuring out how to do them onsite at first.

I apologize to that first cohort for the pain I caused them. :-) Here were the initial features of that first template that now seem obviously way too complex and just too much:

• Many weeks had five assignments--way too much. Chip and I ended up pulling out at least one assignment every week even before the first offering of the class was over.
• The first offering of Missional Church had four professors--Chip as the praxis professor, me as Bible, Chris Bounds for theology, Bud Bence for history, and me as "Integration Professor."
• The student had at least two of the above professors each week, which means that there was frequently confusion over who was teaching what.
• Each week had an "Application Paper" assignment in which the learning of the week was applied to the student's local church ministry and captured at the end of the course in an uber-strategic Application Paper. 
• The course had running throughout it an "Integration Paper" (IP). In this paper, students pick a pastoral issue and then explore it in relation to the Bible, theology, and church history in order to formulate a pastoral response. 
• The student could pick any topic relating to mission for this IP, which means everyone was doing something different. Every student had to pick their own passages, find their own theologians and historians, etc. 

The idea for the IP, which embodied the goal of integration the most, came near the end of the retreat, as I recall. I had the idea, I think, after we had already sketched out most of the content of the Missional course. That meant that, at least initially, it was added on to an already full course. It was too much.

3. So let me back up a bit. Norm had created many pieces, but the craziness above (more on complexity later) required a particular kind of crazy to put together into concrete form. I know when Dr. Charles Arn came on as our first faculty hire, July 1, 2009, he must have felt like nothing yet had been done on the course. Little did he know how much water had already flowed under the bridge.

As was his right as a full-time faculty person, we began to join what had been before with his own expertise in the area. This is a natural aspect to any joining of new to old. We had to negotiate what stayed from before, what was modified, what would be new, and what order it would now go in. Chip was, as always, the consummate team player. Bob was going to teach the onsite Missional course in the Fall, so he was also part of the discussion.

This is one of the features of a start-up organization. When you start with such a small number of people, each new person changes the mix much more dramatically than when you are adding someone to an existing organization with an established core and ethos. In the case of the Seminary, the dream was so unlike the prior experience of any new person, that joining must have been something like jumping into ice cold water for each new faculty person. It was like learning a whole new language.

Through no fault of Chip's (indeed, he would have had it done lickity split), the course was only mostly finished by the time the semester began. I was trying to jockey between the voices (not to mention the other aspects of the Dean's job) and be an instructional designer in Blackboard all at the same time.

That leads to another aspect of my stubbornness that I know many questioned especially in the second year of the Seminary. Why doesn't the Seminary just go along with the way the rest of the online programs operate at IWU? My goal was to take the best of both CAS and CAPS. This inevitably led to tensions in the early stages. Online CAPS was designed for 10,000. We were trying to customize for 30.

With regard to Blackboard, for example, I wanted the buttons to be organized by week rather than by type of assignment (you'll notice that all of IWU now does this and other things I changed for the Seminary ;-) We had sixteen week courses, so going under one button for assignments, then having to click out to go to another for discussions, then click out to go to another for submissions, and another for groups seemed insane. Why not just collect all the assignments for each week in one place?

There were other areas where I wanted to customize Blackboard. For example, we wanted students and professors to be able to subscribe to forums (remember that old function in Blackboard when you could get an email when someone posted something? ;-), which wasn't the default format at that time.

Mind you, this was even before the Center for Learning Innovation was created. I remember when Dave Leitzel showed me how to do what I wanted to do in Blackboard. But I would have to create it if I wanted it a customized way.

4. So there was a quick feedback loop back then, with just as quick revisions made. The first cohort knew they were guinea pigs, but there was a certain excitement at being the first cohort that I think made up for it. Everyone had the sense that they were part of something very exciting and innovative. Do you all agree?

The first convocation service was packed in the commons of the student center for that August 2009 start. Keith Drury preached the sermon, "From Great to Good." Chip led us through a litany I had created that stitched together different Bible verses. We took communion by intinction. We tried to come up with a song that might become the Seminary song, something like "And Can It Be" is at Asbury.

The fact that I can't remember what it was indicates that it didn't stick. :-)

Epilog: Good News versus Soterian

It seemed appropriate to sit back and reflect a little after finishing Scot McKnight's book, King Jesus Gospel.  I had a sense of where I thought Scot would go with the book and in my mind he went half there.  I suppose it has a lot to do with the question he was posing.  What would a fuller sense of the gospel look like in contrast to what happens in an awful lot of American churches?

His answer is that the meaning of "gospel" is something much bigger than what he calls a "soterian" approach.  Since he has invented the word, it is completely appropriate.  A "soterian," as he defines it, is someone whose overwhelming focus is on getting people "saved."  He has made it clear elsewhere that he doesn't actually think the word "salvation" is this narrow in the NT.  What he is targeting is practices associated with a very narrow way of thinking about salvation.

To put it in my own way (which is much the same as Scot's), the gospel is, in the first instance, the good news about the inaugurated kingship of Jesus and the kingdom of God that he inaugurates.  I'm not too sure why this is so controversial in some circles.  People like Scot and Wright might debate some of the details, but it really isn't debatable.  End of story.

This original sense of the gospel is not "me" focused.  It doesn't center on me getting saved.  It is much bigger, much more important than me and my individual salvation.  I think what's really bugging McKnight (and Tom Wright before him) is the all-too-typical, shallow, self-centered focus of so much American Christianity, as if the center of the good news is me and what's in it for me.

