by Gary Corwin
The vocabulary that dominates the theology of mission today features a hierarchy of status describing its very essence. All the terms are derived from the Latin word missio (roughly translated “sent”) and used to convey the concept rooted in the biblical Greek term apostello. At the top is Missio Dei. This is followed by mission and missional in the middle. At the bottom, still championed by ‘unsophisticated slaves to the past,’ is missions.
The vocabulary that dominates the theology of mission today features a hierarchy of status describing its very essence. All the terms are derived from the Latin word missio (roughly translated “sent”) and used to convey the concept rooted in the biblical Greek term apostello. At the top is Missio Dei. This is followed by mission and missional in the middle. At the bottom, still championed by ‘unsophisticated slaves to the past,’ is missions.
This all raises a couple of questions: “Are all these terms really needed? What are the distinctions that they convey?”
As to the distinctions they convey, Missio Dei literally means “mission of God,” and includes everything that God is doing in the world to achieve his purposes. He is sovereign and all that he does in the world, either directly or through his creation agents, is part of Missio Dei.
The part of the Missio Dei that is undertaken by Christ’s Church in all of its variety is reflected in the word mission—the mission of the Church, and all it is to do in the world. Missional is a much more recent Anglicizing of the term to distinguish the outward or other-focus of the Church’s mission from all that the Church does to teach, care for, and minister to its own.
While some may see it as a vestige of the colonial past, or a “From the West to the Rest” approach to mission, missions is actually about that part of the mission of the Church that seeks to cross cultural, religious, and ethnic boundaries to introduce and further the work of the gospel.
In addition, establishing churches among those people groups and communities where Christ is least known has been distinguished over the last several decades as what frontier missions is all about.
As to whether all these terms are really needed, each has a particular important emphasis, even though each overlaps or encompasses at least some of what the others convey. So they are all interrelated, but to the extent they are properly understood, they each do serve a useful purpose. The problems arise when the terms are used in exclusive ways for which they are not adequate, most often in ways that directly undercut or blur the importance of the subordinate emphases.
To say, for example, either that the Missio Dei and the mission of the Church is synonymous, or that the mission of the Church is all that one needs to focus on or be concerned about, runs the risk of defining everything as mission.
The sad history of the International Missionary Council and the World Council of Churches over the last century bears elegant testimony to this truth. The dramatic decline of their related churches in cross-cultural missionary engagement among least-reached populations has few parallels. As historian Stephen Neill once pointed out, “If everything is mission, nothing is mission.”
Neill might have been even more correct had he said, “If everything is mission, missions is not far from extinction.” The reason is that squeaky wheels receive all the attention, but even squeaky wheels that are far away are rarely heard.
Human nature is very predictable when it comes to setting priorities. The things that affect us most intimately—the welfare of our family and friends and the welfare of our community and country—are always going to receive first dibs on our attention. It takes a major adjustment to our mental and spiritual orientation for us to add a focus on geographically or culturally-distant people living and dying without the gospel.
If people(s) and places are outside our orbit of first-hand relationships, then it takes a lot of information and inspiration to get us to really care. And if a missions emphasis focusing on those outside our purview is not a significant part of the burden and teaching of local churches and their members, it will almost always be ignored. Without a special emphasis, the needs across the street (that clearly should be addressed and in former days have too often been neglected) will tend to crowd out the needs across the world.
So rather than limiting ourselves to one or two generalized terms related to mission, or using generalized euphemisms like ‘outreach’, it really is important to be precise in what we are talking about.
Missio Dei is about all that God does in the world. Mission is about all that the Church/churches do in the world. Missional is about what the Church/churches do to reach out beyond themselves. And missions is about crossing boundaries with the gospel to minister to those with limited/least access to it. Without a special emphasis on missions, the unreached and the least-reached will likely stay that way far longer than they should.
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Gary Corwin is staff missiologist with the international office of SIM.
EMQ, Vol. 53, No. 2. Copyright © 2016 Billy Graham Center for Evangelism. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from EMQ editors.
