Mission for every member of the church

This year at its biennial gathering in Pittsburgh, the delegates of Mennonite Church USA adopted a vision to “move more deliberately toward fulfillment of our missional purpose as a church.”

The call to bear witness to God’s reconciling work in Jesus Christ is not limited to “a select few who are specially commissioned and set apart for God’s work,” the delegates affirmed. It is the responsibility of “every member of every congregation.”

It is a bit rare and in fact daunting for an entire denominational body to make this kind of sweeping commitment to deepened missional engagement. It will furthermore be a challenging task in the context of a broader society where increasing numbers of people are questioning the importance and appropriateness of inviting those of other religions to faith in Christ.

So where are we as a church on “the mission question”? It is a conversation we need to have. And when we do, we will discover other questions that will challenge us to reexamine not only our mission commitments but the foundational tenets of the Christian faith itself.

This reality became clear to me several years ago when I conducted a survey with a group of 37 mostly Mennonite university students to identify questions they had about mission. In 20 minutes of small group discussion, 144 questions surfaced. Many of these appeared multiple times. Still, no fewer than 63 distinct issues emerged.

I have repeated this exercise in other settings and harvested an even wider range of questions: What is so unique about Christianity anyway? How can we be sure all paths to God aren’t the same? What happens to people who have never heard of Jesus? Who are we to say what is right and wrong? And the list goes on and on.

When we choose to take on the issue of mission, an accompanying cluster of other intersecting questions will require our attention. They include the following:

1. God. Does God in fact have a plan to save the world? And if so, does that plan apply to all peoples of the earth, or is it limited in scope, designed and intended only for certain individuals, families, tribes or nations?

2. Jesus. What role does Jesus play in God’s plan? Is Jesus who and what he claimed to be? Did he say what he meant? And did he mean what he said? Is he simply “one among the many”? Or is he in fact “the One among many”?

3. Scriptures. Is the biblical text a trustworthy source for our understanding of God’s saving plan? Or have science, the Jesus Seminar and The Da Vinci Code destroyed its reliability? And what about the Qur’an, the Gospel of Judas, Native American spiritual sources and our own life experiences? How does the Bible stand up to these?

4. Church. Wouldn’t it be better if the church simply faced head-on its own internal conflicts and brokenness and cleaned up its act before proclaiming “good news” to others? Shouldn’t the church be a model of the gospel before attempting to be its messenger?

5. History. What about all the horrible things—Crusades, slavery, colonialism, racism—that have been done in the name of Christianity over so many years? Aren’t these reasons enough for the church to take a break from mission for a while?

6. Culture. Are there respectful ways for the church to approach people of other faiths and cultures? And if so, why do so many Christians have bad reputations as culture-bashers, imposing their faith on people through manipulation and coercion?

7. Global faith family. What will happen to the church and its mission as the center of gravity for the Christian family moves south? What new issues and challenges will the global church face? How will it feel for Christians in the West to live in a world where the majority of missionaries are Africans, Asians and Latin Americans, a world where the West is considered “a vast mission field” in desperate need of the gospel?

We at the Mission Network take these questions seriously. But even as we do, we continue to affirm a certain number of core convictions. We believe that mission is:

• God initiated. God is first and foremost a missionary God with a cosmic peace plan to set things right with our broken, violent and sinful world.
• Christ centered. Jesus the Messiah is the means, the messenger and the model of that plan.
• Scripture inspired. The Bible is a God-breathed, trustworthy account of God’s passionate love for the world and of God’s people, chosen and Spirit-empowered by God to be “a light to the nations.” This story begins with the call and promise to Abraham and Sarah and finds fruition in the body of believers who gather around Jesus. It is a story centuries long in the making and has been passed down to us for our instruction on how to live faithfully as God’s missional people in our time and place.
• Church based. The body of Christ, despite its failures and imperfections, remains the principle instrument through which the “practice” and “proclamation” of God’s saving plan in Jesus are made known to the world.
• Jesus styled. Living faithfully as God’s missional people means doing mission the way Jesus did it, rejecting all forms of coercion and cultural cloning, and instead commending to all who will listen the liberating, life-transforming
  thing God is doing by breaking on to the human scene, becoming flesh and blood and “moving into the neighborhood” (John 1:14, The Message).
• Partner driven. We are not lone rangers in this calling but partners with sisters and brothers in our own communities, throughout the church at congregational and district conference levels and with believers around the world as the good news of Jesus becomes known and embraced by new people in new places.
• Globally engaged. For us at the Mission Network this has meant enthusiastic participation in the Global Mission Fellowship of Mennonite World Conference as we explore together with scores of other Anabaptist-related churches and mission groups worldwide how to cultivate mutuality, share resources, empower local initiatives and create new alliances for our common missional calling as God’s people. In the process, we are learning new roles as we move from parent to partner, from lecturer to learner, from resource to recipient, from founder to friend.

We will not as a church achieve clarity and agreement on all aspects of “the mission question” overnight. It will take hard work, renewed focus and disciplined intentionality around a new set of priorities. But each day of creative reflection and faithful obedience will bring us closer to the central affirmations that have given life and sustenance to followers of Jesus from the earliest era of the Christian movement to the present day.

The challenge before us is not for the mission agency alone but for the entire body of Christ—all congregations, all district conferences, all camps and schools, all members of Mennonite Church USA—as we seek together to “move more deliberately toward fulfillment of our missional purpose as a church.”

Mennonites at various points in our history have proven remarkably timid in bearing witness to God’s cosmic peace plan to “reconcile all things to himself in Christ” (Colossians 1:20).

Lesslie Newbigin, lifelong mission worker and former bishop in the Church of South India, calls us to a higher level of reflection and involvement when he writes: “If, in fact, it is true that Almighty God, Creator and Sustainer of all that exists in heaven or on earth, has—at a known time and place in human history—so humbled himself as to become part of our sinful humanity and to suffer and die a shameful death to take away our sin and to rise from the dead as the first fruit of a new creation; if this is a fact, then to affirm it is not arrogance. To remain quiet about it is treason to our fellow human beings.”