Further, Scot is rightly concerned that so many Christians act like the whole deal is done once they "say the magic words."  There are many who believe in eternal security and go on to take very seriously the lordship of Jesus for the rest of their lives.  And there are some who act like once they've read the words on the card, they're done.  Eternal oops there.

Here are two further thoughts upon reflection:
1. God's creational good news
Scot says in the early chapters that the gospel relates to the "Story of Jesus" part of the overall Christian story.  I've hinted before that he is doing a dance between wanting to define words the way the NT does and doing theology, which almost always has to move beyond the specific words of specific biblical authors to formulate an integrated perspective.

The word "missional" does some of that.  I wonder what this book would have looked like if Scot had posed the question "missional versus soterian."  Then it would have more easily looked at a bigger version of the story.  It would have allowed us to talk not only of good news for humanity but about good news for the creation as well.  The NT doesn't actually use the word "gospel" in this way, but it is a valid theological broadening of the implications of the way the NT uses the word "gospel."

Missional has been somewhat of a buzz word, but it still seems to narrow God's purposes for the world to the area of saving.  I personally believe that beauty remains in the world, even after the Fall.  I find it hard to believe that every last bit of goodness flew out of the creation with Adam's sin, and the Bible certainly does not require us to believe that.

God thus has intentions for the creation that do not involve human beings and that are in addition to saving it.  The biggest story we can comprehend is the "creational" story.  I knew a student who pretty much lost his faith traveling the world after college (I've lost track of him).  It seems to me there is a faith crisis waiting to happen if we must limit God's walk with the world to the incredibly narrow story of Israel and story of the church.

I don't think most people have a sense of how few people God must care about if this is it.  We are so surrounded by Christianity that it is easy to assume that most people should know better.  Take a few months and travel through Asia.  Look at a map and compare the size of Judah to the rest of the ancient world.  Then read the book of Jonah. There is at least a potential difference between what Christ has done for the world and what the world knows about Christ.

2. A full switch to what God has done
I came to an ironic realization this morning.  In his chapter on salvation taking over the gospel, Scot pinpoints the Reformation as the point where salvation started on a trajectory to become more important than the gospel.  He says there that it did not happen at once--not with Luther and Calvin--but that it took a while.  It occurred to me where it most took place--with the Anabaptists!

It is the Anabaptist tradition that has been most influential on American Christianity and it is the Anabaptist tradition that has most focused on an event of faith once a person has reached an age of understanding.  With deep respect, I believe this is why I ended the book feeling like it had only gone half way.  As long as we are so focused on this event as the be-all-and-end-all of salvation, we will still ultimately be soterians.

Wesley was of course influenced by the Anabaptist tradition.  But we are not hindered as Wesleyans from recognizing that for Paul, the most important moment of justification and salvation is the final one.  Paul rarely--if even once--uses the word "salvation" in relation to anything but the final escape from God's judgment.  Ephesians 2:8 is the only possible exception I can think of, and even it may speak proleptically (poetically speaking of something that is still to happen but is so certain to happen that we can speak of it as already happened).

It is true that Paul predominantly speaks of justification in the past tense.  We can be justified now and this is incredibly important.  BUT the most important thing is that we are justified when we stand in the judgment.  "It is not the hearers of the law who are righteous in God's sight, but the doers of the law will be justified" (Rom. 2:13).  More important is the "day of wrath, when God's righteous judgment will be revealed.  For he will repay according to each one's deeds" (Rom. 2:5-6).  And this includes believers: "the work of each builder will become visible, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each has done" (1 Cor. 3:13).

Paul's theology was not focused on a justification event in mid-life.  I personally don't think justification was the centerpiece of his theology overall--it was an issue that stood at the center of his debates with Judaizing believers and thus it comes up in Galatians and Romans.  I believe the central focus of Paul's preaching was the cross and what Christ had done.

But even when Paul argued over justification, his concern was with ultimate justification before God, not with a mid-life crisis event.  Certainly we should by all means seek God's justification ASAP.  We can and should be justified now.  But Paul was not arguing over the timing.  He was arguing over the basis.

The role of Acts in our thinking is significant here.  Scot takes the pattern "repent, believe, be baptized" as normative.  An important question is the context of Acts.  For example, these conversions are "first wave."  They refer to places where the tsunami of the gospel is reaching for the first time.  How might the process look different in a place where the wave is retreating?  It is an unexamined assumption that it would look exactly the same.

Even more crucial is the most important element of Acts' equation and one I find that an awful lot of people miss, namely, the Holy Spirit.  Repentance is incredibly important.  Faith is incredibly important.  Baptism is very significant.  But the sine qua non, the most crucial ingredient of all, is the Holy Spirit.  And here we have the precedent of John the Baptist to know that a child can have the Spirit long before they understand the gospel.  These are at least things worth some reflection.

I'll end with a reflection my colleague Keith Drury once made.  "There is no point in my life," he concluded, "at which I would have gone to hell."  His reasoning was thus, put in my own words.

"When I was a child, I did not know what it meant to have faith in God or confess Jesus as Lord.  If I had died at that point or if Christ had returned, God would have accepted me.  The first time I half way understood my need for Christ, I accepted his death for me.  I affirmed him as my king.  If I had died then or Christ had returned, God would have accepted me.  Although I have sinned since then, I have also confessed my sins without undue delay and asked God for forgiveness.  I do not believe there has ever been a time since I confessed Jesus as Lord that God would not have received me if I had died or if Christ had returned."

