Missional living is rooted in a conviction that theology and missiology are inextricably tied together (Edson, 2006). A missiological approach or rethinking of theology appears to focus on three major components: God as Trinity, the Gospel as the good news of God’s reign, and the church as God’s missionary people. Van Gelder (2008) identifies all three components and succinctly defines the core of missional theological reflection:
God is seeking to bring God’s kingdom, the very redemptive reign of God in Christ, to bear on every dimension of life within the entire world so that the larger creation purposes of God can be fulfilled. The church’s self-understanding of being missional is grounded in the work of the Spirit of God, who calls the church into existence as a gathered community, equips and prepares it, and sends it into the world to participate fully in God’s mission. (p. 44)
God as Trinity
The Trinitarian foundation to missional theology is one of the most easily noted facts about missional living. Seemingly every missional writer begins with either one or two foundational principles about God stemming from his Trinitarian nature. The two principles are the economic trinity and the perichoretic trinity (Van Gelder, 2007a; Van Gelder, 2007b; Hall, 2009; Bosch, 1991; Fredrickson, 2007). As economic trinity, God sent the Son and the Spirit to be part of the creation of the world. After the fall of creation, the Father, sent the Son into the world to bring redemption and announce his reign. Both Father and Son sent the Spirit into the world to call, equip, and send the church into the world until the Son is again sent to bring the final culmination of the Kingdom. Thus, God is missionary by nature and is the foundation for the missionary nature of his people, the church. As perichoretic trinity, God is three yet one, a community of interrelation and mutuality. It is in this communal image that the church was created (Van Gelder, 2007) and in this image the church sees God’s will for the world (Padilla, 1998). Recapturing the Trinitarian image of God recaptures the image of the church.
The Gospel as the Good News of God’s Reign
A missiological theology begins with God’s nature and quickly moves to God’s mission, the missio dei. Redemption is both the mission of God and the Gospel. Made available through Jesus Christ, redemption is for the whole world (Van Gelder, 2008) and entails both absolute restorations of earthly communities and total reconciliation of humans to God, culminating in a new heaven and a new earth (Ma, 2009; Padilla, 1998). In this goal, the hostile and alienated world is brought back into God’s natural order of love, justice, and peace – the shalom of God (Dietterich, 2002; Hunsberger 1998).
The gospel in missiological theology is the narrative of God’s mission. As the church reads and rereads, hears and rehears, visions and revisions the story of a God on mission to bring redemption, the church is shaped to be God’s unique missionary people. Roxburgh (1998) captures this common thought of missional writers well. He writes, “If the gospel of God’s unbreaking reign in Jesus Christ is to shape the missional church, then the gospel must be faithfully articulated, studied, explored, and heard over and over again” (p. 213). This statement points to the heart of missiological theology: the shape of the church as God’s missionary people.
The Church as God’s Missionary People
The different ways of defining the missionary nature of God’s people and the nuances to be seen in the semantics of such definitions seem to be endless. Interestingly, most (if not all) either quote, build off of, or give credit to Guder’s (1998) seminal work in the field, Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America. This compilation of essays drives home the nature of the church as active and passive representative of God’s reign, sign and foretaste of the kingdom, and the community of, servant to, and messenger concerning the reign of God (Hunsberger, 1998). The biblical images of salt and light are offered to support the church’s identity as the “eschatological community of salvation” (Hunsberger, 1998, p.86; Barrett, 1998). Elsewhere, the church is named “God’s visionary people” (Roxburgh, 2006; xv), “God’s called out people” (Bullock, 2008, p. 105), the “primary manifestation of God’s kingdom” (Hibbert, 2009, p. 324), a “hermeneutic of the gospel” (Hibbert, 2009, p. 330) and the church of the missio dei (Hirsch, 2009).
No comments:
Post a Comment