Reframing God's Mission and Our Role In It

I love Jesus and I take seriously discipleship's call into Christian community. But that doesn't mean I don't struggle with much of what happens within the church. The way the church has often conceptualized mission, both on the conservative right and progressive left, has felt incomplete at best and harmful at worst.

But let's back up for a second.

One year into marriage Emily and I got our first dog, Amber. She was a rescued dog from West Virginia and had been badly abused. Consequently, Amber entered our home with certain beliefs about us. She assumed that we were not there to help but rather to harm. She spent the firs few months under a bed in our guest room. Only once in a great while would she slip out from her bunker, rush over for a quick bite to eat, and dive back to safety.

Beliefs, even those that are false, have a tremendous impact on our behavior. This isn't just true for a dog's relationship with their owner. It's true between human beings of course. If you think your spouse is being unfaithful, even if that belief is untrue, it will radically alter your behavior. You will either get bitter and angry or keep the relationship at arms length as a protection mechanism.

The same is also true with humanity's relationship with God. This is why theology matters tremendously. Church history, both historic and modern, is littered with examples of how a belief about God, even though tragically inaccurate, has fueled behavior in harmful ways. Or less dramatically, how an incomplete perception of God, which often emerges from reductionistic thinking (taking a part and making it the whole), produces inaccurate or incomplete behavior.

Few examples are more illustrative than in the realm of eschatology. Christians today are all over the map on this one. Eschatology is the study of "last things" like death, judgement, the fate of humanity and creation. A critical question emerges from the space of eschatology that massively impacts the way churches think about mission and both conservative and progressive Christians are guilty of developing an eschatology that has little in common with Jesus and the New Testament. Where is the world headed? What is God's ultimate plan? Like most conversations, the Jesus-centered approach lands somewhere in the middle of two extremes:

Extreme #1: Post-Christian Optimism

Within this paradigm humanity is on a steady and inevitable march towards utopia. Sure, there are significant setbacks but with enough human ingenuity, creativity, justice and technology we will arrive at a perfected state. Soon enough we will all be drinking flat white's at Starbucks, going to yoga classes and having brunch on on Sunday mornings. This view is "post-Christian" because it often values certain ethics of Jesus (justice, creation care, compassion, forgiveness, love, grace) but wants nothing to do with the authority or lordship. As mark Sayers says, post-christian culture wants "the kingdom without the king".

What's God up to in this framework? Not much. Given the inherent goodness and capability of humanity God isn't intimately involved. He did a bang up job creating human beings in his own image but then decided to hand off the baton and let us run. It feels pretty deistic. If there is a God he is off in the distance and primarily uninvolved.

There's a HUGE problem. This ideology cannot deal with honestly, and therefore effectively, with the depth and breadth of human evil and atrocity. Any side of God that feels like anger, judgement or wrath is completely thrown out as barbaric. But how can God be good if those who were torturing and killing innocent women and children inside Syria (I still can't get out of my mind the 60 minutes episode I watched about 6 months ago on this) are not held accountable. If we are on an inevitable march towards utopia how can we deal honestly with egregious violence, torture, genocide and abuse both past and present?

Extreme # 2: Modern Gnosticism.

One of the first heresies the early church had to deal with was Gnosticism. Situated in Greco-Roman culture, the early church was embedded in an environment shaped by plato's philosophy. For the gnostics, with plato's ideological wind at their back, matter was evil or undesirable. Human beings were an eternal spirit imprisoned in the body. Justo Gonzalez, a church historian, articulates gnostic thoughts this way:

"The world is not our true home, but rather an obstacle to the salvation of the spirit - a view which, although officially rejected by orthodox Christianity, has frequently been a part of it"

As Gonzalez alludes to, gnosticism has made a comeback and often found a home within pop-Christian American evangelicalism.

What is God up to in the world? Saving souls from a dammed creation, and an even scarier hell, into a disembodied heaven. Therefore, the church should separate from culture and God's mission is exclusively about saving souls into heaven. Within this narrow framework social justice is often met with skepticism or downright animosity. N.T. Wright, in his book Surprised By Hope, puts it this way:

"A massive assumption has been made in western Christianity that the purpose of being a Christian is simply, or at least mainly, to “go to heaven when you die,” and texts that don’t say that but that mention heaven are read as if they did say it, and texts that say the opposite, like Romans 8:18-25 and Revelation 21-22, are simply screened out as if they didn’t exist”

Oh the number of harmful implications for church mission that have flowed as a result of this bad theology! Many American Christians are held captive by dualistic thinking and church culture wars. The Christian conviction about the mission of God is perverted by partisanship and church culture wars more than the new testament.