I could muse more, but I'll stop there (I'll put in a shameless plug for my life reflections on Romans book if you want more ;-). Let me only say that we, and Wesleyans in particular, should do some significant reflection before we conclude the "soterian" path within broader evangelicalism is the right one for us.

Missional Church

I've been giving some of my wishes for the MDIV curriculum at Wesley.

Pastor, Church, and World
Cultural Contexts of Ministry
Bible as Scripture
Introduction to Theology

Here are some of my dreams for the Missional Church course, the first of 6 praxis courses in our curriculum.  The course covers four broad domains: evangelism, service, church multiplication, and global missions.  As the name of the course suggests, it is oriented around becoming part of the mission of God more than an "attractional" philosophy oriented around getting people to my church.  To be missional is to be oriented around God's mission in the world through the church rather than around the narrow interests of my church.  Find out what God is doing in your area and get on board.

Of course there is a balance here, like the balance between giving to others and having healthy boundaries.  I shouldn't worry if someone is better fed at another church than mine.  But if my church can do something great through God's grace, it probably should do it, even if it draws people from other churches.

Some of my passions for this course are that it demolish some of the (thoroughly unwesleyan) misconceptions of twentieth century fundamentalism. For example, social justice is a core biblical value, found in the Law, the Prophets, the Writings, the Gospels and Acts, and the Letters.  And the problem with the social gospel of the early twentieth century was not its interest in helping those in need--this was not the part of the social gospel that was bad.  Rather, its problem was that this was all it had left of Christianity.  It had lost its faith in Christ and God and it's social message was all that was left, rather than the social message being contrary to faith.

This course should embody the current emphasis of the Wesleyan Church on church planting and multiplying.  My colleague Bob Whitesel tells me that "internal" church plants are generally more successful than external ones, that plants do better when they remain in connection to a mother church.  The options have multiplied, as venued ministry becomes more and more common.  These are not just about attracting more people but are a sign of flourishing.

The scene of global missions has changed dramatically.  For one thing, North America is not the only one doing the sending these days.  Christianity is shifting to the two-thirds world. Short term mission trips need to be carefully conceptualized.  Usually, we have little if anything spiritual to contribute, but we can contribute our resources on every level.  A successful trip, in my mind, is one in which we are changed and our love for one another is clear.  Death, however, to the paternalistic mission trip.

Criteria of Missional Faithfulness

Lois Barrett in Treasure in Clay Jars has 8 criteria for taking the missional temperature of a church.  I thought I'd summarize them in my own language:


1. Missionary Vocation: Does your congregation define success in terms of its faithfulness to Christ, not it terms of its numbers?

2. Missional Formation: Is your congregation eager to learn what it means to be a follower of Jesus? 

3. Missional Courage: To what extent is the church willing to take risks for the sake of the gospel?

4. Missional Love: Does your congregation love one another as Christ loved the church?

5. Missional Worship: Is worship is the central act of your faith community and does it lead your people to testify to the gospel?

6. Missional Dependency: Does your community confess its dependency on the Holy Spirit in prayer? 

7. Missional Agency: Does your congregation see itself as an agent to bring the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven?

8. Missional Authority: Does the Holy Spirit work through the leadership of your church so that the congregation has a missional mentality?

Other Hermeneutic Than Missional?

In a Missional Church class this week we asked the question, is there another hermeneutic other than a missional one? It seems to be something we would all agree with, namely, that the Bible should be read as the story of God acting toward the redemption of humanity and the world.

We did come up with two other hermeneutics, however. The first I called a "principle-oriented" or "propositional" hermeneutic. It engages individual texts in Scripture looking for a principle in each text that is then reapplied to today.

A second might be a "kingship" or maybe "glory of God" hermeneutic. John Piper, for example, sees God setting up the Fall and the partial election of some humanity. Somehow the word "missional" doesn't seem quite appropriate here either because the goal is not really to save the world but for God to demonstrate his own glory.

Can anyone think of another hermeneutic than these?

Government, Foreign Assistance, Church

I was privileged to sit in on a conference at Wheaton these past two days called "Government, Foreign Assistance, and God's Mission in the World." A "Wheaton Declaration" will come out of it after a couple revision loops. One paragraph of the first draft looked to be a particularly good summary:

"The extraordinary power of the United States and the daily impact of the United States on the world's poor requires special vigilance on the part of American Christian citizens as to the effects of the US role and policies and assistance programs. Our goal should be to bend the power of the United States toward a maximally effective impact on the world's poor"

The relationship between churches and the government on these sorts of issues is a thorny one, in my opinion, and I am much more comfortable personally with Christian groups lobbying the government than denominations per se, especially when it comes to specific policies. Nevertheless, I may post some thoughts in relation to the conference over the next few days.

Probably the first thing that struck me was the assumption of values. I think almost everyone at the conference accepted the value of helping the poor. One early caveat was on effective assistance. There was a strong distinction made between aid and development. Aid is short term in a time of crisis (e.g., Haiti). Development is about empowering people to support themselves eventually.

But I sat there wondering whether even most American Christians are on board with the basic value that it is our duty as Christians to help those in need. Before we can ever get to the question of the government, we have to make sure Christians can see that helping those in need is a fundamental Christian value.

