Recapturing the Missionary Nature of the Church
The first shift in thinking that must take place relates to our understanding of the missionary nature of God and the church. We will consider the missionary nature of God, then move to discuss the implications God's nature has on the way we understand the church.
When we think of the attributes of God, we most often think of characteristics such as holiness, sovereignty, wisdom, justice, love, etc. Rarely do we think of God’s missionary nature. But Scripture teaches that God is a missionary God—a sending God.
The missionary nature of God is framed in two primary ways. The first involves the grand narrative of Scripture. When we consider the grand story or meta-narrative of Scripture, we discover it is about God’s redemptive purposes. All the great sections of Scripture, all the great stories of the Bible and all the great doctrines of the biblical faith connect around God’s grand plan and purpose for the whole of creation. Mission is the central theme describing God’s activity throughout all of history to restore creation. The mission of God is what unifies the Bible from creation to new creation. (1)
A second way to recognize God’s missionary nature is to examine the “sending language” throughout the Bible. From God’s sending of Abram in Genesis 12 to the sending of His angel in Revelation 22, literally, hundreds of examples of sending language portray God as a missionary-sending God. In the Old Testament, God is presented as the sovereign Lord who sends in order to express and complete His mission of redemption. The Hebrew verb “to send,” shelach, is found nearly 800 times. While it is most often used in a variety of non-theological sayings and phrases, it is employed more than 200 times with God as the subject of the verb. In other words, it is God who commissions, and it is God who sends.
As just one example, in the book of Exodus, there is a fascinating dialogue surrounding God’s prompting of Moses to confront Pharaoh. God is sending Moses to convince the king of Egypt to release the Israelites from bondage. In six verses, there are five references to sending. The Lord says:
“So now, go I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.” But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” And God said, “I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain.” Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’” God also said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you’” (Exodus 3:10-15).
The prominence of sending language is not only seen in the books of Genesis and Exodus, but throughout all of the historical books, God is a sending God. Throughout the poetic books, God is a sending God. Throughout the prophetic books, God is a sending God. Moreover, when you consider the books of prophecy in the Old Testament, it is easy to see that the prophets were first and foremost people sent by God to participate in His redemptive purposes.
Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of sending in the Old Testament is found in Isaiah 6. In this passage, we catch a glimpse of God’s sending nature in its Trinitarian fullness:
“Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’” I said, “Here am I! Send me!” (Isaiah 6:8).
Later in the book of Isaiah, there is a fascinating passage where the prophet recognizes that God’s Spirit has anointed him to “proclaim good news to the poor” and that he is sent to “bind up the brokenhearted” (61:1). In the larger passage of Isaiah 61:1-3, it is interesting to note that there are no fewer than six acts of redemption that proceed from or are dependent upon, the Hebrew verb “sent” or the phrase “he has sent me.” To emphasize how central the sending theme is, the passage could be rendered this way:
He has sent me, to bind up the brokenhearted,
He has sent me, to proclaim freedom for the captives,
He has sent me, to release from darkness for the prisoners,
He has sent me, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God,
He has sent me, to comfort all who mourn,
He has sent me, to provide for those who grieve in Zion—
He has sent me, to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. (Isaiah 61:1-3)
It is this passage that Jesus applies to His own ministry in Luke 4:18-19 as He claims to be the human fulfillment of Isaiah 61:1-2. It becomes, in a sense, the closest thing to a personal mission statement for Jesus.
Further, in the prophetic books, it is interesting to note that the Old Testament ends with God promising, through the words of the prophet Malachi, to send a special messenger as the forerunner of the Messiah: “I will send my messenger” (Malachi 3:1). Then the New Testament begins with the arrival of that messenger in the person of John the Baptist, described in the Gospels as a man sent by God (John 1:6).
In the New Testament, sending language is found not only in the Gospels but also throughout the book of Acts and each of the Epistles. The most comprehensive collection of sending language, however, is found in the Gospel of John, where the word send or sent is used nearly 60 times. The majority of uses refer to the title of God as “one who sends” and of Jesus as the “one who is sent.” All the way through John’s Gospel, we see God the Father sending the Son. God the Father and the Son sending the Spirit. And God the Father, Son, and Spirit sending the church. In the final climactic-sending passage in John’s Gospel, Jesus makes clear that He is not only sent by the Father, but now He is the sender, as He sends the disciples: “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you” (John 20:21).
With this sentence, Jesus is doing much more than drawing a vague parallel between His mission and ours. Deliberately and precisely, He is making His mission the model for ours. Our understanding of the church’s mission must flow from our understanding of Jesus’ mission as revealed in the Gospels.
Recapturing the Missionary Nature of the Church
Now let's move to consider the importance of understanding the church as a sent, missionary body. If God is a missionary God (and He is!), then we as His people are missionary people. Therefore, the church doesn’t just send missionaries; the church is the missionary. Individually and collectively as the body of Christ, we are a sent, missionary church. We should be sending the people in the church out among the people of the world rather than attempting to attract the people of the world among the people of the church. The reason we start with this crucial distinction as the first paradigm shift is because the vast majority of people in the church today do not think of their congregation in a sending, missionary manner.
