by Manik Corea, C4SO Global Consultant
In my last post, we looked at the fact that all God’s people, without exception, are called to participate in God’s mission in the world. Today, we will discuss the global scope and implications of the mission of God through his Church.
Author and missiologist Chris Wright talks of the time he was teaching a mission course at All Nations College in the UK.[1] The module was called “The Biblical Basis for Missions.” Wright said the more he taught, the more he felt that the title was a total misnomer. It should be called rather “The Missional Basis of the Bible.”
This expresses a fundamental truth. Our Scriptures are really a missiological text. That is, it is God’s story from start to finish – of how he is working to restore and renew his broken creation to have a people for his own, to his glory and praise. As Wright argues, “the whole bible renders to us the story of God’s mission through God’s people in their engagement with God’s world for the sake of the whole of God’s creation.”[2]
Into such a world held captive by sin and the devil, Jesus came in flesh as God’s great missionary par excellence. He is the focal point of God’s redemptive plan, the hope of the prophets realized, the suffering servant who died to save sinners from their sin. He rose again victorious as the king of God’s kingdom come to earth. This ascended Jesus will return again to consummate his rule, but not before this Gospel is proclaimed by us to the whole world (Matthew 24:14).
Therefore, the Gospel not only brings us to Jesus as Savior and Lord, but sends us out by His Spirit to show and share it abroad. “Fundamentally, our mission (if it is biblically informed and validated) means our committed participation as God’s people, at God’s invitation and command, in God’s own mission within the history of God’s world for the redemption of God’s creation. ”[3]
The whole world must be viewed as our assigned task. “We must be global Christians with a global vision because our God is a global God,” John Stott once said.[4] It is the wide ocean where we cast our nets as fishers of all peoples, to bring in a harvest that will be the thrill of heaven.
Acts 1:8 is often seen as a, if not the, key verse of the book of Acts. Jesus, in instructing his disciples to wait for the promise of the Holy Spirit, said that his disciples would be empowered to be his witnesses in “Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and the ends of the earth.” In the English language, the conjunction “and” plays a key grammatical function. In Acts 1:8, “and” helps us see what God never intended for us to separate. The whole world is in view—we cannot pick and choose.
Jesus envisioned, as much of the Old Testament Scriptures already affirmed, a global dimension to the saving work of God.[5]
From the onset, Jesus clearly intended for his whole Church to be involved in reaching the whole world. In fact, the book of Acts narrates the apostolic spread of the Gospel from Jerusalem through the whole Roman world, ending in Paul proclaiming the kingdom of God and the Lord Jesus Christ in Rome (Acts 28:31). We must chart a similar course from our “Jerusalem.”
How else can people who have no Gospel be brought to saving faith in Christ? Paul himself, that great apostle to the Gentiles, makes this forceful point in Romans 10:14-17 when he asks, “How are they (i.e. unreached peoples) to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching to them? And how are they to preach unless they are sent?”
Part of my role in C4SO under Bishop Todd is to serve to raise the “temperature” of C4SO churches for global mission. This will NOT involve, you’ll be pleased to know, hounding priests and parishes in our diocese for our lack of global mission involvement. Instead, I will advocate for and assist C4SO churches to build a “global mission consciousness” toward local mission engagement, participation and support of greater mission engagement with the unreached world and a concern for the persecuted church.
We live in exciting days when the church is more ‘global’ than it has ever been in history. But many challenges remain—much of it to do with a lack of obedient participation of the people of God in the mission of God, whether local or global.
In my next blog, I will take a candid view of where we are in this as individual churches and as a diocese, and begin to suggest practical handles for getting involved with God’s global mission as his ‘sent’ Church.
Footnotes
[1] As related in Christopher J Wright, “Truth with a Mission: Reading All Scripture Missiologically” in The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, Issue 15/2 (Summer 2011)
[2] Chris Wright, The Mission of God (IVP Academic, 2006), 51.
[3] Chris Wright, The Mission of God (IVP Academic, 2006), 23.
[4] John Stott, “The Living God Is a Missionary God,” quoted in James E. Berney, ed., You Can Tell the World (Downer Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1979), 9
[5] Matthew 28:18-20, Mark 16:15; Luke 24:47 cf Genesis 1:28, 12:1-3, 22:18, Exodus 19:6; Numbers 14:21; Deuteronomy 4:6-8; Joshua 4:24; 1 Kings 8:41-43, 59-60; 1 Chronicles 16:23-24, 28, 31; Psalm 2:7-10; 22:27, 24:1; 45:17; 46:10; 49:1; 59:13; 72:17,19; 98:3; 108:5, 138:4; Isaiah 2:3, 12:4; 25:6, 34:1, 37:16, 45:6, 49:1-6; 52:7,10, 60:3; Jeremiah 3:17, 16:19; Ezekiel 36:22-23; Daniel 7;13,14; Jonah; Micah 5:4; Habakkuk 2:14; Zephaniah 3:9; Malachi 1:10-11; etc.
The Rev. Manik Corea, a Singaporean, is a missionary priest of C4SO and our Global Consultant. He serves as the Global Executive of NAMS. Following 13 years of mission and leading a church plant and missional community in Bangkok, Thailand, he oversees the day-to-day running of NAMS and its work in 15 nations on five continents. Manik recently completed an MA in Intercultural Studies from Asbury Theological Seminary. You can contact him at manikcorea@namsnetwork.org.