Scholarship Starters: Variations in Missional Hermeneutics

We're about half way through the first online week of an MDIV course called the Missional Church. Dr. Charles Arn is the professor of record and has really invested an incredible amount of time getting ready for this course. He's gone from never having taught an online course to becoming a Jedi master at Blackboard who runs circles around me, not to mention that he must have read every drop of missional literature, online and on book this summer, just to be all over it... and he is.

But I am the designated Bible professor for the course, which means that I will drop in a number of times to facilitate specific Bible discussions. These are really team taught courses. Bud Bence and Chris Bounds will be dropping in similarly to lead church history and theology discussions.

The discussions I'm facilitating this week have to do with Christopher Wright's book, The Mission of God. You can read my review here. And it has occurred to me that there really will be significant differences in the way one understands the Bible as the mission of God depending on what theological tradition you come from.

I am a bad person, so I have not kept up with all the excellent work Brian Russell of Asbury Florida has been doing on missional hermeneutics. I think he has a book soon coming out soon.

Anyway, I've started a new tag category. I have ideas for books and articles all the time. But I'm busy now with a seminary and I'm not like Joel Green or Ben Witherington, who have everything that's ever been published on the tip of their brain. The long and short of it is that writing articles takes time and a lot of work, and it's hard to find the time when you're busy doing other things that are more pressing.

So the new category is "scholarship starters," books and articles I could research and write if I had a special chamber I could go into where time stood still and you didn't need sleep. But since that doesn't exist and no one has asked me, I'll throw out the idea for someone else to write. I suppose I've already thrown out several of these from time to time, a call for some Wesleyan-Arminian to write an American church history book that is seriously critical of how Mark Noll treats fundamentalism, someone to write an American church history book backward, in a kind of "find your tradition" moving back in time kind of way.

Today's is for someone to point out the differences between the way a missional hermeneutic plays out for a Wesleyan-Arminian in contrast to a hard core Reformed person. Right now I seem up to my ears in Fuller books and Reformed books, because everyone in mission and evangelism these last forty years seems to have come from these places and traditions. I've dabbled in everything from Van Engen to Bobby Clinton. They are worthy of great praise and kudos!

But there are important distinctions that need to be brought out in a Wesleyan-Arminian context, even though all are welcome to chose. For example, I strongly disagree with the feel I get from Clinton that everything that happens to me is God trying to make me into something. I don't believe that everything that happens to me happens for a reason, like God is some divine micro-manager.

And here's a big difference that someone should write on. The mission of God in creation for a Wesleyan is not to create a world God will later redeem. The mission of God in creation for a Wesleyan-Arminian is to create a world of beauty where God's creatures can thrive and excel with humanity as a kind of steward. The mission to save the world is thus a back up plan, not always the plan. It was for Adam posse non peccare, possible not to sin.

The Reformed and Fuller literature tends to assume an extremely deterministic perspective. I deliberately decided not to go with Glasser, Van Engen, and Gilliland's Announcing the Kingdom, as well as Leslie Newbiggen's The Open Secret in part for this reason. There is much good in these books, but they are not Wesleyan-Arminian in approach.

There's nothing wrong with Reformed theology. But it will take some work for the Wesleyan-Arminian tradition to create a literature that will provide a genuine alternative. I fear that, as the down side to a tradition that is more heart focused, the Arminian voice has largely been absent from the table. And since these other sources are so close to our way of thinking, many of our leaders have absorbed some foreign ideas they would not have to.

So have at it, if anyone is interested...

A Missional Hermeneutic: The Mission of God

What is missional?
What is a missional church? Treasure in Clay Jars puts it well when it says, "Missional churches see themselves not so much sending as being sent." [1] Churches used to have a part of their overall life they called "missions." It was the part of the church's life where they sent people out to try to see souls "saved." And, indeed, it was not about sending people across the street or even to the next town. Missions was about sending people overseas, to evangelize those in far away lands.

The missional shift that has taken place this last decade is not just the realization that the person next door might not believe in Christ. [2] It is a huge step back to see the big picture--God's big picture. It does not ask, "What mission do I/we need to send others on?" It is much bigger than that. It is not even just, "What is my/our mission?" It is much bigger than that. It is not even as big as "What is the Church's mission?"

Missional thinking is thinking that steps way back for the biggest picture of all--at least the biggest picture we finite humans can grasp. Missional thinking asks, "What sort of mission is God on in the world?" What is God's plan not just for me, not just for us, not just for the Church, but for the entirety of the universe? Why did God create the world and where is it all headed? The "mission of God" is about the story of God's walk with the creation from beginning to end, and not just about the salvation of us humans, but God's redemption of the world as well.


The Inevitability of a Hermeneutic

One of the must reads of this shift to missional thinking is Christopher J. H. Wright's The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative. [3] One of Wright's main purposes is to show that "the mission of God provides a fruitful hermeneutical framework within which to read the whole Bible." [4] A "hermeneutic" is a way of interpreting something. Everyone has one whether they realize it or not. Some of the most dangerous Bible readers are those who don't know they have one, the ones that assume they just read the Bible and do what it says.

The person who starts down the path of reading the books of the Bible on their own terms soon runs into some interesting issues he or she may not have anticipated. For example, most of us who are Christians read and value the Bible because we believe it to be God's word, God's word to us today. We thus eagerly read the Bible to hear God's living voice, giving us the answers to our life's questions. Perhaps we take a course in Bible study.

