John Mackay’s Missional Vision

When John Mackay assumed the presidency of Princeton Theological Seminary in 1936, he had completed 20 years of notable service as a Scottish Presbyterian missionary in Latin America. His commitment to global mission converged with a parallel commitment on the part of the Seminary that can be traced back to its founding. When, in 1811, the Presbyterian Church decided to form Princeton Theological Seminary as a separate institution next to and building upon the liberal arts education offered at Princeton College, the General Assembly stipulated that the new school should also serve as a “nursery for missionaries to the heathen … in which youth may receive the appropriate training which may lay a foundation for their ultimately becoming eminently qualified for missionary work.” In 1830, the church decided to create a professorial chair in “pastoral theology and missionary instruction,” stating that “the spirit of the religion of Jesus Christ is essentially a spirit of Missions.” Thus, Princeton Seminary was the first institution of theological education to incorporate the teaching of mission into its curriculum. ¹ As the global missionary movement grew in scope and activity through the remainder of the nineteenth century, the interest in mission at Princeton also grew, as evidenced by the number of graduates who went out as missionaries. “Robert Speer reported at the Seminary’s centenary in 1912 that in its first century, 410 Princeton graduates had enlisted in foreign mission—that was one out of every thirteen alumni.” ² During his two years as a master’s student at Princeton (1913–15), Mackay actively pursued his own preparation for missionary service, including his work as a leader in the Student Volunteer Movement. Warfield suggested that he pursue advanced studies in Spain to prepare himself for the missionary service in Latin America which had become his vocational vision. ³

I will argue in this brief article that Mackay’s distinctive and many-faceted engagement with the theological issues of mission anticipates, challenges, and informs in significant ways the contemporary discussion that centers around the theme of “the missional church.” The theological intention of the neologism “missional” can be defined and interpreted by the major themes that shape Mackay’s legacy as a major missiologist of the twentieth century.

Mackay’s work as a missionary, mission scholar, and theological educator was profoundly shaped by his confrontation with the end of Western Christendom and the challenges of the emerging mission fields of the post-Christendom West. “We live in the Post-Constantinian age, a time in which the imposing unity of Church and State has been shattered, bringing to an end … the special secular privileges of the Christian religion.” He was hesitant to speak about the context as a “Post-Christian age,” but he acknowledged that “we have now entered a period in the history of Western man where Christian axioms and assumptions no longer constitute the basis of his thought or action.” ⁴ Rather than lamenting the much-discussed “paradigm shift” in Western Christianity, he regarded it as an opportunity to refocus the church on its essential mission. This entailed a candid engagement with the problems inherited from centuries of the establishment of Christianity and the Christian church.

At the 1928 meeting of the International Missionary Council in Jerusalem, he addressed “the evangelistic duty of Christianity” by first of all reviewing the essential christocentricity of the gospel and the church’s witness to it. The person and work of Jesus Christ is the magnetic center that orients and focuses every theological issue related to the church and its mission. In this, he anticipated the driving energy of the missional theological discussion of today. The missional project, then and now, entails fundamental theological work centered on Jesus Christ. As Mackay saw it, “the members of every congregation “must be taught that everything, in every relationship of life, must be done ‘in the Lord,’ out of reverence for Christ, and in obedience to him. They must be taught to take on Christ’s yoke in the fullest sense … A true theology and a true sense of mission must be imparted to them.” ⁵ The issues confronting the Christian movement were and are no longer merely missionary strategies or policies. “The time is clearly ripe to probe deeply into the theology of mission … What does mission—mission of any kind—mean?” ⁶

Half a century later, as Western Christendom clearly declines on both sides of the north Atlantic, the need to “probe deeply” into the church’s vocation to be, do, and say witness to Jesus Christ has become the central intention of the missional theological initiative. Mackay was raising issues that now form the agenda for the missional rethinking of the church’s nature, purpose, and action. When, in the Jerusalem document, Mackay asked how the Christian message is then to be presented in this rapidly changing context, his proposals are still relevant to the present realities of the Western mission fields. He formulated three evangelistic strategies which confront the negative obstacles inherited from centuries of Christendom: (1) “Win the right to be heard”; (2) “Present that aspect of Christ which the situation requires”; and (3) “When necessary, rid the presentation of ritual accompaniments.” ⁷ With these pithy imperatives, he advocated the missional freedom to practice the kind of theological contextualization that must happen if faithful witness is to be possible. The plain fact is that the cultural captivity and compromises of Western Christendom have resulted in our losing “the right to be heard” in our own contexts. Much of the missional theological initiative today focuses on understanding how our cultural contexts have become such resistant and difficult mission fields. As one reads Mackay’s essays, sermons, editorials, and correspondence from the 1920s onward, one constantly discovers trenchant insights into the theology and practice of missional witness that both challenge and liberate the church to follow its vocation.

