Structures of Missiological Thought

Mission may be a question to which there are one or more biblically valid answers, but it is not directly a biblical word or term.

So what are we looking for when we ask about mission, and how can the Bible help answer our questions? If we don't know what we are asking about, our answers will be whatever we would like the Bible to say. What questions should we be asking? The way we start to organise our thinking about mission generally suggests something of what we want to finish up saying about mission.

What does a theology of mission look like? Introduction, overview, definitions for thinking about Mission, the Church and the Bible.  Ecclesiology and missiology, the relationship between mission as mission to the world and other directions of the church’s total mission.

Reading: Dimensions; Mission, Missiology
 

We think about theology because we owe it to God and ourselves to be more clear than we are about what God is like and what we should be like. We write about theology to provide the people of God with the tools and models they need to pray and to work and to see life in the light of God shown to us in Jesus Christ. We do theology in different times and places and learn new things about life and Christian faith. We compare faith and understanding with other generations and other peoples.

Missiology is theology thinking about the purpose or mission of the church in the world.

Mission puts us in touch with people of other cultures and of other faiths. However the church is multicultural by its very nature. The multicultural face of Christianity is a fact of ecclesiology - what it means to be church -  not just mission and history.

Missiology does not own the world church, or its mission, but it may find itself the champion of these things. It has no right or desire to take over from other dimensions of critical Christian reflection the tasks of discerning and obeying God's will in a particular time and place. Missiology does however have a contribution to the work of biblical studies, ethics, theology and history in a number of dimensions.

1) The shock of the different - missionaries have seen everything
2) Learning from the challenge of translation and the way in which culture affects interpretation and viewpoint
3) Asking who is the hermeneutical community and what things mean to who
4) Using a framework of Gospel and Culture and critical contextualization
5) Having ground-rules for dialogue between those who see things differently, including taking care to be fair
6) Believing in conversion and transformation - God working from the inside out - not proselytism and imitation.

Those committed to mission are often anxious about support from the rest of the Church. 

Rightly so, but there are changes in many contemporary cultures we need to be aware of.

• When Christians used different foci in mission as markers of identity (evangelicals believed in evangelism, liberals in social action) discussion about mission was a way of sorting out who you were and what the church should be. When those markers become unreliable indicators, then debate about mission is not so useful, and interest in it declined.
• Contemporary corporate culture uses mission statements as a way of clarifying the purpose of organisations and enabling people in organisations to speak the same language and work for a common goal. Churches also find this useful, but also discover that unless you use them all the time they don't work, and unless they are thought through carefully they become dated and people don't identify with them. Churches may have a common goal in worshipping God, following Jesus Christ, and proclaiming salvation, but the diversity of congregational life can be difficult to capture in statements which actually help make decisions about what we do and do not do.
• Claiming the whole church as missionary proclaimed a theological truth, but also put meaningful discourse about mission at risk. Mission is surely an essential part of the nature of the church, but when other legitimate functions of the church are placed under mission rather than alongside it, there is a risk that actual commitment to mission will be dropped in order to deal with the other stuff.
• At different times in history Christians have used different things to debate their identity - Christology (as in the formulation of the Creeds), attitude to the Bible (inerrancy), ecclesiology (marks of the true church and who's got them), philosophy disguised as theology (freewill and predestination) and mission (evangelism and social action). We can expect this to go on happening. We seem to be passing from an era in which mission has provided a key part of these sorts of debates and entering one in which worship (in style if not necessarily substance) is a key concern. Where is missiology when people no longer look to it to address their deepest anxieties about what it is to be church?
• Of course popularity is an unreliable guide to truth, and some of us will want to go on clarifying the responsibility of the Church to the world and society to live out the mission of Jesus!
• At the same time, there are some elements of concern in the life of churches today where missiology because of its history, and the sorts of skills and interests it has developed, can be of particular service to the church in relation to some of its felt needs.
  
  These include
  • witness in a religious rather than a secular environment
  • being a multicultural community in Christ.
  • relating to people of other faiths.
  • finding better tools for processing ethical issues