Ironically, this drive of ours to listen to the Bible and to hear what it has to say may lead us directly into a conundrum. We are reading, say, Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. We notice that this chap named Paul is writing it. Perhaps we think for a moment. Now who was this Paul and when did he live? The answer to the question is not particularly controversial. He lived some two thousand years ago. So God is speaking to me through the words of a man who has been dead for some time now.

But wait. This letter does not say it was written to me. Indeed, it quite plainly says it was written to a group of people who lived in a place called Corinth. And I have assumed it is a letter. This would seem a fairly good suggestion, since this Paul chap seems to be responding to a letter himself (1 Cor. 7:1). Again, where was this Corinth place? The answer to the question is not particularly controversial. It was a fairly large ancient city in Greece, situated in the Mediterranean Sea.

The more I pursue the original location of this letter in time and space, the more distance I may feel between myself and this ancient letter. I will discover that the meaning of actions in one culture may very easily differ from the meaning of actions in another. When Paul wrote the Corinthians, Romans, Thessalonians, and so forth with behavioral instructions, the meaning of those actions surely had much to do with those contexts such that even if I were to mimic the actions, I would not be doing the same thing.

An amusing example is the old Levitical instruction not to boil the kid in the milk of the mother goat (Exod. 34:26; Deut. 14:21). Even to this day in Israel, you cannot eat milk and meat in the same meal or serve it under the same roof because of the longstanding Jewish application of this verse. The reason for the original prohibition is not entirely clear, although it has often been suggested that it had something to do with the religion of the Canaanites who surrounded Israel. What it likely was not about, is some arbitrary and inexplicable desire on God's part to keep a person from drinking milk with eggs at breakfast.

Whenever we have this sort of puzzled reaction to the Bible, we are very likely reading stories or instruction whose most direct meaning is largely locked away in its ancient context. What? A woman should have authority on her head because of the angels (1 Cor. 11:10)? What does that mean? What? Jacob put speckled rods in front of sheep having sex so they would have spotted offspring (Gen. 30:37-43)? What does that mean? What? Women will be saved from the transgression of Eve through childbearing if they live in continued faith, love, and holiness (1 Tim. 2:15)? What does that mean?

Most Christian readers never pursue the contextual reading of the Bible far enough to have a crisis. Although most of us are hardly aware of it, we have a way of reading the Bible as a single story with a single plot, a "hermeneutic" that goes back to Bible times. God created the world good, but the first human Adam disobeyed God and set the world at odds with God in sin. But God set to work at reconciling the world, first by calling Abraham, who became a model of faith. Then he called Israel, Abraham's descendants, with the goal of ultimately bringing salvation to the whole world through them.

Then God came to earth in person as Jesus, a child of Israel. He died on the cross to make cosmic reconciliation possible. God raised him from the dead and, in time, he will return to earth to redeem the creation fully and to raise the dead to life, some to eternal joy and others to eternal condemnation. And thus we read the Bible as a single story with an overall plot that binds all the individual pieces together.

Something like the above two paragraphs is indeed the Christian way to read the Bible, although no doubt different Christian groups would write the two paragraphs slightly differently. The myriad variety of Christian churches each have their own spins and emphases, even though the cast of characters and basic storyline remains the same. One of the things that distinguishes one Protestant group from another is the specific "glue" used to connect the story pieces to each other.

But for some, the deeper exploration of reading the books of the Bible on their own terms begins to pull against this unified story. Indeed, it is one reason seminarians sometimes find the Bible begin to lose some of its living quality for them, which ironically was one of the reasons they went to seminary in the first place. For example, Adam plays a very important part in the Christian story. But when a person reads the Old Testament on its own terms, Adam plays almost no role at all. He is mentioned in the second and third chapters of Genesis, and thereafter is not mentioned again as a person. The role of Adam in the Christian story does not come from his role on the Old Testament's own terms.

The virgin birth is similar in the Christian reading of the New Testament. It appears in Matthew 1 and Luke 2, but then plays no role in the thought of the rest of the New Testament nor even in the rest of Matthew and Luke. The significance of the virgin birth in the Christian story thus does not come from its role on the New Testament's own terms.

Learning to read the books of the Bible in context is not something to try to avoid, although this has been the initial reaction of many--either to fight context or flee it. Twentieth century fundamentalism and, to a lesser extent, evangelicalism, tried to make the most likely original meanings of the books of the Bible go away when they seemed to come into conflict with reading the Bible as Christian Scripture. Sophisticated--and sometimes not so sophisticated scholarship was developed as a coping mechanism to deal with the so called "higher criticism" that rose in the late 1800's.

Sure, Genesis never says that Moses is its author. Reading Genesis on its own terms would not lead a person to this conclusion, nor would reading Exodus through Deuteronomy on their own terms, since they talk about Moses. They do not read as the voice of Moses narrating the story. But for some it seemed important to find a way to defend Mosaic authorship for the sake of the story's unity. Sure, the varying accounts of the four gospels at times seem difficult to reconcile historically. But intellectuals in the fundamentalist tradition found ingenious ways to deny what seemed an unavoidable conclusion to others, sometimes suggesting amusing scenarios to reconcile minute details. And the suggested harmonization often gave us a storyline that differed from the four gospels far more than any of them actually differ from each other!

