Abstract
In The Mission of the Church: Five Views in Conversation, Craig Ott gathers five respected missiologists to provide nuanced perspective and response chapters to the questions: “How are we to understand the mission of the church? What precisely is the missionary nature of the church? What are those purposes for which God sends the church into the world?” (ix–x). They map distinctive trajectories from early twentieth- to twenty-first-century mission thought and practice with which to revisit and think afresh about the central questions as answered and lived today.
The five perspectives do not reflect institutional or denominational affiliations, but rather demonstrate the ecumenical and overlapping contours of missiology as a discipline. Trinitarian foundations of the missio Dei, high Christology, and the final reign of God inform each writer. Yet, ecclesiological emphases and the priorities of God’s redemptive work in the present generate some points of divergence. For example, Stephen B. Bevans’s “prophetic dialogue,” Darrell Guder’s “multicultural-translational approach,” and Ruth Padilla DeBorst’s “integral transformation,” or misión integral, display conceptual overlap in the scope of mission practice. The goodness of all creation, the expanse and multiplicity of cultures, and the whole of the cosmos are the theaters of God’s mission. Edward Rommen’s “sacramental vision” underscores the Eucharist as the encounter with Christ that centers mission, both sending out and drawing in the church (159). Ed Stetzer’s “evangelical kingdom community” model upholds that “God’s mission has a people—the church” (99) who serve to advance God’s kingdom, with priority on personal repentance and salvation as entry into the purposes of this kingdom (165).
Ott admits the volume’s weakness is that “four of the five authors are white, male North Americans” (viii). Only Bevans and Padilla DeBorst engage significantly with sources beyond male and white North American and European voices. This is not a minor problem within the construction of missiology discourse. The next generation of scholars and practitioners will need to query and innovate on sources and methods to develop a more expansive conversation that reflects a deeper field of theologies, practitioners, and practices.
Nonetheless, this is a generous, instructive, and affordable book for the specialist and initiated reader alike, within and beyond academic classrooms. The conversation will no doubt prompt clarified understanding (viii) and encourage further reading and doing. I hope that The Mission of the Church will be a starting point for fresh and critical missiological questions and perspectives for the future.