Being the Church Is the Church’s Mission
I.
What is mission? This question is one that confuses the church endlessly today. For one thing, different groups in the
church define mission very differently. These differences fall into two main categories.
On the one hand, some see mission as service. They base their view on Matthew 25:31-46, where Jesus, just prior to his
death, specifically identifies with the poor and suffering. He says that to serve them is, in effect, to serve him. He says
this is the way to heaven. This group of Christians correctly understands that the church’s mission is to help those
in need. I grew up with this understanding of mission. In many churches the Mission Committee, and money raised for mission,
has mainly to do with giving assistance to needy and hurting people. Usually, following Jesus’ own example, there are
no strings attached to this service. It is given simply where there is need.
The other view is based on Matthew 28:18-20, and sees mission primarily as evangelism. Here the risen Lord Jesus specifically
commissions his disciples to "go and make disciples of all nations." It is the more evangelical Christians who have been most
inspired by this command. They would say, also correctly, that mission is when the church is out there converting people and
bringing them into a relationship with Jesus.
It is a tragedy that the church has been divided so profoundly between these two opinions, especially since they are only
separated by a handful of chapters in Matthew’s gospel. Given the wall erected between these two understandings by their
interpreters, it is almost hard to believe that the words in both chapters 25 and 28 are from the mouth of the same man. The
chapter 25 (service) party looks on the chapter 28 (evangelism) party as a bunch of harsh fundamentalists who attach unnecessary
and selfish conditions to God’s grace and the church’s work. As if we should deny help to suffering people unless
they convert. (Sadly, some Christians do hold this extreme view as we heard about after the tsunami.) The chapter 28 (evangelism)
party views the chapter 25 (service) party as mere social service providers who are ashamed to mention Christ in their work
at all. (This is not completely inaccurate either.)
I suspect that the bifurcation between these two views of mission began early in the era of Christendom, when Christianity
was practically identical with Western Civilization. In those days, roughly from the 4th through the 20th
centuries, it was the State that got to decide what the mission of the church was to be. The State defined the church’s
mission in terms of what the State needed done. (By "the State" I don’t mean just the government, but the complex of
all the institutions in a given nation.)
Thus the church’s mission was focused on two separate areas. First, since the whole culture was officially Christian,
and nearly everyone was born into the church, there was no point to doing evangelism in the sense of going out and converting
people. Within Christendom everyone (except for small pockets of Jews) was Christian. Evangelism became something that was
aimed at other parts of the world, outside the bounds of the West (Europe and North America). Even when I was a kid,
a missionary was someone who went to Africa or Asia to spread the gospel. They were literally fulfilling Jesus’
command in Matthew 28. They went to other nations because, of course, our own nation was already converted.
Secondly, the State decided that the church should have a domestic mission, which is the care of the poor, sick, and otherwise
less fortunate. It was the "social safety net," as it were, caring for those whom the State — families and communities
— either would not or could not. The church embraced this task with enthusiasm because they knew it was a literal fulfillment
of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 25.
This bifurcation worked well enough as long as the premises of Christendom functioned. But when Christendom began to collapse,
it became increasingly difficult to hold together two distinct views of what mission is. Where it used to be that there were
these people here, whom the gospel required us to serve, and those people out there whom the gospel required us to convert,
now the boundary which once divided Christendom from the rest of the world began to blur.
More and more we found non-Christians — people who left or rejected the faith or who had never been exposed to it,
and people with other faiths — among us. The "unchurched" were no longer people in other countries far away, but our
neighbors, co-workers, relatives, and friends. Indeed, the government and other institutions were themselves less and less
explicitly Christian. So it occurred to some that evangelism is something that we should be doing right here. Thus
the two understandings of mission collided. The group that heard Jesus telling us to serve others, and the group that
heard him commanding us to convert others now focused on the same people.
This brought the church into conflict over strategy and resources. Serving and converting are two different activities
requiring two different ways of speaking, thinking, and acting. Thus churches and denominations have been waging guerrilla
war for a few decades over budgets and priorities between the "mission is service" group and the "mission is evangelism" group.
Matthew 25 vs. Matthew 28.
But Christ is not divided. The same Lord uttered both passages a few days apart, on either side of his death and resurrection.
He clearly did not mean for his words to be taken as contradictory. He must have thought it was possible to do both service
and evangelism at the same time. It was not he but the church, under pressure from the State, which separated the two.
In the early church, before it was coopted by the Roman Empire, the believers saw no conflict between these emphases. They
understood that service and evangelism were in fact the same thing, and that it was a large part of the mission of the church.
Bringing these two back together does not mean simply mentioning Jesus more in our service activities, or making sure our
evangelism efforts bring physical assistance to the needy. This reblending approach has been shown to be very difficult if
not problematic. Service and evangelism have evolved into two distinct approaches, both based on the Christendom model. Which
is to say that both have tended to be patronizing efforts by the people with all the power to express, prove, and enforce
their superiority over those with none. And both also tended to identify the gospel with the interests of the State. Thus
service and evangelism, in their usual incarnations, both have to do with assisting people in becoming useful and willing
cogs in the economic and social order.
No. We need to rethink the mission of the church from the ground up. In this task we will have more to learn from the early
church and from a few very selective examples of mission in our history, than from anything in the last thousand years. What
the early church, and other fruitful and faithful manifestations like the Celtic mission, understood was that the church does
not do mission; it is mission. The church’s mission is realized and accomplished not in what it does,
but in what it is. That is, the church is doing its mission when it is itself the kind of community Jesus established.
II.