The Jesus-centered alternative: NEW CREATION

Imagine an artist has just completed their masterpiece. Beaming with pride and joy they take a step back to admire their good work. Shortly after, the artwork incurs water damage thanks to some local flooding. Because the painting was so precious to the artist, they don't want to throw out the original and start over. With relentless love and commitment to their good creation, they begin the long process of restoration and renewal to the original. It won't look the same, but some of the best features will remain in tact. The final restoration project will have continuity and discontinuity with the old.

This analogy, although imperfect, hints at the Bible's testimony of new creation. This is the mission of God. This is, by God's great love for his creation, where things are headed. Let's briefly trace this theme of new creation by looking at the biblical narrative in four stages. I'm channeling lots of N.T. Wright and Tim Macke here. And yes, this is overly simplistic. But we have to start somewhere.

Stage 1: Eden

In the beginning God created the world and everything in it. It was good. It was very good. When God stepped back from the work even he was impressed. In Gensis two we learn that both men and women were naked and felt no shame. This garden of eden was a place of purity, abundance, flourishing, goodness and beauty. Heaven (God's space/dimension) and earth (our space/dimension) were in total overlap. One and the same.

Stage 2: Sin and Split

Because God is love he gave humanity agency and freedom to choose relationship with him. After all, love cannot be coercive or manipulative. Humanity leveraged that freedom to walk away from God. Sin entered the world and heaven and earth had a great split. God's space of justice, beauty, goodness and abundance no longer overlapped with our space. Earth then became a place of sin, death, injustice, scarcity and oppression.

Sin caused brokenness and this brokenness had (and has) a multi-dimensional impact:

• Brokenness between us and God

• Brokenness within our own self. Too low or too high of self-esteem

• Brokenness between us and creation: Selfishness, greed and materialism causes us to neglect our care for God's good creation.

• Brokenness between us and others: injustice, oppression, etc.

The original goodness of creation was not lost. However, the powers of sin and death began to have their way.

Stage 3: Overlap Again

But God was determined to rescue and restore his good creation and there began, in glimpses, to be places where heaven and earth overlapped again. God chose the Israelites as the people he would partner with in this cosmic restoration plan. The tabernacle that the Israelites built at Mt. Sinai became a place where heaven and earth overlapped. Through proper ritual and sacrifice the Israelites could enter into God's space on earth. Then, Solomon had the temple built in Jerusalem for that same purpose, a plan for heaven and earth to overlap again in the unhindered presence of God. The babylonians destroyed the temple but the Israelites rebuilt it determined to provide a place for God to dwell.

But then Jesus came on the scene. As John 1 tells us, God put skin on and dwelt among us (literally tabernacled among us). Jesus was fully human and fully divine. A place where heaven and earth overlapped. But Jesus didn't choose to spend his life sitting in the safety of a synagogue reading torah scrolls. Instead, this heaven-on-earth man stepped into the world. He entered into sin, death, disease, oppression, and the margins of society determined to bring heaven with him. As a result, the kingdom of God (a place where God's space and our space overlap because the will and way of God is being done) expanded.

Jesus' ministry culminated in his death on the cross and subsequent resurrection. The power of sin and death was defeated. Ressurection occurred. New creation burst forth. Those who put their trust in Jesus experienced new creation too and a glimpse of what is to come...God's ultimate plan to restore all things.

Stage 4, the Stage to Come: The Restoration of all Things/ New Heavens and New Earth

God wants to do in all of creation what he has done in Jesus: resurrection, renewal, restoration and the defeat of sin and death. When we pay attention to the trajectory of the biblical narrative we see a God whose mission is to renew every nook-and-cranny of creation. God made it all. It all was good. And he wants to redeem it all. There is an abundance of scripture to chose but here are a few key ones:

• Isaiah 65:17-19. The prophet provides an eschatological vision given by God in which a new heavens and a new earth are established. No more sin and death. No more weeping and crying. Just a God delighting in his renewed creation.

• The Gospels. When we are tempted to narrow the concept of God's mission to the either/or of the material and the spiritual we would do well to pick up a gospel and read it through. If anything is clear it is this: Jesus, God's mission with skin on, cared passionately about physical and spiritual needs. He called people back into a reconciled relationship with God and each other. When you look at the totality of what he taught and modeled the mission of God dramatically expands.

• Acts 3:19-21. It's fascinating to me that of the many gospel presentations in the book of Acts by the apostles never once is hell mentioned. They also never discuss a disembodied heaven for our souls to play harps alongside angels with washboard abs. To me this is the ultimate blow to the heaven-hell duality that drives much of American evangelical eschatology and subsequent mission. In this passage Peter, after sharing about the story of Jesus, calls listeners to repentance and points them to a future in which God will restore all things.

• Ephesians 1:9-10. Paul articulate clearly God's plan "bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ". God's plan of redemption is cosmic in scope and has nothing to do with disembodied souls escaping an earth doomed for destruction.

