Abstract
This article proposes a means to reconcile and properly order two of the dominant missiological concepts of the past century: the so-called “Great Commission” of Matthew 28:18–20, and the concept of missio Dei. By doing so, the article seeks to offer a more robustly trinitarian basis for mission which references the Great Commission, and a means to better nuance and understand the relationship between divine and human agency in mission. To make these arguments, the article offers a theological primer on and critique of the two missiological concepts, then contends that the Great Commission should be understood as a second-order, rather than a first-order, frame of reference for mission, located within the wider trinitarian framework of the “even greater” co-missions of the Son and Spirit. The article then draws on the theology of Karl Barth to affirm that the church, insofar as its actions correspond to God’s own activity in the Spirit, can be regarded as the locus of human co-activity in the pneumatological missio of God. With further reference to Barth, the article proposes that properly ordering and relating the Great Commission and the missio Dei allows for a cooperative, if asymmetrical, co-missional account of the relation between God’s agency and human action in mission. While primarily drawing on the resources of systematic theology, the article concludes with some preliminary implications for mission theology and practice.
Either/or: the Great Commission or missio Dei?
Two major missiological concepts have dominated mission discourse, particularly among Protestant denominations, over the past century. 1 The missiological trope that has animated much of the mission activity of evangelical and Pentecostal churches in particular is the so-called “Great Commission” of Matthew 28:18–20. 2 By contrast, churches associated with the World Council of Churches, and its ecumenical predecessor, the International Missionary Council, have tended to embrace the missiological concept of missio Dei, which locates human mission within the redemptive work of God in the world. This article will offer a theological primer on these two concepts and propose a means of relating and properly ordering them. In particular, it will be contended that the Great Commission is best regarded as a second-order missiological framework located within a chastened understanding of the missio Dei, as part of the latter’s pneumatological outworking. The aims of the article are to reconcile the sometimes-stand-alone frameworks, offer a more adequate trinitarian basis for mission driven by the so-called Great Commission, and provide a viable and nuanced account of dual agency on the basis of construing the two missiological constructs together.
The “Great Commission” as a mandate model of mission
The missiological prioritization of the Great Commission, 3 which continues to provide the impetus for much mission practice today, has given rise to what might be termed a mandate model of mission. 4 The term “mandate” conveys the sense that the Great Commission is sometimes understood as representing a binding dominical command upon Jesus’ followers throughout history to make disciples, baptize, and teach “all that [Jesus] commanded” (Mt. 28:20) among the nations. 5 There are historical, theological, and perhaps exegetical reasons why Matthew 28:18–20 might be challenged as a missiological text for the post-apostolic church. 6 Nevertheless, assuming the text has continuing relevance to mission today, 7 and without diminishing the weight of Jesus’ words in this passage, some of the theological dangers of elevating the Great Commission to a first-order understanding of mission can be identified as follows.
First, the text on which the Great Commission is based by itself provides a relatively thin trinitarian basis for mission. The only explicit reference in the text to the First and Third members of the divine Trinity is in the baptismal formula (Mt. 28:19), although it might be assumed that the mode of Christ’s continuing presence (Mt. 28:20) to his followers is by the Spirit, even if this is not stated in Matthew’s text. 8 Second, there are very limited pneumatological resources in this account of mission. While many might supplement such deficits with other pneumatological material, including the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost (Acts 2:1ff.), and the subsequent role of the Spirit in the Acts narrative, these commendable pneumatological supplementations are necessary precisely because the Great Commission itself tends to be lacking in this regard. Third, because of the lack of strong trinitarian foundations, and although the Matthean text is ostensibly christological in nature, mission based on the Great Commission may tend towards generating anthropocentric, or perhaps ecclesiocentric, missional practice. Theologically, there is an echo of a functional christological Deism in this understanding of mission: some might interpret the mandate as suggesting that Christ—having finished the divine salvific work in his incarnation, passion, and resurrection—has ascended to the heavens to monitor progress, handing over the task to his followers, while promising to be somehow present to believers (in a manner not explicitly apparent; potentially through his general ubiquity as the ascended, divine Son). Meanwhile, a sense that the church has been given the responsibility and authority to now “get on with the job” of mission, may lead to emphases being placed on human agency, activities, strategies, and methods. While Jesus said that all authority in heaven and earth was given to him, churches and individual Christians may be tempted to act as if that authority has now be handed over to them (Mt. 28:20), producing a sense of divine license to act on their own initiative, basing their actions on expedience and “impact.” In terms of the theological grammar of this missiology, Jesus risks being seen as no longer the active, or at least, primary Subject of mission. Rather, human agents take center-stage, becoming the leading, active subjects. What was Christ’s mission might now be seen as the church’s task, with little ongoing reference to Christ, let alone the whole Trinity.