With his distinctive gift for memorable formulations, Mackay summarized the missional challenge before world Christianity with his appeal to “let the church be the church.” It was in a preparatory document he authored for the Oxford Conference on Church, Community and State (1937), an event whose theme and deliberations, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, powerfully testified to the urgency of the church’s coming to terms with its history in order to be free for faithful witness. Mackay’s argumentation can be read as his missional vision for the church:

Let the Church be the Church. Let the Church know herself, whose she is and what she is. Discerning clearly her own status as the Community of Grace, the organ of God’s redemptive purpose for mankind, she must by a process of merciless self-scrutiny become what God intended her to be. Nothing less than that, nor yet anything more than that … It must be her ceaseless concern to rid herself from all subjugation to a prevailing culture, an economic system, a social type, or a political order. Let the Church live; over against all these, let the Church stand. ⁸

Mackay’s missional vision focused on the ecumenical character of the church’s vocation and practice. The global missionary movement was the driving force that led to the 1910 Conference on World Mission in Edinburgh, and the emergence of the International Missionary Council was one of its most constructive organizational outcomes. Mackay was an articulate advocate of the emerging “Ecumenical Movement” from its outset. This he made especially clear as he appointed himself Professor of Ecumenics at the Seminary and, having initiated this new discipline, he began the development of its curriculum. In retirement, he drew together his research and constructive theological work on this theme with the publication of Ecumenics: The Science of the Church Universal. The discipline as he envisioned it “embraces everything that concerns the nature, functions, relations, and strategy of the Church Universal, when the latter is conceived as a world missionary community.” ⁹ The final phrase is crucial. The church, if it is to be the church, must understand itself as a “world missionary community.” This basic presupposition summarizes the intention of the term “missional” in contemporary discussion. It entails attention to the following concerns, all of which are addressed in diverse ways in Mackay’s work.

The formative role of Scripture. The fundamental christocentricity that marks Mackay’s work defines his view of Scripture, which may be regarded as an early precursor of “missional hermeneutics,” which is a growing concern of the missional theological initiative today. “No one can know what Jesus Christ and His lordship really mean save in the context of Holy Scripture. For Jesus Christ is in the fullest sense the Lord of the Scriptures, the clue to their meaning, and the core of their message.” ¹⁰ To submit to the formative power of Scripture is not, however, to make the Bible an idol. Rather, it is to experience the Spirit’s work through Scripture for the formation of faithful Christian witnesses, both individually and corporately. This necessitates the development of a “missional hermeneutic,” which responds to the fact that

the Bible demands that those who study it should become willing to adopt the basic attitude towards God and life which it challenges men to adopt. It demands especially that they submit to the sway of that central Figure, Jesus Christ, whom it presents. When men are willing to adopt a Biblical point of view, to put themselves in the perspective from which the Bible looks at all things and to identify themselves with the spiritual order of life which the Bible unveils, they understand the Bible, they see those spiritual realities about which the Bible speaks. ¹¹

The Epistle to the Ephesians had made a profound impact on the young Mackay as he grappled with his growing sense of vocation to ministry. In 1948, he presented, as the Croall Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, his interpretation of Ephesians, under the thematically revealing title, God’s Order: The Ephesian Letter and This Present Time. Although based on careful scholarship and displaying all the hallmarks of exegetical responsibility, the book is not so much a commentary as it is an interpretation of the message and impact of this epistle as it continues the apostolic formation of witnessing communities.

The Vocation of Witness. “It cannot be emphasized too much or too often that mission is of the essence of the Church.” ¹² Nor can it be overemphasized that this essential mission must take concrete shape in the life and actions of the Christian community and of its members. The church does not exist as an end in itself but as the servant of God’s mission that embraces all of creation. “The Church is truly the Church only when corporate worship, theological understanding and ecclesiastical unity move Christians to missionary ardor, inspiring them to move in crusading array beyond the portals of the sanctuary towards all the frontiers of the world.” This conviction can even serve as a means of discerning the authenticity of a community’s claim to be Christian: one “can never rest satisfied with a Church which worships God but does not bear witness to God.” ¹³ With this emphasis on the concrete action of witness in the world, Mackay drew together major themes of the missiological work of the International Missionary Council during all the years of its activity. But he also anticipated the missional ecclesiology of Karl Barth, who insisted that the vocation of witness defined the identity and purpose of the Christian person and the Christian community.

