The Trialogue of God, Culture, and Contextualization: The MissionShift Conversations, Part 1
- Filed under: Bible, Christianity, church, church planting, contextualization, culture, eschatology, Evangelicalism, Gospel, history, Jesus, kingdom of God, missiology, mission, missional, missional church, missional living, missions, orthopraxy, resurrection, sanctification, sent, Trinity
- Date: Jan 17,2011
[This post is an entry in the Missionshift Book conversation happening @ edstetzer.com]
MissionShift: Global Mission Issues in the Third Millennium is a timely book in the midst of the missional conversation we find ourselves in at the top of the 21st century. It’s a book that I hope gets the press it deserves because it is a indispensable resource for those wrestling with what it means to be “missional.” A big thank you goes to David Hesselgrave and Ed Stetzer for compiling this opus.
At a cursory scan, the book is moored by essays related to mission’s past, present, and future from three of the leading-edge missiologists of our time: Charles Van Engen, the late Paul Hiebert, and the late Ralph Winter. In response to these essays, Hesselgrave and Stetzer gathered a “who’s who” in the field of missiology to interact and debate about the issues therein.
In the coming weeks, I am going to respond to each section in MissionShift. Today, I would like to comment on the first section of MissionShift related to mission’s past.
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I have to admit that Van Engen is one of my favorite missiologists. His books, God’s Missionary People and Mission on the Way, are must-reads for any pastor, church planter, or missionary who is engaged in mission today. These books have informed my thoughts on how mission, the church, the Kingdom of God, and eschatology intersect, like few other.
Van Engen begins by showing us the plethora of ways the word “mission” is being used today — and thus the confusion surrounding the term. Some are attempting to use it correctly, while others are using it to “stand for any kind of new life, vision, vitality, and direction of the church — often with little or no theological or missiological reference.” (10)
I concur with Van Engen that due to this blurring, “it is especially important that the Christian church wrestle with its mission in the sense of articulating the reason and purpose for which it exists” because “a cohesive, consistent, focused, theologically deep, missiologically broad, and contextually appropriate Evangelical missiology has not yet emerged for this new century.” (10, 24)
Van Engen is the consummate historian in this essay, accentuating the important shifts in mission thinking in two millenia of mission’s history. He capably takes us through mission’s past by walking us through mission in the early church through the Constantinian era through the late 1700s circa William Carey through mission reconstruction in the 20th century.
Some will question (like essay respondents Keith Eitel and Andreas Kostenberger) the length at which mission’s past influences Van Engen’s mission present. But as Ed Stetzer notes in his response, the privilege of Biblical revelation does not “preclude us from gaining favorable insights from the history of the church…where God’s truth about the world and the people who live in it may be discerned.” (77)
One of Van Engen’s most important contributions in his essay is where he reminds us that the original Biblical meaning of the word “mission” — apostello and pempo — denotes being sent “forth to service in the Kingdom of God with full authority (grounded in God).” (11)
His point here is to highlight that mission is participating in the mission of Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit. In other words, the sender is Jesus, whose authority “defines, circumscribes, limits, and propels Christian mission.” (12) This is a simple but profound subtlety in the debate over mission today. Who sets the agenda? Whose bias is inserted — the mission agency, the denomination, the sending church, the non-for-profit or something/someone else? Van Engen says, “Biblical mission is God’s mission.” (12)
So how do we let God set the docket for mission?
I believe we do this in large part as we see mission as robustly Trinitarian (as respondent Enoch Wan argues Van Engen is lacking — though Stetzer will later argue that Van Engen is not neglecting in this idea). Van Engen seems to purport this idea but I wish he would have been a bit more clear on this issue. To be fair, Van Engen leans toward this notion in a couple of ways:
1) First, he says “The church is sent by her Lord” and then goes on to say, “mission is participation in the mission of Jesus Christ…in the power of the Holy Spirit,”; I think we can synthesize his thoughts here to support a Trinitarian grounding of mission, but it’s not easily ascertainable (12)
2) He does cite David Bosch’s magisterial definition of mission from Transforming Mission in which Bosch says, “Mission [is] understood as being derived from the very nature of God. It [is] thus put in the context of the Trinity, not ecclesiology or soteriology.” (footnote, 24)
I believe that as we reflect and dialogue on the implications of a Trinitarian grounding for mission, contextual orthopraxy will emerge. These questions strike me as helpful questions to ask ourselves as we use the filter of the Trinity for mission:
–What does the story of God tells us about how God interacts with His people? How does this inform us on how to interact with people?
–How does the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus show us how to live in such a way that the Gospel is attractive to those in our spheres?
–How can we pursue the leading of the Holy Spirit to make prayerful, discerning decisions about mission in our contexts?
In summary, the most helpful respondent essays are from Stetzer, Darrell Guder, and Wan as Eitel’s is polemic in nature and the least helpful. Kostenberger’s response is generally helpful but also seems to show a paranoia that Biblical revelation is being usurped in the name of contextualization.
Guder specifically enriches the conversation by stating, “The authority of Scripture is not then defined so much by our anxiety about boundaries and guidelines but by the powerful way in which God’s written Word continues our conversion to our vocation.” (53) This reminds me of Tim Keller’s thoughts that the key to a Christian’s sanctification is not to tread into deeper theological waters but to come back to the Gospel found in the Word again and again. One of the by-products of this Gospel-wakefulness converts us to a community of faith that understands our vocation as missional.
Stetzer hits the nail on the head when he says, “For us to be biblical…in our reflections on the church’s mission, we must have a theological interpretation of the message of Scripture… (and) of our culture, and a theological application of the gospel to our culture.” (77) This Newbiginian-like trialogue of God’s story (Bible) and culture (context), and practice (contextualization via the local church) does not dilute Biblical revelation but rather enhances it to the glory of God flowing from Trinitarian mission.
