MissioLife

This is the third post in a series called “On Mission.”  See part 1 here, and part 2 here. 

As we help guide our children, youth and adults into the story and mission of God it is critical that we help them discover responses to the following questions:

Who is God? – It is in a full-narrative approach to God and God’s mission that we begin to understand and know God.  Particularly, how God relates to our own individual story and the stories of others (family, culture, history, etc.)

What do I believe about God? – Faith in God, developed through the narratives of God, self, others and the world help us and the children, youth and adults of our faith communities to move the our faith from an intellectual pursuit or activity to a practical reality.  Theology becomes tangible when it is lived out.

Who am I? – We become aware of what it means to live into the image in which we have been created (likeness of God) when we discover both the special calling (unique gifts and talents) and general calling (agents of God’s love) that God has for us as humans.  The meaning of the Christian life is found in our call to be God’s image and live faithful stories.

How do I live? – What we have come to know and experience about God through Scripture, thought, practice and conviction helps us to develop a set of virtues in which we allow to shape our inner life.

How do I participate with God’s mission? – Ultimately, our outer life is formed by the inner virtues.  These inner virtues, in the end, are the way we interact with people, the urgencies that we seek to live out and the patterns of our lives that co-operate with God’s mission.

Want to help people turn missional instincts into missional expressions?  If so, it’ll need to be through a full-narrative view of God and God’s desired work in this world.

God is the Storyteller who tells the ever weaving, unfolding and enduring Story of God’s amazing holy love. The Story of God reveals God’s missionary heart and the nature of our existence as Christians and our purpose of presence in and to this world.

Consider this quote from my good friend Mark Miller found in his book, Experiential Storytelling:

“We were created with a curiosity, a complexity and a need for meaning.  The longing to understand the bigger questions is a deep need that cannot be filled with mere facts.  God did not choose to reveal a list of facts to us.  The Old Testament was given to humanity in the form of narratives and poetry.  Even the writing of the law took place in the midst of the deeply compelling story of God redeeming his chosen people.”

Would you rather be told a story or read a list of facts?

It is widely know that the device for telling stories is what some refer to as the storytelling triangle.  Every story told has a storyteller, a narrative and an audience.  The Christian story’s triangle is this:

1. God fills our curiosity, complexity and our meaning and God fills it with image, mission and work.  God is the storyteller.
2.  The story God tells through the scriptures (and the stories God continues to tell in us each day) is where we find our identity as Christians.  We are part of the story.
3. People are the audience of God’s great story. The compelling redemptive narrative is where humanity lives.  We are the hearers and doers of this great narrative.

The narrative and mission of God provides us with a large, dramatic, explicit and intense story in which we find God, ourselves, our relationships with others and our experience with the natural world.  We are introduced to Jesus and caught up in his life and ministry most effectively through the interaction with the entire story of God.

In what ways have you recently been caught up in the life and ministry of Jesus?

See Part 1 here

In his great work entitled Transforming Mission, David Bosch said:

“It cannot be denied that the missio Dei notion has helped to articulate the conviction that neither the church nor any other human agent can ever be considered the author or bearer of the mission. Mission is primarily and ultimately the work of the Triune God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, for the sake of the world, a ministry in which the church is privileged to participate . . . . Mission has its origin in the heart of God. God is a fountain of sending love. This is the deepest source of mission. It is impossible to penetrate deeper still; there is mission because God loves people.”

Mission is not our idea, it is who God is. When we, as churches, work to guide children, youth, and adults in Christian formation for the sake of the world (more on this in forthcoming posts) we do so knowing that we can only understand mission as it is seen in God’s heart and the narrative of Scripture. This is the reason why I have undertaken this massive project called MissioLife.

The origins of the mission of God are the heart of God and the story God tells.

I desire to come alongside churches by creating biblical, intentional, and practical content that helps you guide your people (worship services, small groups, children’s ministry, youth ministry, etc.) into Christian formation that is rooted in the heart of God. MissioLife seeks to provide you with a framework for a multi-generational approach.