I believe it was the German theologian, Emil Brunner, who made the oft-quoted observation about how mission is to the church
as burning is to a fire. That statement was true and profound... but woefully misunderstood more often than not. For what
was frequently self-servingly gleaned from it was that everything the church does is mission... which means that in the end
nothing is. This motto was used to justify retaining the status quo, as everything the church was already doing became defined
as a part of its mission. What I suspect Brunner really meant was not that the church defines what mission is, but that mission
defines what the church is, the way burning defines what a fire is.
The word in Greek for church is ekklesia. It comes from the prefix ek-, meaning "from" or "out of," and the
word kaleo, which means "call." The church, then, literally is those who have been called; called out from secular
society and called into the Kingdom of God. More specifically, the church is those who have been called by God into a new
community. In that community, in the way it worships, talks, orders its life, serves, and loves, people experience in advance
something of what God’s coming Kingdom is about. The ekklesia is not the place where you work out just the spiritual
or charitable side of your life. It represents an entirely different orientation of your whole life. It is your life.
Under Christendom the church was part of the State. It was one of many cultural and civic institutions the combined effect
of which was to make people more productive, loyal, enthusiastic, and serious participants in the social order. But that was
hardly what Jesus had in mind. Jesus and the apostles understood the church as ekklesia in completely different terms. Peter
in particular calls the Christians "aliens and exiles" (1 Peter 2:11). The church is a group of people who happen to live
under one social order, and yet are loyal to a completely different regime, one "not of this world," but that is nevertheless
coming. In other words, far from being an arm of the State, the original vision of the church was as a beachhead of a foreign
power that was preparing to invade and even overthrow the State. It becomes easy to see why Christians, like the Lord,
were arrested and killed for blasphemy and sedition. They were considered enemies of the State.
The values under which the Christians lived were given, not by the State, but by the Word of God: Jesus and the Scriptures.
These values were lived out in the context of the church. The church became the place where another, alternative, form of
life could happen. It was where people learned to live together according to the rules of God’s Kingdom, as opposed
to the rules of Caesar’s empire. The church was a place of honesty and forgiveness, mutual love and support, equality
and acceptance, transformation and repentance, prayer and worship, and so it became the place where people met God. It was
where they experienced God’s saving Presence in their lives. It was where they related to one another in sacred communion.
The focus of this sacred communion was the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist, the offering of thanksgiving,
the sharing of the Lord’s Body and Blood.
That sacred communion with each other and with the Lord was the essence of being the church. Being the church in this way
was its mission. The church’s mission is to be the sacred community where God’s love is embodied and shared,
and where God is thanked for it.
If we are to recover this more ancient and original model of the church it would mean realizing in our practice that the
mission of the church is not something we do; it is what we are. We do not get together in meetings and groups
for study and planning in order to then go out and do this other thing called mission; rather, our mission is realized and
accomplished in the very act and manner of our getting together and relating to each other and to the Lord. If we are not
the church in our meetings and conversations we will certainly not be the church in whatever we subsequently do after our
meetings and conversations.
Serving and converting others are important, but they are not the primary mission of the church. Rather, they are secondary
and derivative effects of our true mission which is to be the Body of Christ in the world. When we are the Body of Christ,
then our serving and converting of others will emerge naturally.
I find the example of the Irish missionaries during the 5th-12th centuries to be instructive here.
When the Irish monastics undertook mission work they followed the example of Jesus himself. In the Incarnation, Jesus takes
on human life, sharing it down to every detail, and so revealing the love of God to people; therefore the Irish missionaries
followed the same pattern. Their strategy was to move into a village, or even into a sparsely populated rural area, and establish
a household. Dwelling together in a life permeated by prayer and mutual love, they would learn the language and the customs
of the people, and quietly and sincerely over time embody among them the kind of community Christ inspires and creates. Knowing
that it is he who satisfies the deepest longing in the human heart, they knew that their lifestyle would be obviously and
inherently attractive.
This mission was informed by a more inclusive theology that believed God to be present in all creation, all people, and
all cultures. Therefore, instead of eradicating the pre-Christian beliefs of the people, they embraced what was consonant
with the Christian faith and reframed elements that could be reinterpreted in terms of the Christian story. Only irredeemably
violent and perverse aspects of the people’s faith were rejected. But even here it was not done with a paternalistic
and self-righteous attitude. Rather, the point was to show, in the quality of their communal life, how wrong and dangerous
these things were.
Those who were attracted by this model were embraced, instructed in the faith, and incorporated into the community. The
idea is that no one is talked down to. No one is threatened with hell-fire. No one is coerced by the withholding of some benefit.
Neither is anyone paid off or sold out. Finally, the mission did not rely upon the entertainment value of its worship to lure
converts. The church simply embodied Christ’s love for the world in such a way that people observed it and wanted to
be a part of it.
The Irish missionaries did things we would consider service. They ministered to the sick and suffering in the local areas.
The early church was famous for ministering to those whom the rest of society feared or rejected: plague victims for instance.
They did all the things Jesus mentions in Matthew 25. These things were done as an aspect, outgrowth, and expression of the
community’s life together. It would have been clear that these things were done as an expression of their joyful obedience
to the Lord. Not in an attitude of superiority, but as the actions of some broken human beings with others. As people who
have found something wonderful and who are motivated to share what they have found with others.
Thus by being the church, that is, by tending first and foremost to the quality and integrity of its own communal and sacramental
life, the church becomes a place where both Matthew 25 and Matthew 28 can be practiced.
[Part III is not yet complete.]