There is a further, related—and vital—theological problem which emerges from the above issues: elevating the Great Commission to a first-order understanding of mission risks an imbalanced account of divine and human agency. As noted above, under the mandate model human agents become seen as the active and even primary subjects in mission, with God’s triune self being relegated to a more secondary and even passive role. In turn, an overemphasis on human agency risks generating an over-elevated estimation of the role of ecclesial and human activity in the economy of salvation, giving an impression that human action (alone, or perhaps merely with God’s prior sanction) is able to bring about conversion, reconciliation to God, salvation, and other outcomes which are properly only the possibilities of God alone.
In summary, some of the implications for mission of taking the Great Commission as a stand-alone, first-order framework for mission may include:
overconfidence in the extent to which human, ecclesial missional activities have divine sanction and cooperation;
overreliance on human capacities, strategies, and initiatives;
a nigh idolatrous over-estimation of the human role in “converting people,” “saving people,” and “bringing the kingdom of God.” Such vocabulary refers to activities which are properly only God’s possibilities;
a sense of wide-ranging divine license, risking an ethos of ends justifying the means;
a loss of the profound sense of the continuing redemptive divine action to outwork the reconciliation of the world wrought in Christ;
a human self-reliance which may fail to submit humbly to God’s lordship in mission.
In relation to these latter points, John Taylor’s observations remain pertinent:
… we have lost our nerve and our sense of direction and have turned the divine initiative into a human enterprise. “It all depends on me” is an attitude that is bedevilling both the practice and the theology of our mission in these days. That is precisely what Jesus forbade at the start of it all. They must not go it alone. They must not think that the mission is their responsibility [Acts 1:4–5] … They were not invited to deploy their resources or plan their strategy [Acts 1:7–8]. (1972: 3)
The contention of this article is that regarding the Great Commission as a primary or stand-alone framework for mission risks producing the above effects, largely due to an imbalance in the account of double, divine/human agency in mission, arising in turn from the muted trinitarian/pneumatological notes in the text of the Great Commission.
Before offering a corrective proposal, however, it is necessary to outline the other dominant missiological model of the twentieth century, the concept of missio Dei, its historical emergence, and some of the theological difficulties which also came to plague the concept.
Missio Dei—an all-encompassing model of mission?
Missio Dei, as a theological framework for mission, emerged in the ecumenical mission discourse of the mid-twentieth century. 9 While the idea had its roots in the theological milieu of the preceding decades, the understanding that the church’s mission was grounded in the divine missio is well known to have gained currency after the 1952 International Missionary Council (IMC) gathering at Willingen, Germany. 10 Based on the classical trinitarian language of the missiōnēs of the Son and the Spirit, 11 missio Dei theology asserted that God can be understood as essentially (or at least economically) “missionary,” and thus human missionary activity should be understood as a participation in this divine activity. The idea grew in popularity among European churches and mission organizations in part due to a book entitled Missio Dei (1958) by German missiologist Georg Vicedom. 12 In such churches the concept became virtually intractable, but in the ensuing decades detailing the concept proved somewhat problematic (cf. Flett, 2010: 4–10), especially in relation to questions of dual agency: while missio Dei gave due priority to the divine agency in mission, overcoming the risks of anthropocentrism and imperialism in the mandate model, nevertheless missio Dei discourse became plagued by questions of human agency. Some of these problems centered around what constituted the missio Dei in the historical domain: is the church to be understood as the human agent of God’s missio? If so, is the divine mission limited to the church, or are we to understand that God might also, by the Spirit, work extra muros ecclesiae—outside the church? General agreement that the Spirit can and does indeed work beyond the church, led some to argue—reflecting the zeitgeist of ecclesial self-criticism of the 1960s and 1970s—that political revolution and social reform might also represent instruments of God’s mission (cf. Hoekendijk, 1967). Some went even further, wondering whether the church—mired, as some thought it to be, in irrelevance and social impotence—might even be an obstacle to God’s mission; the most radical proposal to emerge along this trajectory was that God was at work in the world primarily outside and indeed in spite of the church. 13 These more radical propositions remained somewhat on the fringes of the discourse, but when combined with the growing emphasis in ecumenical discourse on this-worldly salvation and mission as “humanization,” 14 such positions both divided ecumenical missiologists and seemed to justify the suspicions of more conservative churches that missio Dei was the province of churches which had abandoned the task and mandate of “true” mission. 15
For all the problems which came to beset the concept of missio Dei, disengagement with missio Dei theology by those churches which preferred the Great Commission framework may have perpetuated the trinitarian deficits in their mandate model of mission. While churches which embraced the language of missio Dei had at least recognized that God was the primary Subject of mission, those groups which until recently did not engage with missio Dei discourse may not have been similarly prompted to develop a more theocentric, if not trinitarian, account of mission.
