Whose Mission?

"It is not the church that has a mission of salvation to fulfill in their world; it is a mission of the Son and Spirit through the Father than includes the church."

- Jürgen Moltmann

"...we must recognize and articulate clearly... that God's mission is, from first to last, the work of the Holy Spirit. To put it negatively, mission is not dependent on upon money, programs, or education. Empowerment for mission is more about prayer, devotion, and silence than about fundraising and seminars. Too much missionary work is done as if the Holy Spirit did not exist... We need to remind our overworked and overprogrammed twenty-first century selves that if we don't wait, and if we don't listen, we are very likely to develop our own mission apart from the work of God in our midst."

- Scott W. Sunquist

​ Perhaps the chief sin of humanity is our tendency to inflate our own importance, and missionaries are in no way immune to this failing. Especially in evangelical circles, mission is often portrayed as the urgent task of the church to bring the gospel to the unreached. While that definition is not entirely wrong, it is also not entirely right, and it is utterly incomplete. It is too simple a thing to make mission all about us (the Christians or missionaries) or all about them (the unreached). Instead, mission is first, foremost, and always the work of God. Before the church even existed - indeed, long before Abraham was called to be a blessing to all nations (Gen 12:2-3, 22:18), God was at work in his mission to restore the broken creation and to reconcile broken humanity to himself. The mission in which we are engaged is not first our mission, but God's - and our recognition of that fact radically changes how we partner with him in his mission. This is not to say that we have no part to play in the work of God, because God very clearly and emphatically calls us to work with him in what he is doing in the world. It's just that the whole enterprise does not rise and fall on our ability, strategy, wisdom, or even obedience. God is at work in the world, and he will bring his work to completion with or without us. To stop there, however, would also convey an incomplete understanding of God's mission because God is a relational God, and dearly loves his children. He displays his love partly by inviting us into the glory and wonder of the work that he is doing - not because he needs us, but simply because he loves us, and wants us to participate with him for his greater glory, our greater joy, and for the greater blessing of this broken world into which he has called us. We can choose to accept his gracious invitation, or we can foolishly reject it. If we reject his call to join him in his work of redemption, restoration, and reconciliation, he will call others in our place who will no doubt join him in glad obedience. But if we reject his call or delay in obeying him, the mission will not fail - we will just miss out on a vast and glorious experience of God's goodness, glory, and love - and both we and the world will be poorer for it.

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​ The question, simply put, is this: Is mission human-centered or God-centered? Upon whom does the success of this mission depend? Our answer radically affects our view of God, ourselves, mission, and how we engage in mission. If it all depends on us, we will prioritize strategy, methodology, and activity. Those things are not inherently evil unless they are expressed in a lack of humility and utter dependence on God, or an attitude toward life and ministry that focuses more on frantic productivity than on Spirit-led doing rooted in relational being with God. A person who is only concerned about charging the next hill is rarely concerned with understanding their own weakness or their need to wait on God for guidance and depend on his power for mission.

​ If, on the other hand, mission all depends on God, we'll prioritize listening prayer, intercession, silence, and sabbath, among other things. By this we do not mean that Christians generally or missionaries specifically should sit at home all day in contemplative prayer - though an occasional day spent thus would not be amiss! We mean that whatever strategy or methodology we employ, and whatever activities in which we engage, must be rooted in a crystal-clear recognition of our utter dependence on the Spirit of God in all things, and that recognition must be made real in how we operate from day to day as we partner with God in his mission. To be clear, experienced movement practitioners and trainers will often be the first to make this point, but people newer to the conversation or those who perhaps have not paused to think more deeply on these things might miss the importance of this distinction. To be clear, strategy and action are obviously needed, else God would not have gifted his people with the ability to conceive of plans and implement them. The question is in what do we put our trust? Of course any Christian would (hopefully) claim to be led by God more than their own plans, but we believe that in reality, more often Stephen Seamands' assessment is true: "We depend nominally on the Spirit but primarily on ourselves - our training, our skills, our personality, our past experiences, our knowledge, our sincere efforts. As a result, what we accomplish is limited to what we can do".

​ So what might a God-centered missional mindset look like? When we lean on our own understanding and power, we will naturally tend to focus on efficiency, productivity, and strategy in order to maximize results. But a recognition that God is the originator, sustainer, and finisher of his mission encourages a different focus as we are pulled into a relational, rather than a strategic or productivity-centered reality, as the foundation of mission. When we recognize that we are not so much given a task by God as we are invited into a relationship of working alongside God, we can be freed from our obsession with productivity and performance, which can easily become a cancer in the soul of the missional worker. After all, God is not concerned about our productivity; he is concerned about our fruitfulness, and while often confused, those are two very different things. When we recognize that the foundation of mission is relationship (between the members of the Trinity, between the Trinity and ourselves, between ourselves and other children of God, and between ourselves and those who do not yet know God), we are forced to abandon our task-oriented frameworks and begin to consider people over projects. In other words, the right ordering of God's love for us before God's call to us challenges our default priority of working for God rather than enjoying partnership (and rest) with God.

​ We believe that this shift is a corrective to the Western tendency to exalt Frederick Taylor's scientific management theory of "best practices" over living relationship and active partnership with God in his mission. After all, God is an eternal community of relationships: Father and Son, Son and Spirit, Spirit and Father, and so on. So long as we hope to control outcomes and "make things happen", we are in danger of missing the relational heart of God for us, and for the lost, in our missional partnership with God. Certainly there are methods that have proven more effective than others in different contexts, but the spark that actually catalyzes a movement (or any missional breakthrough) is always and irrevocably the power and presence of God - and while God invites us to pray and ask, this is largely beyond the scope of what we can hope to control or plan for. Only with our hearts centered on God and his work in and between the people around us can we hope to keep moving forward in partnership with God even when we see no tangible results.

​ A further complication of a faulty mindset around our role in God's mission is that when it becomes my mission or my responsibility, it is easy for mission or ministry to become an idol, or something that actually comes between us and God. But God will suffer no idols to come between him and his children - not even the well-intentioned idol of ministry results. When working in ministry takes the place of relating to God in our lives, we are on the road to burnout and bitterness. When we righty perceive God as a loving father who calls us to work alongside him in what he is already doing, the silliness of this pitfall becomes clear. No loving father would elevate his expectations of his children's performance over his love for them and his call for them to partner with him in his work.

​ It all comes back to the simple yet universe-shattering idea that God loves us and wants to have a relationship with us. This idea is not just something for altar calls and warm feelings of personal devotion; it drastically impacts how we view reality, the world, God's mission, and our role in God's mission. Mission is not about a task. It is about a relationship.