• Revelation 21:1-5. Revelation is notoriously difficult to interpret. Given it's metaphorical and apocalyptic genre one should never develop a systematic theology. Yet, many Christians base their understanding of where God is moving humanity through some proof-texted verses in Revelation. Ironically, the way the book ends is often ignored: a beautiful picture of God's space coming to earth to dwell here among a a fully restored humanity:

"And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them.They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.' He who was seated on the throne said, 'I am making everything new!' Then he said, 'Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.'"

Other passages like Colossians 1 and 1 Corinthians 15 also speak to God's mission being the restoration of all things.

Each of these passages needs to be taken within its context. Some of the imagery in Isaiah and Revelation are surrounded by intense pictures of God's judgement again sin. God takes human evil and the suffering that it causes very seriously. How could he be good if Auschwitz has no accountability and ISIS gets off free?

Unfortunately we have collapsed a beautiful vision of cosmic redemption into a plan to save individual souls from an earth bound for destruction. God's plan is not replacement but renewal and resurrection.

Implications

A robust theology of new creation has tremendous impact on the way we conceptualize the mission of God and the role that we play in it. The list could be long, but I want to highlight three:

Evangelism and Justice matter

The fruitless and baseless debates between evangelism and justice are proof we have lost contact with Jesus and the New Testament related to God's mission in the world, in large part thanks to partisan politics and church culture wars. N.T. Wright puts it this way:

“ It’s no good falling back in to the tired old split-level worlds here some people believe in evangelism in terms of saving souls for a timeless eternity and other people believe in mission in terms of working for justice, peace, and hope in the present world. That great divide has nothing to do with Jesus and the New Testament and everything to do with the silent ensalvement of many Christians to the platonic idealogy of the enlightenment”

If we want to understand the mission of God in the world the clearest revelation is the life of Jesus. One read through a gospel makes it abundantly clear the God cares about physical and spiritual needs. Jesus was all about justice and was committed to drawing people out of burdensome religion and back to God. As Jesus followers we must transcend the polarization towards a third way. A way in which both evangelism and justice are unapologetically held together. This is not a zero-sum game as if doing more justice automatically means less evangelism or vis-a-versa. Imagine if Jesus had that mindset with his followers! If we walk away from social justice we walk away from the old testament and New Testament witness of what God's longs to do in the world. The prophets would have much to say to us. Ironically, they would likely be labeled as "woke" and Critical Race Theorists by many who have been taken captive by a dualistic and narrow mission of God.

The sacred and secular divide must be abolished

When it comes to calling and vocation many Christians assume that only pastors, missionaries and leaders of Christian non-profits engage in work that matters for the kingdom. In this view, someone's work at the grocery store only matters when they are sharing the gospel with a co-worker over the lunch hour. Otherwise, it's just something that pays the bills. They engage the christen mission when they show up to events put on by pastors or contribute financially to missionaries and christian organizations.

This sacred and secular divide must be abolished. Otherwise the mission of the church has a very low ceiling. If this conception of mission is true, then only 1-2% of our congregations have meaningful vocations. If God's mission in the world is the restoration of all things and every aspect of this good creation matters to God, then every follower of Jesus has a meaningful vocation. This is one of the gifts of the gospel. Christian vocation transcends our context. With this view, when I lost my job a year ago I did not lose my vocation. Additionally, the bagger at the local grocery store has a meaningful vocation just like their pastor. Pastors would do well to recognize this and begin to view their role as empowering the vocation of everyone else in their congregation. Do we really think that 98% of the congregation supporting the ministry of a select few is a better way to bring heaven to earth?!

Mission has many entry points

When sin entered the world broken relationships resulted. As noted earlier, this brokenness manifests itself in humanities relationship to God, self, others and creation. If God's mission to is heal and restore all that is broken then we have entry points into missions every single day of our lives, not just when we are on a short term missions trip or supporting a church ministry. Every single day we can find ways to partner with God in what he is doing in the world:

• The teacher who is committed to transforming the teachers lounge into a place of encouragement rather than gossip.

• The supervisor who is committed to seeing the image of God in each member of her team.

• The grocery store bagger who gives special attention to those who need extra help like the elderly or moms with their hands already full.

• The artist, instead of just producing noise and stuff, who is committed to ushering beauty into the world.

• The neighbor who pays close attention to the elderly shut-in down the road.

• The father who cultivates a relationship with a spiritually curious parent from their kids soccer team and shares the story of Jesus.

• The student who commits to welcoming into their social network a peer who is often on the margins.

• The family who rejects materialism during the Christmas season and instead finds radical ways to give.

Of course there are more dramatic and sacrificial examples that can be given. Hopefully we have some of those stories bubbling up in our churches as well. But if we can't see opportunities to partner with God in his mission in the world in our everyday Monday to Saturday lives then we are missing out and so is the world.

May the church grow in its understanding of new creation. And may this belief push us out of culturally conditioned imaginations related to God's mission and into a more hopeful and holistic understanding.