Ford / Brisco Missional Quest

1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8308-9578-6
Verlag: InterVarsity Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

Reihe: Forge Partnership Books

When Christ calls people, he invites them on a journey-a journey taken together in community. We have reached a point in history, however, when we think of the church as a fixed place where isolated individuals show up, consume a Christian message, drink some coffee, and get on with their lives. The times demand, and the gospel proclaims, that we recover our identity as a church that is a people on a quest for the kingdom of heaven, formed intimately by a loving God and called onto a long journey for the sake of our neighbors and our world. In The Missional Quest you?ll learn how to take your church on a long run, and how to sustain yourselves and one another along the way, through the power of God for the sake of the world.

Lance Ford is the cofounder of KC Sentral and the Sentralized Conference. He is the author of Unleader and, with Alan Hirsch, Right Here, Right Now.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ford, Lance

Brisco, Brad

Leseproben

1

The Starting Line

Where the Missional Journey Begins

Brad Brisco

• • •

Mission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God.

David Bosch

If mission defines who Christ is, and if Christ sends us as he was sent, then mission defines who we are.

Albert Curry Winn

The mission is God’s. The marvel is that God invites us to join in.

Christopher Wright

For nine years I taught a course on evangelism at a small Christian college. There was an exercise I would do every year to illustrate to the students just how inwardly focused most churches are. I would divide the whiteboard into two large columns. I asked the class to list all of the programs and ministries that their church had for those inside the church. In other words, activities just for church members. They would quickly create a very long list of things like Sunday morning worship, Sunday school, small groups, prayer groups, men’s ministry, women’s ministry, children’s ministry, sports leagues, special fellowships—you get the picture. Occasionally a student might argue that some of the activities were open to those outside the church, but inevitably they agreed that each of the activities was tailored with church people in mind.

The next step was to list the ministries that their church had exclusively for those outside the church family. Beyond that, I would ask them to consider any training that the church provided for members to equip them to engage those outside the church. The contrast was striking. In more than one case a student couldn’t name a single activity that his or her church had for those outside the church walls. All of the church’s planning, finances and energy were spent exclusively on church members.

The vast majority of churches in America are not missional. But despite this reality, some people believe using the phrase “missional church” is redundant. “Of course the church is missional,” they quip. The truth is that it should be redundant, but it isn’t. The church in North America, generally speaking, is clearly not missional. Both individually and collectively, it simply does not consistently live out of its missional identity. So please don’t say that missional church language is redundant. It is not.

So how are we to best understand the language of missional church? Unfortunately the word missional today seems to be connected to just about everything in the church world. Missional leadership. Missional evangelism. Missional youth ministry. Missional parenting. Missional denominations. Even missional clothing! Moreover, people are using the word missional to describe “new” ways to think about church growth, outreach, social justice and discipleship. Lance likes to refer to this crazy use of terminology as “applying missional paint.” Buy a can of missional paint and brush it on to whatever the church is already doing. Just like that, it’s missional!

But if we reject this overuse, what then does the word missional mean? Moving forward, how are we to best understand it? I usually respond by saying that I have a short answer and a long answer to this question.

The short answer is that missional is simply the adjective form of the noun missionary. Therefore when we use the language of “missional church,” the word missional is used to describe the church as a missionary entity. The church doesn’t just send missionaries, the church is the missionary.

Now for the long answer. When considering a more theologically rooted definition of the word missional we need to examine three chief distinctions. These are the theological foundations of a missional approach, which we believe must serve as the starting line to our journey. Each point deliberately confronts long-held assumptions most Christians have about God, the church and mission. Without serious attention to each of these three points, the missional journey will inevitably end prematurely.

The Missionary Nature of God and the Church

The first shift in thinking that must take place relates to our understanding of the missionary nature of God and the church. When we think of the attributes of God, we most often think of characteristics such as holiness, sovereignty, wisdom, justice, love and so on. Rarely do we think of God’s missionary nature. But Scripture teaches that God is a missionary God—a sending God.

What’s more, the Bible is a missionary book. Scripture is generated by and is all about God’s mission activity. The word mission is derived from the Latin missio, meaning “sending.” And it is the central theme describing God’s activity throughout all of history to restore creation. While often overlooked, one remarkable illustration in Scripture of God’s missionary nature is found in the “sending language” that is prominent throughout the Bible.

From God’s sending of Abram in Genesis 12 to the sending of his angel in Revelation 22, there are literally hundreds of examples that 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 redemptive mission. The Hebrew verb “to send,” shelach, is found nearly eight hundred times. While it is most often used in a variety of nontheological sayings and phrases,[1] it is employed more than two hundred times with God as the subject of the verb.[2] In other words, it is God who commissions and it is God who sends.

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 just 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.’” (Ex 3:10-15, emphasis added)

The prominence of sending language is not only seen in the books of Genesis and Exodus; 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. 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.

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: “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’” To this Isaiah responds, “Here am I! Send me!” (Is 6:8, emphasis added).

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” (Mal 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 (Jn 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 sixty times. The majority of uses refers 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” (Jn 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 reflected in the Gospels. Geoffrey Harris states it this way:

The Gospels reflect the fact that mission is the essence of the Church’s life and not just an aspect of it. The life of Jesus is invariably represented as being enacted in the world at large (and not in religious settings), among ordinary people of all sorts (and not just among...