The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.
Antisthenes quotes (Greek philosopher of Athens, disciple of Socrates, 445-365bc)
In “The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative”, Christopher Wright argues that we all need to unlearn some assumptions that aren’t true. Reading the CT summary of his thoughts, I found myself going to Amazon to order the book. I got it today and will soon begin to dig in. Til I can more fully report, here are some of the assumptions we need to unlearn:
1. The original nature of biblical Christianity was polycentric. Acts 1:8 gives the impression that the early church spread out in ripples from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria to the ends of the earth. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve drawn concentric circles to illustrate this impression. In reality, Acts tells a more complicated story. Antioch was the center of westward-oriented missionary work…Paul saw Thessalonica as the radiating center for the gospel in Macedonia and Achaia…Ephesus became the key metropolis for reaching the rest of Asia Minor. Paul wanted to use Rome for a base to go to Spain. In other words, Jerusalem was simply one center among many.
By unlearning this assumption about missions, we recognize that Christianity never had a territorial center. Our center is the person of Christ, and wherever he is known, there is another potential center of faith and witness. If true, our Western assumptions of heartland hegemony are wrong and keeping us from the emergence of genuine world Christianity.
2. If #1 is true, then mission today is from everywhere to everywhere. One quick look at the statistics shows that mission is becoming increasingly multidirectional. Already, 50% of all Protestant missionaries in the world come from non-Western countries, and the proportion is increasing annually.
3. If #1 and #2 are true, then we must unlearn the habit of using the term mission field to refer to everywhere else in the world except our home country in the West. The language of home and mission field is still used by many churches and agencies, but it fundamentally misrepresents reality. Not only does it perpetuate a patronizing view of the rest of the world as always being on the receiving end of our missionary largesse, but it also fails to recognize the maturity of churches in many other lands.
The real mission boundary is not between “Christian countries” and “the mission field,” but between faith and unbelief, and that is a boundary that runs through every land and, indeed, through every local street.
Take some time to listen to Kenyan church leader Oscar Muriu talk at Urbana 2006 here.
One of his quotes:
Two qualities that mark North Americans is your ability to solve problems and your assertiveness. You are quick to speak your mind. . . When you come to Africa, you want to fix Africa. Well, you can’t fix Africa! You must come as listeners and as learners. . . . Come to build bridges of healthy interdependence. Come as people who build reciprocity. Come as people who approach the cultures of the world with respect and with humility. . . . This century must be the century of genuine partnerships.
4. In the Book of Acts, the crisscrossing lines of Christianity’s missionary movement was held together by carefully tended relationships of trust. The book of 3 John is the much-neglected missional tract of our times. It exhorts the church to treat traveling church partners and teachers in a manner worth of God and to respect their self-sacrificing for the name of Christ. Movement building requires this relational, partnering, reciprocal style of missionary interchange.
5. Most of all, we need to unlearn the assumption that mission is about us. The whole Bible presents a God of missional activity, from his purposeful, goal-oriented act of Creation to the completion of his cosmic mission in the redemption of the whole of Creation–a new heaven and a new earth. Behind humanity’s mission to rule and care for the earth and the church’s mission to reach the nations stands God with a mission–the redemption of his whole Creation from the wreckage of human and Satanic evil.
Key Point: Any mission activity to which we are called must be seen as humble participation in this vast sweep of the historical mission of God. All mission or missions that we initiate, or into which we invest our vocation, gifts, and energies, flows from the prior mission of God. God is on mission, and we, in that wonderful phrase of Paul, are “co-workers with God.”
6. The Cross has a comprehensive glory. We mustn’t persist in a narrow, individualistic view of the Cross as a personal exit strategy to heaven. The Cross is the center of holistic, biblical mission–that is, of all we do in the name of the crucified and risen Jesus. Why? Because in all forms of Christian mission, we are confronting the powers of evil and the kingdom of Satan. The cross is the only basis by which we challenge the chains of Satan, in word and deed, in people’s spiritual, moral, physical, and social lives.
Wright concludes his book (I cheated and read the epilogue) with these upside-down thoughts:
We ask, “Where does God fit into the story of my life?” when the real question is, “Where does my little life fit into the great story of God’s mission?”
We wrestle to “make the gospel relevant to the world.” But God is about the mission of transforming the world to fit the shape of the gospel.
We invite God’s blessing on our human-centered mission strategies, but the only concept of mission into which God fits is the one of which he is the beginning and the end.
Source: Christianity Today
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