Reformation Heritage View
People today understand the church in two primary ways. The first view is what some call the “Reformation heritage” perspective. (2) The point with this understanding of the church is that Protestants have inherited a particular view of the church from the Reformers, which emphasizes the right preaching of the Word, the right administration of the ordinances, and the proper exercise of church discipline.
Historically these have been referred to as the “marks” of the church. While each of the three marks are important aspects of church life, this view has left us with an understanding of the church as a place where certain things happen. In other words, a person goes to church to hear the Bible taught “correctly,” to participate in the Lord’s Supper and baptism and, in some cases, to experience church discipline. Once again, all very good things, but is that the way we want to define the church? Does a place-where-certain-things-happen understanding speak to the real essence and nature of the church?
Contemporary Variation View
The second view is a slight variation on the Reformation heritage definition. This “contemporary variation” view is perhaps the most prevalent way people in America understand the church today—that it is a vendor of religious goods and services. From this perspective, members are viewed as customers for whom religious goods and services are produced. Churchgoers expect the church to provide a wide range of religious services, such as great worship music, preaching, children’s programs, small groups, parenting seminars, and so on.
One of the major issues with both of these views of defining the church is that the church is seen as an institution that exists for the benefit of its members.
The alternative vision of the church is to see it as a people called and sent by God to participate in His redemptive mission for the world. The nature of the church—rooted in the very nature of God—is missionary. Rather than seeing ourselves primarily as a sending body, we must see ourselves as a body that is sent. Of course, the church still gathers, but the difference is that we don’t simply gather for our own sake, but instead for the sake of others, or better yet, for the sake of God’s mission. We come together as a collective body of followers of Jesus to be equipped through prayer, worship, and study and then to be sent out into the world. The church is to be a gathered and scattered people.
Missionary Lesslie Newbigin stated it this way:
The church is the bearer to all the nations of a gospel that announces the kingdom, the reign, and the sovereignty of God … It is not meant to call men and women out of the world into a safe religious enclave but to call them out in order to send them back as agents of God’s kingship.
Why This All Matters
To grasp the importance of understanding the church as missionary, consider the idea of cultural distance. This is a simple missionary tool to help discern just how far a person or a people group is from a meaningful engagement with the gospel. To give you a visual of this idea view the image below.
You will notice there the number scale. Each numeral with the prefix m indicates a significant cultural barrier to the meaningful communication of the gospel. Barriers include such things as language, race, history, worldview, traditions, beliefs, political affiliation, etc. The greater the number of cultural barriers there are, the increased complexity there will be in communicating with another person.
In the book The Forgotten Ways, author Alan Hirsch offers a description of how each section of the scale might look in a local church context:
m0–m1
Those with some concept of Christianity who speak the same language, have similar interests, probably the same nationality, and are from a similar class grouping as you or your church. Most of your friends would probably fit into this bracket.
m1–m2
Here we would include the average non-Christian in our context: A person who has little real awareness of, or interest in, Christianity and is somewhat suspicious of the church. This category might also include those previously offended by a bad experience of church or Christians. Just go to the average local pub/bar or nightclub to encounter these people.
m2–m3
People in this group have absolutely no idea about Christianity. Or they might be part of some ethnic group with different religious impulses or some fringy subculture. This category might include people marginalized by “WASPy” Christianity, for example, the LGBT community. But this group will definitely include people actively antagonistic toward Christianity as they understand or have experienced it.
m3–m4
This group might be inhabited by ethnic and religious groupings such as Muslims or Jews. The fact that they are in the West might ameliorate some of the distance, but just about everything else gets in the way of a meaningful dialogue. They are highly resistant to the gospel. (3)
The reason this discussion is important for this particular lesson is that the church in the U.S. operates almost exclusively in the sphere of m0–m1, as illustrated in the image below.
In other words, too many churches in North America function in a sort of Christian bubble where there are little or no cultural barriers. This is a significant problem because as we have stated previously in this lesson, it is we who are the called, sent missionary people of God, which will sometimes mean we must go to where people are. If we fail to go to the people, then to encounter the gospel meaningfully, they must come to us. This is the inbuilt assumption of the attractional (vendor of religious goods and services) church, and it requires that the nonbeliever do the cross-cultural work to find Jesus, and not us! And make no mistake, for many people coming to a church service involves some serious cross-cultural work. When we ask them to come to us, we are in essence asking them to be the missionaries!
Instead, we must see that we are missionary people, sent to participate with a missionary God, who desires to reconcile all of creation to Himself, for His glory. We, the church, are a chosen people to bless and reach the nations.
Footnote:
Christopher Wright. The Mission of God (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2006).
George Hunsberger, The Church Between Gospel and Culture (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1996), 337.
Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating Apostolic Movements (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Publishing Group, 2016).