But the "liberal" conclusion was wrong as well. The liberal lost faith in the possibility that the Bible might present a unified story and that this story might be the Christian story. This person may at times have understood better what it means to read the individual books of the Bible in context, indeed, may in some cases have been more "honest" with the evidence in his or her interpretations. But the unfortunate consequence was that the meaning of the Bible's books ended up locked up forever in the ancient near east or in the Mediterranean world. The meaning of each biblical text became so particular, so foreign to our world, that it became irrelevant, certainly not God's living word for us today.

The way forward, however, was neither to deny the insights of reading in context (as the fundamentalists) nor to consider the unity of Scripture no longer viable (the liberals). The way forward has proved to be two-fold, and the second way has only emerged clearly in recent days. The first way was recognized by some who managed to keep their faith without running away from the genuine insights of a historical approach to the Bible. For example, Oscar Cullmann and others read the Bible in terms of "salvation history," where the story of salvation is not only a story in the Bible's literature but the story of God moving through history including the events of writing the books of the Bible. [5]

Thus God's story is not merely Adam to Abraham to Moses, in Genesis and Exodus. But God inspired the writing of Genesis and Exodus as moments in the history of salvation. It is the paradigm shift that takes place when one begins to see how to read the books of the Bible in context. You see the books of the Bible themselves as key events in the story even moreso than the characters and statements in those books. The books of the Bible thus become the story of God moving humanity forward toward a better understanding of Him in history, progressively, making the message take on flesh.

The "pre-modern" reader who cannot yet read the Bible in context goes through the books of the New Testament in their literary order--Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. This person has a tendency to think the gospels were written first because they are about Jesus. Paul's books are taken in the order they appear in the New Testament.

The contextual reader sees God walking with the early church through a series of revelatory events. Paul's writings were written first. 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians are early. But we see God walking with Paul into Philippians and Romans, whose teaching seems somehow to reflect a minister nearing the end of a decades long ministry. The gospels were some of the latest writings of the New Testament, especially John. And they reflect a whole generation or two's reflection on Jesus, his teaching, his ministry.

The writing of each of these books was a moment in a flow of revelation that has surely been underway since the creation. The same is true of the Old Testament. Abraham probably understood so little of what we understand that we would scarcely recognize him if we were to meet him. Moses understood a little more, and Isaiah still more. But we may, with 2000 years of God walking with the Church, understand things about the Trinity that the apostle Paul would not have clearly seen. Here is the contextual way to see the unity of the books of the Bible as inspired--inspired within the story of salvation's history.

But postmodern attention to the flexibility of the meaning of texts has also made it possible to return to reading the Bible as a single book once again, just as Christians did before the crisis of historical criticism. Before the modern era forced us to read the Bible in context--or led us to run away from it into separatist enclaves--Christians read the Bible as a single story from creation to final restoration. They read the text of the Bible as a single piece of inspired literature with a single meaning. They placed themselves within that single story they read into the Bible. Ironically, it was the Protestant Reformation's rejection of non-literal interpretation that most set us on a trajectory away from such a unified reading. A unified reading of this sort requires us to de-emphasize the original contexts of each book in deference to a unified perspective we inevitably have to provide as readers.

Paul does not tell us how his "justification by faith" fits with James' "justification by works," nor does James tell us. We are forced to glue them together. The fundamentalist pretends that the unity of these sorts of diverse texts is somehow in the Bible, but it is not. These were separate documents. The gluing together is entirely a function of us as readers looking on. A process of unifying is required to fit the teaching of all the books together, and it is inevitably something we have to do because the Bible itself does not tell us how to do it.

And that is okay. Indeed, it is more than okay. It is the way Christians since before the New Testament have, by the Holy Spirit, found the unified story of the Bible. It is the way the Church, the body of Christ universal, has always read the books of the Bible. It does not matter that it is a slightly different way of reading the books than reading them in context. It is the Christian way of reading the texts.

A Missional Hermeneutic
This discussion may seem tangential to reading the Bible as the mission of God, but it is essential if a person is to appreciate the depth and profundity of what we mean by a "missional hermeneutic." Postmodernism has enabled us to loosen the words of the Bible from their original contexts enough so that we can once again read it as a single story of God creating and redeeming the world. We are currently witnessing the thriving of what is called a "theological hermeneutic" that can once again justify reading the Bible as a single book with a single story even while recognizing the Bible is a collection of books, plural, written in multiple languages to address multiple contexts.

But many readers have simply taken this climate as an excuse to continue reading the Bible in ignorance, never to confront the question of what these texts actually meant in the first moment of inspiration. True, it is most important that we read the Bible as Christians and thus that we hear in the words of the Bible the unified voice of God to us today. But the history of faith crisis will only postpone and reassert itself in the next generation if we pretend that the crisis of context never took place. The challenges of higher criticism were not all the vain attacks of the faithless. Many of them had real substance, and if we cannot proceed with faith without facing them, then we are begging the faith of our children to fail.

