Mission is More Than a Commission
Most Christian missions endeavors—if not all—take as their starting point the Great Commission delivered by Jesus to his disciples. It is found in the purpose statements of missions organizations, the opening pages of missions textbooks, and the statements of belief of “sending” churches.
There is perhaps no more direct or concise call for missions than the words of Christ: “Go and make disciples of all the nations…” (Matt 28:19, NLT). With such explicit language, it is all too easy for us to understand this moment as the dawn of the Christian mission to “all the nations.” If we stick rigidly to the narrowest sense of the term “Christian,” then we may be able to justify such a claim, but the biblical perspective is not so confined.
The mission of those following Christ’s example does not begin in Matthew 28 but is witnessed from Jesus’s very first arrival among us (the case for an early point of origin will be made below—patience please…). It is not the imperatives of “go!” or “make disciples” that should define the shape of Christian missions, but rather the very life and lifestyle of the one we follow. The Great Commission is not the beginning of a new ministry but the culminating command of a design put into action years earlier (or millennia…again, patience).
The story of the Gospels is not one strictly of disciple-making—if it were, the authors could have stopped with the “calls” issued to the twelve. Instead, what was remarkable about Jesus’s ministry and what drew hordes to him were the relationships he formed with people and the interest he had in their real-world circumstances. In a recent post for Mosaic, Becky Burroughs helpfully summarizes the gist of many Gospel narratives:
I was dead, but Jesus brought me back to life.
I was lame or blind or mute or deaf or paralyzed, but Jesus healed me.
I was a sinful woman who washed Jesus’s feet with my hair, but Jesus forgave me.
I had a withered hand, but Jesus restored it.
We had no wine for the wedding, but Jesus turned water into wine, and then we had the finest.
I was a leper, but Jesus healed me.
My mother-in-law was sick with fever, but Jesus healed her.
I had a demon, but Jesus cast it out.
I was caught in adultery and condemned to be stoned to death, but Jesus forgave me.
Our boat was overcome by a storm, but Jesus calmed it.
There were 5,000 of us hungry, but Jesus fed us.
My ear was cut off when I came to arrest Jesus, but he restored it.
Notably, all of these scenarios occurred before Jesus issued the Great Commission to his disciples, and they are not separate from the mission to which he called them. Certainly, teaching and “discipleship making” are a component of Christ’s command, but in his own ministry, these things often came after the relational investment that awoke the passersby from their slumber and drew their eyes up to something extraordinary happening in their world.
Still, though, we may wonder if the “Christian” mission can be content to find its pattern only in the earliest pages of the New Testament. As the one who drew his followers' eyes not up to himself but to the one who sent him, Christ would beckon us to follow their gaze. Such a command is very clear from the words Jesus offers to the crowds surrounding him: “For when you see me, you are seeing the one who sent me” (John 12:45, NLT; the surrounding verses merit further reading here, also). While God’s indwelling our world through Christ marks the high point of the Divine’s relational passion for us, it is very clearly a continuation of the work that God had already been doing from the creation of the world—and these stories, too, should factor into our idea of “missions.”
The episodes we might recall from the history of Israel are vast, and we might just say that from the Garden of Eden onward, God relentlessly pursued nurturing relationships with humanity, even when we stubbornly resisted such compassion. From the calling of Abraham to the enduring guidance of Israel, the Lord walked alongside the people he called into existence. But the work did not stop there; the people were called not only to follow the Divine but to expand their relationships outward in order to bring in those around them. As missiologist Christopher Wright observes in The Mission of God's People (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2010, p. 46):
God’s mission is what spans the gap between the curse on the earth of Genesis 3 and the end of the curse in the new creation of Revelation 22. God’s mission is what brings humanity from being a cacophony of nations divided and scattered in rebellion against God in Genesis 11 to being a choir of nations united and gathered in the worship of God in Revelation 7.
When we, as the people of God, think of “missions,” we must frame it within the entire biblical picture of God’s work to reconcile humanity to himself, that is, to bring humanity into proper relationship with him.
This conviction has served as the creative spark for our upcoming missions community at Summit. We have invited a handful of guests who have reconfigured the notion of “missions” around the relational priority of our God, and we asked them to share with us their journey and vision for how the Church can follow in the missional example of Christ and the one who sent him. We’ll start where most missions discussions do not—in our own backyards. By asking how we treat our relationships with our physical neighbors, we’ll chart out relational principles that should equally inform our interactions with our global neighbors. This, we hope, will help us to think of how our short-term mission trips and long-term missionary support should prioritize this dynamic in their work. We invite you to join us Oct. 11–13 at Summit as we explore this topic together in our missions community.
