Stephen Neill once said, “If everything is mission then nothing is mission.” The way we use the word “mission” around the church does perhaps reduce it to something so familiar that it loses its meaning. What is mission? In churches we speak of “mission statements,” or we talk about participation in a “mission project” when we make a trip to Central America to paint a school. Sometimes we speak of a “mission” when our congregation reaches out into the community in service and witness. Others in the church associate the word mission with something churches do overseas, and we tend to call our overseas church personnel “missionaries.”
The word mission has a long and honourable tradition. It is the Latin form of the word we find in the New Testament known as apostolic or apostle. As a verb, it simply means to be sent. In the context of the church and the Gospel, it means to be sent by God. Perhaps the most fundamental missionary text in the New Testament is to be found in the Gospel of John 20:21, when Jesus says to his disciples, “Peace be with you. As the Father sent me, so I send you.”
This sending of the disciples has parallels in the other Gospels and the Book of Acts. John, however, describes God as the God who sends. In addition, in Jesus, God's sending merges with God coming to us. Our God is a missioning God. God moves from inside who God is beyond God to us. This movement from inside God to us as God's creatures became known as “The Mission of God” in the 20th century. The famous Swiss theologian Karl Barth first described God in this way. In 1932, a time of great ferment after the First World War, Barth gave a lecture at the missionary conference in Brandenburg, Germany, in which he described mission as a matter of divine purpose – the mission of God. This small lecture would launch an idea that reverberates unto our day in Christian circles. Theologians soon turned the idea of God as the missioning God into a Latin phrase, Missio Dei, as they are wont to do. In 1938, at the large mission conference of the International Missionary Council in Tambaram, India, this phrase came into its own. There it became clear that the emphasis on the word mission should first of all be on the action of God and only secondarily on our actions or missions in the world.
At that time, people were thinking of mission as something associated with churches in Europe and North America sending people to do mission overseas. However, very soon, after the Second World War, there was a deep process of self-examination that started to take shape in our churches. The fact that the “Christian nations” could so brutally kill each other made everyone question old assumptions about how “Christian” we really are. In addition, with the independence movement among colonies, a new awareness of the paternalism of the church and its resistance to supporting indigenous leaders started to surface. John Gatu from Kenya called for a moratorium of mission. As people started to ask “what is mission?” the answer that mission is in the first place the mission of God started to gain more strength. Mission is not something we do to other people – mission is God's loving care and outreach to God's creation. We join that mission in our missional activities. With the formation of the World Council of Churches, the conversation continued about the meaning and significance of mission. In 1967, the WCC published two reports on the idea that each congregation is in its essence missionary. Biblical scholars started to realize that the New Testament was written in the context of a missional church. The missional dynamic of the church became a key principle in helping us understand the New Testament. Theologians started to claim that mission is the mother of theology. It is no wonder that at that time Bishop Stephen Neill got a bit frustrated and uttered his famous complaint against everything becoming mission.
What then is mission? How should we use the word? Next month we will look at some helpful definitions that may save us from Stephen Neill's complaint.