Christopher Wright puts it this way, "a missional hermeneutic must include at least this recognition--the multiplicity of perspectives and contexts from which and within which people read the biblical texts." [6] A deep missional hermeneutic will not just read the whole Bible as the single story of God working out His mission for the world, although certainly this will be the centerpiece of a missional hermeneutic. But a missional hermeneutic with depth will recognize, as Wright puts it, that the "writings that now comprise our Bible are themselves the product of and witness to the ultimate mission of God." [7] "[T]he Bible itself is in so many ways a missional phenomenon in itself." [8]

Here is how Wright summarizes a missional hermeneutic:

"A missional hermeneutic, then, is not content simply to call for obedience to the Great Commission (though it will assuredly include that as a matter of nonnegotiable importance), nor even to reflect on the missional implications of the Great Commandment. For behind both it will find the Great Communication--the revelation of the identity of God, of God's action in the world and God's saving purpose for all creation. And for the fullness of this communication we need the whole Bible in all its parts and genres, for God has given us no less." [9]

Wright closes his introductory chapters with the following elements of the story of God on His mission. These headings provide us with a fruitful way to integrate the biblical material into a single, Christian, coherent storyline of salvation's history:

1. God with a mission
God created the universe for a purpose. He is the center of the story, not us. We are small players in a story that is, from beginning to end, about God, not us. The driving force of the plot is the mission of God.

2. Humanity with a mission
Christians understand God to have created a good world that Adam's sin put into crisis, however we conceptualize that sin. One key feature of a missional emphasis is the recognition that God's business is bigger than us. God may have put us above all things in the creation, but He didn't expect us to be "rulers" who couldn't care less about those over whom He placed us. A missional hermeneutic will take concern for the creation as something over which God placed us as stewards.

3. Israel with a mission
The Old Testament is the first part of the story. If we are to take Christianity seriously, then we have to see Act 1 as a true part of the story, where God used one nation out of all the earth to begin the slow process of bringing the whole universe back to Him.

4. Jesus with a mission
Jesus' mission spans Act 1 and Act 2. He comes to earth and ministered to the smallest part of humanity, the back hills of Galilee, truly insignificant by any human reckoning. But by the time he is done, he has died to bring the cosmos back into order and has risen from the dead as the first installment of a victory over the power of death that will be universal.

5. The Church with a mission
This is the part of the story that we are currently in, and the New Testament inaugurates this phase with the Day of Pentecost, placing us in the age of the Spirit. When this phase comes to a close, Christ will come again and bring about the decisive denouement of the plot.

Conclusion
These are the elements of a missional hermeneutic. A missional hermeneutic will not only read the whole Bible as the single story of God's mission to create and restore a world in a book. It will see the books of the Bible themselves as moments in God's mission to restore a fallen world in history. In both cases, the mission of God provides an appropriate unifying principle by which to see the Bible as a whole.

A story, by its very nature, has a beginning, a middle, and an end. In the beginning of a story, a goal is unfulfilled. Sometimes we do not know how the situation comes about. In the story of Cinderella, for example, we never learn how Cinderella came to be living with her step-mother without her father. But every story has in its origins a problem situation of some kind. It is this problem that the middle part of the story works to overcome. And if the story has a happy ending, the end will see that goal--or some related goal--accomplished.

When we read the Bible through the lens of the mission of God, the goal of the story was for God to create a good world, a world over which humanity would serve as God's steward and representative. The problem at the beginning of the story is that humanity's sin has separated it from God and spoiled the creation. The rest of the story, particularly as found in the Bible, is the working toward a solution, a solution that finds its double climax in the death/resurrection and then second coming of Christ. This plotline of the mission of God to redeem humanity and creation, provides the most appropriate Christian hermeneutic through which to read the texts of the Bible.

[1] Lois Barrett et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), x.

[2] None of this talk of shifts is to say that we are saying something unknown in previous generations. Indeed, these "momentous" shifts are often where the quiet, holy folk in the pew have been all along. And they have patiently watched energetic speakers pontificate to some extreme or another, themselves overreacting to the same speakers in the generation right before them. Meanwhile, the quiet, wise souls in the pew smile and wait for the next circus clown to come through their church, overreacting yet again to the previous speaker with the latest new thing.

[3] (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2006).

[4] Mission of God, 26. A slightly earlier book with a missional hermeneutic was Announcing the Kingdom: The Story of God's Mission in the Bible, by Arthur E. Glasser with Charles Van Engen, Bean S. Gilliland, and Shawn B. Redford (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003). Its authors are Fuller professors and come at God's story from somewhat of a Calvinist perspective.

[5] Christ and Time (London: SCM, 1962).

[6] Mission of God, 39.

[7] Mission of God, 48.

[8] Mission of God, 50.

[9] Mission of God, 60-61.

After Missional, What?

As a quick pulse through the blogging system, what do you think is missing from an approach to the church, hermeneutics, eschatology, etc. that subsumes everything under the heading of missional?

I agree we can capture an aweful lot. It gives us God's purpose in creation and eventual restoration. It subsumes the movement of God's people through time. Here's my question. Christianity is not just about doing. A legitimate part of Christian identity is being in the world.

Will we see a counteremphasis on Christian being after the missional emphasis has had its run?

Missional Buzz Books?

Let's say I was going to read a different book every week for the next 20 weeks trying to get an overall and yet balanced sense of a missional church that reaches out, assimilates in, is interested in true conversion and evangelizes, mobilizes for mission, multiplies, does traditional missions, and serves the community and the world...

In short, those of you who are missional experts, what am I missing that is oh so obvious???