The Comprehensive Character of the Vocation of Witness. Missional ecclesiology today grapples with the inherited issues of ordered ministry, especially the problematic division of the gathered community into the ordained and the lay. Mackay read the classical text in Ephesians 4, dealing with the “offices,” with strong focus on the function of “apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers” as “equippers of the saints.” The “supreme objective of the gifted men [see Eph 4:11] must be to equip the ‘saints’ that they, in turn, may engage in ministering, that they too may be servants, and that resulting from their service the Body of Christ may be built up.” ¹⁴ It was and is significant for the whole enterprise of theological education that the outcome of this work is not ultimately the qualified graduate, the theological specialist, the clerical professional. Rather, as Mackay emphasizes,

it is the function of “ministers” so to equip the “saints,” that is, members of the rank and file of the Christian congregation who are, by their commitment and profession, “Christ’s men and women,” that they too may render service to Christ and the Church in the fullest sense of the term. ¹⁵

Thus, Mackay summarizes the ethical formation undertaken in Ephesians 5 as “the four imperatives of Christian living”: “Walk in the light”; “Copy God”; “Learn Christ”; and “Be Filled with the Spirit.” ¹⁶ As he expounds the Pauline exhortations, he focuses on the apostle’s theme that most pointedly addresses missional formation for the vocation of witness: “Paul … proclaimed that Christians must live on the roads of life in a way worthy of their calling.” ¹⁷ What constitutes such worthiness is a theme that figures large in the present-day missional exploration of the vocation of witness. Mackay’s exposition of Ephesians is still a fresh and provocative resource for that exploration.

The Witness of Unitive Mission. Mackay’s ecumenical vision was comprehensive and inspiring. It informed every aspect of his leadership. It generated a practice of hospitality that was remarkably inclusive. Among his friends he reckoned representatives of all the Christian traditions, including the emerging Pentecostal Churches and the contemporary para-church movements. But unity was for him a profoundly theological and gospel-centered commitment. His analysis of the theme of unity in ecumenics is explicitly ecclesiological. There, he works comprehensively through four complementary functions of the church: its worshiping function, its prophetic function, its redemptive function, and its unitive function. ¹⁸ He draws on the diverse ecclesiological traditions both appreciatively and critically, making clear that a gentle and hospitable spirit can certainly practice critical discernment in constructive ways.

The theological work of the ecumenical movement in the twentieth century has certainly generated important insights and facilitated movement toward visible unity. But there is reason for concern when we look at the present situation. The wind of the Spirit that appeared to be driving the sail of the ecumenical ship seems to have lost power. There appears to be little energy available to pursue the unity of the church using the strategies and methods that developed in the course of the twentieth century. The legacy of Western Christendom has slanted the ecumenical conversation toward matters of institution, organization, property, wealth, and polity. Mackay’s framing of the theme of unity under the larger rubric of mission is an important perspective which presents an alternative that might enliven the ecumenical movement again. Looking back on the ecumenical movement of the twentieth century through Mackay’s perspective, one has to wonder if the loss of vision is related to the failure to understand unity primarily in terms of missional obedience and faithfulness. That was certainly Mackay’s ecumenical vision, and he formulated it often and with passion.

He concluded his address to the Ghana Assembly of the International Missionary Council in 1958 with an appeal to the “unitive mission” which the Christian church is called to fulfill. The model of unity is not organizational. Unity has to do with the “oneness which exists between the Father and the Son.” The trinitarian unity is not static but “a dynamic unity.” It is even a “missionary unity.” It has to do with the witness before a watching world to the triune God’s self-sending for the sake of the healing of creation. How that unity will take shape must be determined by the trinitarian gospel to be embodied.

It is on the road of missionary obedience that the unity of the Church of Christ will be achieved and will prove most effective. It is on this road, and only on this road, that a pilgrim missionary Church, which subordinates everything in its heritage to the fulfillment of its mission, will discover the structural form and appropriate organ which will best express its oneness in Christ and contribute most to its missionary service for Christ. On the road of the Church’s missionary obedience the Holy Spirit will reveal the form of ecumenical organization which is most in harmony with the reality of the Church as a world community which seeks to be loyal to its mission and its unity.

Mackay’s missional vision of the unity of the Church both informs and admonishes us today to pursue that vision with renewed commitment. It focuses us on the essentially martyriological nature of the unity of the church. It is concrete witness to the sovereign grace of the ruling Lord Jesus Christ who overcomes all human walls of separation as he draws all to himself. It expects that the “form” and “organ” of such concrete unity will be given by God’s Spirit to the divided churches as they journey together on “the road of the Church’s missionary obedience.”