mission

I have been rather bothered recently by the way in which the emerging church - though not only the emerging church - makes use of the concept of the ‘kingdom of God’ to define its mission, the idea being that the task of the church is to extend or build the kingdom of God on earth. Very often there is an implicit polemical aspect to the usage: we build the kingdom of God rather than merely convert people; or we are more concerned about the concrete social dimension of the kingdom on earth than the rarefied - if not mind-numbing - prospect of an eternity in heaven. The phrase ‘kingdom of God’ appears to capture for us something of the down-to-earth political and moral relevance of the gospel that we are so anxious to reintroduce into Christian discourse; and it gives substantial theological justification for this shift in missional focus. But I am not at all sure that this is how the term works biblically.

I suggested in my review of Alan Hirsch’s book The Forgotten Ways that, in our search for a new paradigm to replace the now more or less defunct Christendom worldview, the historical moment which we should revisit for inspiration is not the beginning of the narrow path of suffering that the radical Jesus movement took in pursuit of its Lord but the end, when the faithful community, having finally overcome the opposition of Greek-Roman paganism, was in a position to ask far-reaching questions about how it should organize and define itself as God’s ‘new creation’.

The ebullient Alan Hirsch was in Portugal recently with the Christian Associates leadership community, talking about what makes a missional church-planting movement, in his words, go ‘Kaboom!’ In his book The Forgotten Ways he faces squarely the fact that the church in the West is experiencing ‘massive, long-trended decline’ (16). For the most part, the techniques and strategies that are currently being proposed as remedies for this dilemma are no more than revisions of techniques and strategies that have already proved themselves ineffective. ‘As we anxiously gaze into the future and delve back into our history and traditions to retrieve missiological tools from the Christendom toolbox, many of us are left with the sinking feeling that this is simply not going to work’ (17). What is needed is a new paradigm: ‘a fundamental change in our thoughts, perceptions, and values, especially as they relate to our view of church and mission’.

I had sworn off OST, vowing to myself never to return, having been consigned either to the flames or to the bottom of the sea depending on who’s talking at the moment. But habits are hard to break, and as I found myself clicking onto the site my attention was captured by the title and photo at the top of this post.

Last night my wife, daughter and I watched The Red Balloon, a French short film from 1956 about a little Parisian boy who finds a red balloon…

It appears to be a core theme of Tom Wright’s Simply Christian that the mission of God - and therefore of the people of God - is to rescue the world and put it to rights. The Bible, he says, tells the story of a ‘good creator longing to put the world back into the good order for which it was designed’; it is the story of what the ‘one creator God has been doing to rescue his beautiful world and to put it to rights’ (40, 41); it is the story of how the ‘creator God is rescuing the creation from its rebellion, brokenness, corruption and death’ (159). Following the thorough-going collapse of human society depicted in Genesis 1-11, Wright argues, God calls Abraham and his descendants, ‘somehow, to be the means of God putting things to rights, the spearhead of God’s rescue operation’ (64); and what Abraham sees in his mind’s eye is this world restored to peace and justice…

Having now read McLaren’s book I can see why it’s controversial in evangelical circles. It’s thought-provoking, forcing the reader to reconsider assumptions about the relationship between the gospel and the world. I think he makes a good case for his position. Rather than interacting specifically with Andrew’s review, I’ll try to summarize (at some length, alas) my own response to the book.

It’s three months now since Brian McLaren’s latest book Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope was released, and in the frenzied, web-driven world of emerging theology, three months is a long time. For all I know it’s not even his latest book any more. It has been widely reviewed, blogged on, commented on, pod- and videocasted about, facebooked, eulogized, trashed on the web. But I found it a highly stimulating read for all sorts of reasons and I think it’s well worth reviewing even at this late stage in the cycle of fashionability. The review comes in two parts: first, in this post a synopsis of McLaren’s argument in the book; and secondly, at some time in the near future, a critical evaluation in which I want to consider in particular how the category of ‘kingdom of God’ fits into a vision of social transformation, which seems to me to be the central theological question posed by the book.

I am pleased to say that my book Re:Mission: Biblical Mission for a Post-Biblical Church has just been published by Paternoster in their ‘Faith in an Emerging Culture’ series. The book builds on the argument of The Coming of the Son of Man but broadens the scope of its historical-realist narrative to embrace an understanding of ‘mission’ that arises out of the summons to Abraham to be the progenitor of a creational microcosm, a world-within-a-world, an authentic humanity.

In March 2007 I had the opportunity to present a paper at the eastern regional Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) conference on this very subject (with Alan Roxburgh as the plenary speaker). The paper is entitled “Are We Syncretizing the Gospel? A Reflection Upon Lesslie Newbigin’s Definition of Syncretism for the Church’s Missionary Encounter with Culture.” In my paper I examine the charge of syncretism which has been used to describe the emerging movement.