Redeemer Family,
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been seeking to clarify our parish vision - Gospel Formation for Missional Presence. If you missed the first two installments, you can read them here:
Gospel Formation | Metamorphosis
Today I’d like to press in just a bit more into that word “mission.” It’s a word that nearly all Christians use, but that is often used to mean very different things. Often when followers of Jesus hear or use the word mission, they mistakenly assume that everyone agrees and means the same thing. This wouldn’t be a big deal if “mission” was something small and peripheral, like using the correct brand of shampoo. But it is enormous and central - it is the way in which we participate in what God is doing in the world. God Himself has a mission and we, His children, are invited to be a part of it. For a Christian, therefore, mission is not a side dish, it’s the whole meal. It’s not one aspect of life, it’s what your life is about.
The Bible renders and reveals to us the God whose creative and redemptive work is permeated from beginning to end with God’s own great mission, his purposeful, sovereign intentionality. All mission or missions which we initiate, or into which we invest our own vocation, gifts, and energies, flow from the prior and larger reality of the mission of God. God is on a mission, and we, in that wonderful phrase of Paul, are “coworkers with God.” (1 Corinthians 3:9) Having made that reorienting paradigm shift in our concept of the fundamental meaning of Biblical mission, then indeed the whole Bible can (and I would argue, should) be read in light of this overarching, governing perspective. The whole Bible delivers to us “the whole counsel of God” - the plan, purpose, and mission of God for the whole creation, that it will be reconciled to God through Christ by the cross (Colossians 1:20).¹
Now, if God is on a mission and the entirety of the Bible points to the missional work of God in the world, and if we are called to participate in the mission of God, then there remains a crucial question that is immediately practical for our lives today, “How does God do mission?”
James Davidson Hunter writes, “The very character of God and the heart of his word is that God is fully and faithfully present to us. On the face of it, faithful presence suggests proximity, but it is much more than this. His faithful presence is an expression of commitment.” ²
Or, more concisely, as Francis Schaffer put it, “the God Who is There.”
HOW IS GOD MISSIONALLY PRESENT TO US?
He enters our story and reveals that we are actually a part of His story. Over and again God interrupts the human narrative: Noah, Abraham, Moses, Ruth, David, Isaiah, Daniel, Hosea, Zechariah, Mary, Joseph, Peter, James, John, Paul. God speaks. He invites, calls, asks, challenges, commands, inquires, affirms, and critiques. When God enters the human story, we realize that our story is, in fact, His story. We have been conscripted into the mission of God. David was just your average blue-collar teenager until God entered His story and he became DAVID in God’s story. Mary was just a peasant girl in her parent’s house until God entered her story and she became MARY in God’s story. God’s missional presence in our story reframes and transforms our little story into His grand story.
God identifies with us and gives us a new identity in Him. “For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.” (Psalm 103:14) God knows what it feels like to be us. He empathizes. What’s more, in Christ, God becomes one of us. “Born in the likeness of men.” (Philippians 2:7) Further still, Jesus remains human in his resurrection - demonstrating God’s solidarity with humanity for all eternity. He identifies with us permanently, not temporarily. God didn’t try out being human for a day. God became human in Jesus for good. It is on these grounds that God now offers us a new identity in Himself. “For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ.” (Romans 8:15-17) God’s missional presence in identifying with us transforms our own sense of identity.
God pursues us and gives us belonging in Him. “Chosen out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession.” (Deuteronomy 7:6) “I have called you by name, you are mine.” (Isaiah 43:1) Not only does God pursue us and call us to Himself, but through Jesus, He forms a new humanity, a new family in which we practice our belonging in Him. “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” (1 Corinthians 12:27) God’s incarnational pursuit of us not only draws us in but also sends us out to incarnationally pursue others. God’s missional presence with us, Immanuel, fosters our presence with each other.
God lives virtuously on our behalf and enables us to live a new life of virtue through Him. The life of Jesus was a life of obedience to the Father. “The son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing.” (John 5:19) But it was not only obedience for His own sake, it was vicarious obedience for us, “It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.” (Romans 4:24-25) God’s missional presence is the life He offers to us in Jesus and the new life we are able to live through Jesus.
God becomes local and time-bound, dignifying our place and time. Not only did Jesus enter history at a particular place and time, but His Spirit now dwells within His people in their place and their time. “Do you not know that you are a temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells within you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16) This gives tremendous dignity and honor to every place and every age. Every place is valuable, none are disposable. Every age is the age in which God is at work. For a Christian, a pilgrimage to the Holy Land may be beneficial, but it is not necessary, God is with you right where you are. Particular cultural traditions of the faith are beneficial, but they are not necessary for God to work. God can work right now, inhabiting any culture of this era. God’s missional presence in time and space enables us to faithfully live in our place and in our time.
God calls us to a vocation, and gives our life purpose. Not only does God call all of humanity in the cultural mandate, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps over the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it…” (Genesis 1:26-28) God’s presence is His voice calling to us - giving us purpose, direction, and meaning in our life’s work. But God’s presence does not only call us to our work, He is also with us in our work. Our work is co-laboring with God. “We are ambassadors of Christ, God making His appeal through us.” (2 Corinthians 5:20) God’s missional presence for, in, and through human work gives us purpose, no matter how difficult, dull, or painful our work may be.
God’s self-sacrificing love transforms our imaginations. “This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (1 John 4:10) The mystery of faith is that Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again. This new reality of Jesus’ presence has broken into our old reality with a love that our world does not understand and cannot control. The cross and the empty tomb, death and resurrection, sacrifice and hope, give birth to a new way of conceiving of beauty and the good life. The Kingdom of Heaven is present, right here on earth, right now. God’s missional presence, in the self-sacrificing love of Jesus, gives us a new imagination for how we can be missionally present with self-sacrificing love.
SUMMARY
In summary, we might say that the way God does mission is to be fully present to us: fully present in that He brings all of Himself and holds nothing back, and fully present in that He is present to all of us - our whole selves. God’s presence does not only seek to convert the beliefs of our minds or the affections of our hearts or the habits of our lives - but our whole person - making us into “a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
God’s presence does not only seek to evangelize people, but to transform all of human society and indeed the whole earth.
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” (Revelation 21:1-5)
God’s mission is comprehensive. He is fully present to us so that we might be fully present to Him, to ourselves, to each other, and to the world. If we grasp the magnitude of the mission of God, then our entire lives will be swept up in His mission. Everything we do and everything that we are becomes a mode of participation in His mission.
WAIT, IF MISSION IS EVERYTHING, THEN MISSION IS NOTHING. RIGHT?
I hear you. This objection is common if you’re still trying to frame mission as something you do rather than a kind Christ-like presence that you embody.
When should a Christian be filled with the Holy Spirit and embody the love of Jesus? Sometimes or always? Always, right?
THAT is what it means to live missionally God’s way. It means everywhere you show up, you show up as a missional presence - the presence of Jesus, embodied in you - in your particular personhood, complete with your personality, your life circumstance, your resources, your relationships, your work, etc.
CONCLUSION
So, when we talk about our parish being a missional presence, let’s be on the same page with each other. Missional Presence is God’s mission, God’s way. It’s being present to others the way that God is present to us. Framing mission as anything else requires you to chop up the Bible and chop up the Christian life into separate parts that, from God’s perspective, are one and the same.
Of course there’s much more we can and will say about what this means and how we become these kinds of people, but we’ll stop here for now.
Redeemer Family, I love you and I’m so grateful for your presence.
In the Father’s love,
¹ Christopher J.H. Wright. The Mission of God. p. 531-2
² James Davidson Hunter. To Change the World. p. 241