In the remainder of this article I will propose that the Great Commission of Matthew 28:18–20 is best regarded as a second-order frame of mission, to be understood as located within the prior and primary framework of a chastened understanding of the missio Dei. More precisely, it will be argued that the Great Commission should be located pneumatologically within the co-missions of the Son and the Spirit. For, as Bosch notes, “John’s version of the Great Commission has Jesus saying to his disciples, ‘As the Father sent me, so I send you’ (20:21). Thus the sending of the disciples is grounded in the sending of Jesus by the Father” (2008: 90). To extend Bosch’s observation, Jesus’ sending of the disciples and thus the church should be understood as situated within the sending by the Father and Son of the Spirit of Christ and of the Father. 16 This, in turn, may offer a more properly balanced understanding of divine–human agential relations, with the church seen to be dynamically caught up in the pneumatological movement of God towards, with, and in the world. In the final section of this article, I will thus articulate a pneumatologically informed account of divine and human agency in mission, based on the ensuing proposal concerning the relation of the Great Commission to the missio Dei, and drawing on Karl Barth’s understanding of double agency.
Both/and: the Great Commission and the missio Dei
As we have seen, while itself problematic in some ways, the missio Dei understanding of mission offers a potentially more theocentric basis on which to base mission than the so-called Great Commission, which inherently lacks trinitarian, and, specifically, pneumatological resources. Nevertheless, the Great Commission might be understood as a secondary framework for mission, subject to and located within the primary and precedent activity of God in the missions of Son and Spirit. As noted, missio Dei better recognizes that it is not the Christian, the missionary, the missionary organization, or the Christian church which is fundamentally the active Subject and Agent of mission. Rather, God is the precedent Subject, Agent, and Lord, of God’s mission, specifically, in the Son and Spirit by the will of the Father; human agency, and the sending of the church, therefore, remains secondary and subsequent to the divine mission. 17 Missio Dei affirms that Christian participation in God’s continuing work is a participation by grace (and miracle) in what God alone can do—reconcile and redeem humanity to fellowship with God, others, and God’s world. 18 Nevertheless, the Great Commission might be legitimately located within the missio Dei in the following manner.
