The Mission of God

Ed Stetzer has been tweeting a lot this week on the missional church--from what I gather, his church is starting a new study on Christopher Wright's 2004 tour de force The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2004). This is a great read, and of course a very timely study for the Christian church. Many missiologists see this missional direction of the Bible as the means by which we must interpret Scripture (a missional hermeneutic, in the parlance of the academy). David Wells and Michael Goheen have followed this idea, particularly as stated by Wright:
"In short, a missional hermeneutic proceeds from the assumption that the whole Bible renders to us the story of God's mission through God's people in their engagement with God's world for the sake of the whole of God's creation" (Wright, 122, as quoted by George Hunsberger in "Proposals for a Missional Hermeneutic: Mapping a Conversation," Missiology: An International Review, Vol. XXXIX, no. 3, July 2011).

Christians (that's us) are actors in this grand meta-narrative. We are not the primary actors, of course (which is a tough sell in our hyper-individualistic, self-actualizing, Kardashian-watching times). The producer-director-star is God. We are caught up in the story of God rescuing the world. This is the missio Dei.

I am writing about this for a couple of reasons: 1) I just started work on my doctorate at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan, and have been up to my eyeballs in missiology (George Hunsberger is the director of the DMin program at WTS), idolatry, demons, and spiritual warfare; 2) one of our leaders at Faith Community Church as been teaching a wonderful class on intercessory prayer and we are getting shaken up a little (or a lot); 3) our church is growing, which necessitates some changes, which produces stress and conflict and...warfare; 4) all of this is being mixed up and spread out on the table with the question, "What are we doing here and why?"

One of the idolatries we face in our country is apathy: apathy to this defining story and our part in it. Another idolatry we face is that of comfort: just give me a church that fulfills my spiritual needs (ironically missing that our spiritual need is to live into the story of God's mission as we ourselves are swept up by it). Yet another idolatry (and the last for this posting) is that of confusion. This is not so much an idolatry as it is a work of the "powers and principalities" at work in the world. Most of the time (and here I am speaking for the church), we don't know what we are doing or why we are doing it. We have largely (within the mainline protestant tradition) jettisoned Scripture, instead breathlessly doing hermeneutical acrobatics to somehow accommodate the "spirit of the age" as we desperately try to catch up with the world (on its rapid decent into decay...I can't understand this).

Suffice to say (and here I am borrowing from Stetzer's clever tweets this weekend and doing so with due reverence as his admirer and as one who actually lives in Chicago-land) "We're on a mission from God." Yeah, we're on His mission.