1. The Shape of Things to Come, Hirsch, Frost
2. The Missional Church, by Guder and friends
3. Treasure in Clay Jars: Patterns in Missional Faithfulness, Lois Barrett
4. Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, Resurrection and the Mission of the Church, Tom Wright
5. The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission, Lesslie Newbigen
6. The Mission of God, Christopher Wright
7. Announcing the Kingdom: The Story of God’s Mission in the Bible, by Glasser, Van Engen, Gilliland
8. Emerging Churches Gibbs, Bolger
9. The Prophetic Imagination, Bruggemann
10. The Politics of Jesus, Yoder
11. Exclusion and Embrace, Miroslav Volf
12. They Like Jesus but Not the Church, Dan Kimball
13. Irresistible Revolution, Shane Claiborne
14. Breaking the Missional Code, Stetzer and Putman
15. Surprising Insights from the Unchurched, Thom Rainer
16. The Forgotten Ways, Hirsh
17. The Prodigal God, Keller
18. The Missional Leader, Roxburgh
19. God's Missionary People, Van Engen
20. Generous Orthodoxy, McClaren

Missional Hermeneutics

Both Brian Russell of Asbury Orlando and IWU's own Steve Lennox, not to mention the prolific Scot McKnight and the lovely Mission of God by Christopher Wright, have been knocking at the door of my mind on missional thinking. (Steve will have to read on to have any clue what I'm talking about :-) "Missional" is a big buzz word right now. IWU's MDIV has actually named a 6 hour course "Missional Christianity," which includes not only the traditional topic of evangelism, but church "multiplication" (another buzzword) and Christian service, which relates to the growing return of the church to its mission to the poor and needy.

The idea that the church is missional does not seem controversial to me, that one of its principal duties is to go as ambassadors of reconciliation between God and the world in all its aspects (not just spiritual but social, economic, psychological, etc...). But Brian asked me today what I thought about a missional hermeneutic. To my shame I admitted to myself that I just haven't been getting the big picture of the missional movement or how its current flavor might differ from the missions, evangelism, and church growth movements of the past, other than the welcome addition of service.

So I grabbed Wright's Mission of God off the shelf to try to figure out what a missional hermeneutic might be and I think something clicked. Here's what it was:

The thing that, for Christians, pulls the Bible into a single book is not really a creed. Protestants have often had a tendency to reduce the Bible to a set of propositions, which is why we love Paul's letters and sometimes ignore the Gospels. Calvinist evangelical/fundamentalist institutions like Wheaton or Westminster Theological Seminary formulate their identities by way of lists of desicated beliefs. My strong hunch is that these cognitive elements are way more important to belonging at these institutions than personal piety or godliness.

But at least half of the Bible is narrative, and virtually none of the remaining material appears in the form of philosophically absolute propositions. The drive to encapsulate the Bible in propositional form is understandable, but clearly there is a huge gap between any set of such propositions and the biblical texts themselves. Anyone who knows me knows that I do not reject the "rule of faith," by which I understand the basic propositional beliefs held by the consensus of Christians throughout the ages.

But as I think Brian has realized long before me, and as Lennox has been hinting at as he alludes to his forthcoming book on the story of God (that he needs a sabbatical to write, say, Spring of '11), Christians don't join the individual pieces of the Bible together so much by way of propositions. We join the individual, distinct books of the Bible together into an overarching narrative, into God's story. We do this just as the Christians of the ages have.

I looked at this dimension to Hebrews' use of Scripture in a forthcoming chapter in a collection of essays from the 2006 St. Andrews Conference on Hebrews and Theology. Pre-modern use of Scripture both places ourselves as readers in the story of the text while at the same time placing the text in the story of history. So we like the New Testament authors are awaiting the second coming in the same age as they were--we are part of the story in Luke 21. But Genesis is in the overarching story of salvation's history as well.

Most of us do not notice that this overarching story is as much a Christian as a biblical creation. Nothing about Leviticus requires us to consider Hebrews as an appropriate later "chapter" in the story. As Christians, we take cues from the New Testament and the later church on how to situate the books of the Jewish Bible within the story. Paul's understanding of Genesis goes well beyond anything Genesis requires, and most of us read Paul reading Genesis through the eyes of Augustine.

So I think I might now understand what a missional hermeneutic might be--or at least the way in which I might conceptualize and embrace one. Far more than a Christian propositional framework for reading Scripture, the Christian way of reading Scripture reads it as the story of God moving in history, from creation to ultimate redemption. Like most stories, this story has a direction and an appropriate denouement.

God had a reason to create, a purpose for the creation. The driving point of any story is an unfufilled goal or purpose. The story of God in history is the story of God's mission to redeem, to reclaim, to reconcile the world to Himself. The principal moment in the story and the turning point in the mission is the incarnation, resurrection, and exaltation of Jesus Christ. The rest is the working out of those events. God's coming to Israel, God's mission in the church are both part of the mission.

A missional hermeneutic is thus a Christian approach to Scripture that reads the individual texts of the Bible as a part of this story.

This is a Christian reading of these texts together. The "Old" Testament texts do not in any way beg to be read in this way, which is why Judaism can have such a drastically different understanding of God's story than Christians do. And key features of the Christian reading of the New Testament come more from the church than from the Bible. The incarnation, for example, seems to play no appreciable role in the soteriology of the New Testament. I included it above because it is essential to the Christian understanding of the story, not because it plays a major role in the New Testament. The same could be said of the virgin birth.

So thanks Brian for the push! I do not think that mission is the only hermeneutical category for a Christian reading of Scripture, but clearly it is one of the most important, perhaps the most important.