"What's it all about?" - Chris Wright
(from "Four Corners", the UFM magazine, reproduced here by kind permission of the editor.)
I remember them so vividly from my childhood – the great banner texts around the walls of the missionary conventions in Northern Ireland where I would help my father at the stall of the Unevangelised Fields Mission, of which he was Irish Secretary after twenty years in Brazil. ‘Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature’, they urged me, along with other similar imperatives in glowing gothic calligraphy. By the age of 12, I could have quoted you all the key ones – ‘Go ye therefore and make disciples…’ ‘How shall they hear…?’ ‘You shall be my witnesses… to the ends of the earth.’ ‘Whom shall we send?…Here am I, send me’. I knew my missionary Bible verses. I had responded to many a rousing sermon on most of them.
By the age of 21 I had a degree in theology from Cambridge, in which the same texts had been curiously lacking. At least, it is curious to me now. At the time there seemed to be little connection at all between theology and mission in the mind of the lecturers, or of myself, or, for all I knew, in the mind of God either. ‘Theology’ was all about God – what God was like, what God had said and what God had done and what mostly dead people had speculated on all three. ‘Mission’ was about us, the living, and what we’ve been doing since Carey (who of course was the first missionary, or so we erroneously thought).
‘Mission is what we do.’ That was the assumption, supported of course by clear biblical commands. ‘Jesus sends me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.’ Many years later, including years when I was teaching theology myself as a missionary in India (another curious thought: I could have done precisely the same job in a college in England, but that would not have been considered "mission"), I found myself teaching a module called The Biblical Basis of Mission at All Nations Christian College – an international mission training institution in South East England, UK. The module title itself embodies the same assumption. Mission is the noun, the given reality. It is something we do and we basically know what it is; biblical is the adjective, which we want to use to justify what we already know we should be doing.
The reason why we know we should be doing mission, the basis, foundation or grounds on which we justify it, must be found in the Bible. As Christians, we need a biblical basis for everything we do. What, then, is ‘the biblical basis for mission’? Roll out the texts. Add some that nobody else has thought of. Do some joined-up theology. Add some motivational fervour. And the class is heart-warmingly appreciative. Now they have even more biblical support for what they already believed anyway (for these are All Nations students, after all; they only came to the college because they are committed to doing mission).
This mild caricature is not in the least derogatory in intent. I believe passionately that mission is what we should be doing, and I believe the Bible endorses and mandates it. However, the more I taught that course, the more I used to introduce it by telling the students that I would like to rename it: from The Biblical Basis of Mission, to The Missional Basis of the Bible. I wanted them to see, not just that the Bible contains a number of texts which happen to provide a rationale for missionary endeavour, but that the whole Bible is itself a ‘missional’ phenomenon. The writings which now comprise our Bible are themselves the product of, and witness to, the ultimate mission of God.
The 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. The Bible is the drama of this God of purpose engaged in the mission of achieving that purpose universally, embracing past, present and future, Israel and the nations, ‘life, the universe and everything’.
Mission is not just one of a list of things that the Bible happens to talk about, only a bit more urgently than some. Mission is, in that much-abused phrase, ‘what it’s all about’.
I remember them so vividly from my childhood – the great banner texts around the walls of the missionary conventions in Northern Ireland where I would help my father at the stall of the Unevangelised Fields Mission, of which he was Irish Secretary after twenty years in Brazil. ‘Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature’, they urged me, along with other similar imperatives in glowing gothic calligraphy. By the age of 12, I could have quoted you all the key ones – ‘Go ye therefore and make disciples…’ ‘How shall they hear…?’ ‘You shall be my witnesses… to the ends of the earth.’ ‘Whom shall we send?…Here am I, send me’. I knew my missionary Bible verses. I had responded to many a rousing sermon on most of them.
By the age of 21 I had a degree in theology from Cambridge, in which the same texts had been curiously lacking. At least, it is curious to me now. At the time there seemed to be little connection at all between theology and mission in the mind of the lecturers, or of myself, or, for all I knew, in the mind of God either. ‘Theology’ was all about God – what God was like, what God had said and what God had done and what mostly dead people had speculated on all three. ‘Mission’ was about us, the living, and what we’ve been doing since Carey (who of course was the first missionary, or so we erroneously thought).
‘Mission is what we do.’ That was the assumption, supported of course by clear biblical commands. ‘Jesus sends me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.’ Many years later, including years when I was teaching theology myself as a missionary in India (another curious thought: I could have done precisely the same job in a college in England, but that would not have been considered "mission"), I found myself teaching a module called The Biblical Basis of Mission at All Nations Christian College – an international mission training institution in South East England, UK. The module title itself embodies the same assumption. Mission is the noun, the given reality. It is something we do and we basically know what it is; biblical is the adjective, which we want to use to justify what we already know we should be doing.
The reason why we know we should be doing mission, the basis, foundation or grounds on which we justify it, must be found in the Bible. As Christians, we need a biblical basis for everything we do. What, then, is ‘the biblical basis for mission’? Roll out the texts. Add some that nobody else has thought of. Do some joined-up theology. Add some motivational fervour. And the class is heart-warmingly appreciative. Now they have even more biblical support for what they already believed anyway (for these are All Nations students, after all; they only came to the college because they are committed to doing mission).
This mild caricature is not in the least derogatory in intent. I believe passionately that mission is what we should be doing, and I believe the Bible endorses and mandates it. However, the more I taught that course, the more I used to introduce it by telling the students that I would like to rename it: from The Biblical Basis of Mission, to The Missional Basis of the Bible. I wanted them to see, not just that the Bible contains a number of texts which happen to provide a rationale for missionary endeavour, but that the whole Bible is itself a ‘missional’ phenomenon. The writings which now comprise our Bible are themselves the product of, and witness to, the ultimate mission of God.
The 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. The Bible is the drama of this God of purpose engaged in the mission of achieving that purpose universally, embracing past, present and future, Israel and the nations, ‘life, the universe and everything’.
Mission is not just one of a list of things that the Bible happens to talk about, only a bit more urgently than some. Mission is, in that much-abused phrase, ‘what it’s all about’.
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