Missional - A Biblical Theology

From the beginning of Scripture to the end, the Bible tells the story of a God of love, a missionary God who is active in redeeming a broken world. His activity is self-initiated and for the restoration of all of His creation. The biblical message describes a missional theology. As Bosch (2009) asserts, “. . . theology ceases to be theology if it loses its missionary character” (p. 494). The remainder of this section builds this case by reviewing the nature of God, described in the Bible as love and as missionary, and the main emphasis of the biblical story in both the Old and New Testament.

The Nature of God

The Bible repeatedly paints a picture of a God who is defined and described through the characteristic of love. 1 John 4 declares that “God is love” (v. 8, 16), “love comes from God” (v. 7), “God showed his love among us [by sending] his one and only son into the world that we might live through him” (v. 9) and by sending “his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (v. 10). In chapter 3, John describes the depths of that love when he exclaims, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! . . . This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us” (v. 1, 16).

The very essence and nature of God is love. Love is what God does because God is love. And because God is love, He loves, expressing that love to His fallen creation. At the same time, God is holy (Isa. 6:3). He is separate from all that is evil, He is righteous and pure, and in Him there is no darkness at all (Jas. 1:13; 1 John 1:5). His very being requires separation from all that is evil, including all humanity because all have sinned (Rom. 3:23). But the amazing thing about God is His love for His broken creation and sinful children (John 3:16). While the fall separated man from God, the gospel, or good news, declares that God loves all of humanity and pursues humanity for relationship with Himself. He desires that all people would know and worship him; as Paul says, "Christ has become a servant of the Jews on behalf of God's truth . . . so that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy" (Rom.15:8-9).

Jesus clearly declared that this was the purpose of His life. Luke records these words of Jesus: “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost” (Luke 19:10), and Mark notes that “Jesus said to them, ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners’" (Mark 2:17). Luke reports this story about Jesus:

The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.’ Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, and he began by saying to them, ‘Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.’ (Luke 4:17-21)

Jesus lived in the full knowledge that he was the demonstration of the love of God. He came in love and lived in love to show the world that the very essence and nature of God is love. This nature of God as love, as the one who self-initiated restoration for all of His creation by sending his son for reconciliation, is the theological foundation undergirding the term missional.

The Story of the Bible

Not only does the Bible give us a theology that is missional, but it collectively tells the story of a God who is on mission. Both the Old and New Testament tell the story of God’s mission to restore his broken creation, and thus the Bible can be understood as the product of God’s mission. Wright (2006) asserts, “The very existence of the Bible is incontrovertible evidence of the God who refused to forsake his rebellious creation, who refused to give up, who was and is determined to redeem and restore fallen creation to his original design for it” (p. 48). He also states:

Mission is not just one of a list of things that the Bible happens to talk about, only a bit more urgently than some. Mission is, in that much-abused phrase, “what it’s all about.” (p. 22)

The missionary nature of God is observed in the first story of the Bible where he extends grace to Adam and Eve by providing them with a covering for their naked bodies. This message of God’s grace and reconciliation continues in the subsequent stories and is expressed in various forms and ways. In particular, the story of Abraham depicts God’s blessing of turning him into a great nation, of making his name great, and of blessing all peoples on earth through him (Gen. 12:1-3), (emphasis mine). Through this story, God is observed as one who establishes a people for himself, while at the same time blessing the entire world.

The next major story, the Exodus, tells of God's intervention and redemption of his chosen people from the oppression of the Egyptian Pharaoh to bring Israel into its own promised land. In reflecting on the story, Bosch (2009) notes, “They have only become a people because of God's intervention . . . the focus is on what God has done, is doing and is yet to do according to his declared intention” (p. 17). God is on mission; it is his action that established Israel as his people, his action that redeemed them from evil, and his action that will restore them forever (Exod. 3:7-10).

The remainder of the Old Testament story tells of the establishment of the nation of Israel as God's people elected for the blessing of all the nations and set apart to declare to those nations that God is redeeming the world. God, through the prophet Isaiah, declared, “I have made you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth” (Isa. 49:6). Ironically, the Old Testament story does not depict a nation sent by God to speak to the nations of his love. The nation was simply called to be a light for the Gentiles. Instead, it was God who would assume the role of missionary, drawing the nations to himself.

If they do come, it is because God is bringing them in. So if there is a missionary in the Old Testament, it is God himself who will, as his eschatological key par excellence, bring the nations to Jerusalem to worship him there together with his covenant people (Psa. 96:9). (Bosch, 2009, p. 19)

The entire world is blessed through God’s initiative and his utilization of his people, Israel.

As the story of God's mission moves into the New Testament, the gospels tell of God sending his Son to save and redeem the world (John 3:16). At the end of each gospel the Son sends his disciples, instructing them to go into the whole world preaching the gospel and making disciples (Matt. 28:18-20; Mark 16:15; Luke 24:46-48; John 17:18; 20:21). By sending his disciples into the world, he firmly established an expectation that they should never live separate from the world in their own detached community. Instead, Jesus called them to be “in the world [but not] of the world” (John 17:15-16). The phraseology may seem subtle, but the practice is dramatic. Jesus called his disciples to live alongside people in such a dramatically different fashion that those who are separated from God would come to faith in him (1 Pet. 2:12). As Bosch (2009) notes, “The church is always and at the same time called out of the world and sent into the world” (p. 386). Jesus was sending his disciples to be with people but to be different in thought and action. Instead, the disciples were to form a community of God's people who were “aliens and strangers [and who] abstained from sinful desires” (1 Pet. 2:9-11). Yet, they were to be a community who lived in the same world with those people who were separated from God.

The obedience of the disciples is reflected in the stories of the Book of Acts and the remaining New Testament. The narrative demonstrates that the focus of the early church was on mission. As Bosch (2009) observes, “mission was, in the early stages, more than a mere function; it was a fundamental expression of the life of the church” (p. 16). Bevans and Schroeder ( 2004) add:

We believe that a reading of the Acts of the Apostles shows that the origin of the church is intimately connected to its consciousness of the mission that it saw before it, and so Acts can be claimed to provide a strong biblical basis for the dictum that the church is missionary by its very nature. (p. 30)

The early church lived on mission all of the time. Her very essence was missionary.

In summary, the term missional is deeply rooted in the person and nature of God and described in the biblical text. The theological concept of the love of God demonstrates that he is the one who self-initiated restoration for all of his creation by sending his son into the world to bring reconciliation. The story of the biblical text demonstrates that the Bible is all about God's mission. Mission is the central focus of both the Old and the New Testament and is the “fundamental expression of the life of the church” (Bosch, 2009, p. 16).