Our dear brother James Mueller preached this past Sunday on our value of “mission.” His sermon concludes our series in which we have been preaching through our 5 key values. You can read all of them here.
What I’d like to do now is to offer a few notes, expanding and exploring points brought-up by James on this theme:
We’ve said it about all our values so far, and we’ll say it here: one can read the whole story of the Bible as the story of Mission (just as it is about “Worship” and “Family” and “Word” and “Feasting”). God is on mission. God is Mission Himself. God invites us, even before the Fall, to partner with Him in the glorification of the world.
That being said, it is good to note that “mission” does not begin only after the Fall. It is not merely a response to Adam and Eve’s sinfulness. It is more ancient than sin and more eternal than it. Redemption is a state where we are restored to being on mission with God forever.
Mission, therefore, while it includes the salvation of the lost and the prodigal, is not reducible to it. Evangelism is a part of mission, but mission is always larger than it. A part of God’s mission is that we go out and seek and save the lost. Why? So that they can enter into mission as well.
Mission, therefore, includes all manner of things beyond salvation: justice, culture, care for creation, invention, administration, governance, catechesis, discipleship. Mission is doing the work the Lord has given you to do for the glory of God.
This keeps us from the despondency and lackadaisical posture of late modernity to “mission".” If “mission” only means “foreign missions to those who have literally never heard the name of Jesus” then only a handful of God’s people are called to be on mission. But that’s not true. God’s whole kingdom, from the least to the greatest, are called to go on mission wherever the Lord has them: schools, jobs, travel, leisure, creativity, finance, etc. Wherever the Lord has you, there is the place you are called to be on mission.
This also protects us from falling into a kind of clericalism —a belief that only the clergy do the real work of mission. That. Is. Wrong. Just the opposite is true: the clergy serve to equip, lead and enable the people of God for the mission of God. This confronts a dark place in our hearts in which we don’t really want to be involved in mission, but we’d very much like to be a part of a church that does mission so we can say —in a perversion of solidarity— “the church I go to is missional.”
Where has the Lord put you? There go and make disciples. There be hospitable. There seek and serve those in need. There name the unnamed things. There be fruitful and multiply. There give glory to God for all the good things He has given you.