Church and Mission: A Chicken and Egg Question

I had some trouble locating my car in the megachurch parking lot. I wondered if they could add some Disneyesque labeling of the lots with Bible characters instead. Finding Samson Lot B might have been easier. As I joined the lines of cars heading for the exits, a half dozen cheerful parking lot attendants with florescent security vests signaled me along the way. Then, just as I left the church property, I saw a little sign with the church logo on it that read, "You are now sent as a missionary!"

This was an entirely unexpected promotion. At first I wondered if the sign might not apply to me. I was not a part of that church. I was there for a conference is all, the first and last time I was there. But now I was apparently counted among the missionaries of this impressive church!

Back in the days of Antioch in Acts 13, after prayer and fasting, the faithful gathered around Paul and Barnabas to lay hands on them and send them out to parts unknown on what became known as the First Missionary Journey (like many classics, they stopped with a trilogy).

However, for my new missionary journey, prayer and fasting were replaced by merely exiting the parking lot. The laying on of hands was replaced with the waving of the traffic safety batons at me, confirming my missionary call out the exit. Thus I was commissioned by a church I have yet to return to, and frankly, forget the name of, for my immediate missionary journey to buy myself a grande skinny vanilla latte across the street.

We have all heard the exhortations from pastors by now. It is a new and perhaps compelling refrain to some of us:

"You are a missionary right where you live!"

Is this accurate? Is this helpful? Is it problematic in any way? I want to think this through with you.

Is the Church the Chicken or the Egg?

The first thing we might need to figure out is defining what "mission" is. There is the mission of God and the Church of God. Which one comes first, the chicken or the egg, in this situation? Does the church have a mission?

Perhaps you have noticed that specialists love to disagree. It is hard to move forward in any academic field without having some territory of your own, an area that perhaps all those before you find to be a little suspect. But one idea everyone that studies it seems to agree on is this: The Church doesn't have a mission after all, God's mission, in fact, has a church.

What this idea means is that the church is a tool to achieve the mission of God, as opposed to the mission being a "part" of the church, the church is a part of the mission. This is why Christopher Wright said, “It is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world, as that God has a church for his mission in the world. Mission was not made for the church; the church was made for mission – God’s mission.” (2) Nearly everyone in the theological fields of missiology and ecclesiology (1) across a vast diversity of backgrounds and persuasions agrees that the mission of God is a fundamental nature of the church and of all of Christianity. Renowned missiologist David Bosch adds, "The Christian faith, I submit, is intrinsically missionary…. This dimension of the Christian faith is not an optional extra: Christianity is missionary by its very nature." (3)

Therefore the answer to the question, "Does the church have a mission?" is, no it does not; God's mission has a church. On a theological level, all followers of Jesus Christ are a part of, whether they know it or not, the mission of God. Bosch said, "Missionary activity is not so much the work of the Church as simply the Church at work." (3) Or put another way by Bosch, "The church is not the sender but the one sent." (3) The church is the egg, not the chicken

That somewhat resolves the first part of my questions about the church, missions, and missionaries. But it doesn't fully answer the questions I asked myself as I exited that megachurch parking lot on the Apostle David's First Missionary Journey to Starbucks. For that, I'll need a little more time to think, and space to write, so I'll return to this next week, when I'm guessing we'll have to take a bus ride with Lesslie Newbigin from India to England to figure it out.

NOTES:

(1) I find it generally helpful (even if over-simplified) to think of theology as the study of God, missiology as the study of the mission of God, and ecclesiology as the study of the church of God. Basically these are God-focused fields of study with more and more specialization.

(2) The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative by Christopher J.H. Wright

(3) Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission by David Bosch