I am doing a series of webinars on March 13, April 5, and May 17. You can learn more about them at www.missiolife.com/webinar. I invite you to join me in discovering how MissioLife can help you create disciple-making environments in your faith community.

As you think through the discipleship process in your church, remember that the mission of God is the context for understanding the person and work of Jesus. If you want people to know and love Jesus, they need to see where Jesus fits into the mission. God proclaims the kingdom, Jesus makes the kingdom present, and the Holy Spirit gives witness to Jesus through the life and practices of the Church, the people of God.

In what ways does your disciple-making environment include the mission of God as a foundational element for living in the way of Jesus? 

5 Reasons the Mission of God is Indispensable for our Church Life

Thinking further about the missional nature of God, we discover through the sweeping redemptive arc of the biblical narrative, the story of our culture, the story of our self, and the story of our faith communities that the mission of God:

1. Gives us a dream.  God includes us in his dream for the world.  We are invited into and commanded to be about God’s will to redeem humanity and the world and its freedom from every oppressive situation. Or, as I sometimes say, to restore the world to its intended wholeness.
2. Brings focus.  Staying attentive to the mission of God requires that we keep our hearts focused on God and not the material concerns that can often keep us from seeing God as a God-for-people.
3. Relieves the pressure to produce.  When we let God’s dream for a whole world reign in our priorities for action, we concern ourselves with our faithfulness first rather than our productivity.  What if our absolute best intentions aren’t enough?  Does that mean we weren’t effective?  Where does our faithfulness to the mission of God fit in to the equation of “success”?  The world isn’t ours to win, it’s God’s.
4. Provides the structure for participating. Look around.  Can you see God at work?  If not, look again.  If so, how are you joining in what God is already doing?  No need to scurry around and look for something to do, it is right in front of you.  What is right in front of you?  God’s will to redeem the world is right in front of you.
5. The mission is the message.  The mission of God provides the freedom to take hold of God’s hope and healing through repentance and conversion.  There is not a need to create your own message. The message of the mission has already been given to us . . . “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

What other reasons might you give to the indispensability of the mission of God in our church life?

I hear the word “missional” from church leaders and workers almost every day.  Conversation through email, phone, tweets, Facebook, text, whatever . . . it seems as though everyone who desires for their church to be perceived as relevant in some way is using the word “missional” to describe their latest flurry of activity.

I typically ask, “What do you mean by the description, missional?”  Responses often vary from “not attractional” to “others-centered” to “seeking justice” to “home church.”  I once even heard the phrase, “ . . . Hip, you know, like postmodern.” What?  Really? Friends, missional may involve these things (well, maybe not the hip part) but missional is not merely about changing the way you do church.  Missional is about changing (or returning to) the reason why you do church in the first place, if you want to use the “do church” language.

What phrases have you heard to describe missional church?

To be a missional church, then, means that missiology shapes your ecclesiology.  Consider the statements of these missional thinkers and doers:

“There is church because there is mission, not vice versa”

(David Bosch)

“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 creation.”

(Christopher Wright)

“Mission is the people of God intentionally crossing barriers from the church to the nonchurch, faith to nonfaith, to proclaim by word and deed the coming of the Kingdom of God in Jesus Christ; this task is achieved by means of the church’s participation in God’s mission of reconciling people to God, themselves, to each other and to the world, and gathering them into the church through the repentance and faith in Jesus Christ by the work of the Holy Spirit with a view to the transformation of the world as a sign of the coming Kingdom in Jesus Christ.”

(Charles Van Engen)

To be missional, therefore, is to participate in God’s redemptive activity in the world.  Doing so, however, cannot simply be viewed pragmatically.  It must first be viewed theologically.  God is a missionary God and it is out of this attribute that we understand how to effectively serve the children, youth and adults in our church and communities.

In what ways is your faith community participating in the redemptive activity of God?