Jesus Christ is the One sent by the Father, conceived and anointed by the Spirit (Luke 1:35, 4:18–19), whom, as the Augustinian tradition would have it, binds the Son both eternally and temporally in loving fellowship with the Father. Without indexing the entire temporal relation of the Father and Jesus in the Spirit, 19 it is sufficient to observe that the same Spirit who anointed Jesus the Sent One with power for His ministry (Acts 10:38), is, post-Pentecost, now the Sent One (Luke 24:49; John 14:16–17), continuing the mission and effective presence of Jesus Christ himself (Barth, 1961). 20 The Spirit makes Christ present to the church and through it to the world (Barth, 1961: 760–761), as the Spirit gathers, builds up, and leads the church and its members into a cooperation in the continuing divine missio, in fulfilment of the church’s vocation to witness to Jesus Christ (Barth, 1961: 795ff.). 21
Seen in this context, Matthew 28 describes the manner in which Jesus Christ, the divine missio of the Son of God, adds a subsequent human sending to his own Sending: that of his “sent ones” in the Spirit (cf. Luke 24:49; Acts 2:33). In other words, the Father having sent the Son, and the Spirit with the Son, and the Father and Son having sent the Spirit as the presence of the Son, the Son now sends the apostolate in the Spirit: “Go … and surely I [Jesus Christ] am with you always [i.e. by my Spirit], to the very end of the age.” 22 The church can neither be divorced, nor considered in isolation from, the divine missio of the Son continued in the Spirit; 23 rather, the church is constituted by Jesus Christ through the Spirit as the locus of Christ’s own ongoing activity by the divine Spirit (Barth, 1961: 759). Indeed, for Barth, the mission of the Spirit-led church is to witness to the reconciliation already achieved in Jesus Christ, and thus participate in Christ’s own saving self-attestation. The Great Commission might then be understood not in the sense that Jesus’ own missio is ended, and that he has handed over his work and authority to the church to act in his stead (or absence). Rather, set in context of the missio Dei, the church in the “power of the Spirit” (Moltmann, 1977) remains under the full authority, lordship, and direction of Christ (Acts 16:6–7) who, through the Spirit, continues the missio Dei, which is now to witness to what God in Christ has already done, and by revelation fully realize and bring people to faith in what Christ has achieved (cf. Acts 4:8, 31; 6:10). 24 The church in mission thus does not operate independently of or subsequent to the divine missio, but as the human instrument and arm of the divine missio itself, indeed even as the continuing human agency of the ongoing work of God in Christ by the Spirit (cf. Acts 1:2; Acts 13:2–4). It might even be said that, just as the divine Son was enfleshed in Jesus of Nazareth, so the divine Spirit is “enchurched” in the Christian community. 25 The key point, however, is that the Spirit is the Lord and the primary and precedent Agent of God’s ongoing missio in the world, 26 but in outworking that divine mission, constitutes the church, makes Christ present to it, and sends it among the nations.
Thus, the Great Commission is best understood as a secondary sending constituted by and located within the ongoing missio of God in the Son and Spirit, specifically as the human cooperation in the missio Dei.
This must not be taken to suggest that the missio Dei is collapsed into the missio ecclesiae. Such a reduction would see a return to the dangers of the idolatrous presumption that whatever the church does is necessarily God’s action and has divine sanction, thus confining God’s action to whatever the church is doing. Reducing the missio Dei to the mission of the church would entrap God into fallen, fallible, and finite human actions. 27 A distinction must be maintained, therefore, between the free and primary agency of the Spirit of Christ, and the human agency of the church, a distinction which calls in turn for a proper account of the relationship between the two. What, then, is the nature of the relationship between the divine activity of God the Spirit, and the activity on the human level of the Christian community? In the final section of this article, I will seek to expand the above account of this relationship, and thus the relationship of the Great Commission to the missio Dei, by drawing on the vision of double agency offered in the theology of Karl Barth. 28
Barth and the relationship of divine and human agency
Having located the Great Commission in the missio Dei, and human agency in the divine agency of mission, it is helpful now to draw on Karl Barth’s treatment of double agency to better articulate the relation between human and divine action. 29 Put simply, the question addressed in this section is: to what extent, and how, does human action participate in divine activity, particularly concerning the divine soteriological actions of revelation, reconciliation, calling to faith, conversion, and so forth. Barth addresses the question of dual agency at various points in his monumental Church Dogmatics (1936–1969), and here it is only possible to draw on a limited, salient, but representative selection of his treatment of the topic. 30
First, Barth insists that we must allow that God, by the Spirit and as the free Lord of God’s own work, can and may work extra muros ecclesiae (1961: 516). God’s freedom and lordship demand that God is not tied to the witness of the church in fulfilling his reconciling and redemptive work; 31 this is first and foremost God’s own work, of which he is Lord. 32 Nor, however, does Barth hold that the Spirit is divorced from the church; Christ has not forsaken or grown disillusioned with his Church as we might, but remains faithful to it, gathering, building up and sending it out in unity with the Spirit to witness to all that Christ has achieved (Barth, 1956b: 648). For Barth, the Spirit, we might say, is enchurched, but not there entrapped (Barth, 1956b: 646).
Second, for Barth, the action of the human witness to Jesus Christ cooperates with the action of Christ by the Spirit within what Barth terms a “community of action determined by the [proper] order of the relationship between Christ and the Christian” (1961: 597). To expand on this point, this community of action is, in Barth’s terms, “a differentiated fellowship of action in which Christ is always superior and the Christian subordinate” (Barth, 1961: 598). Cocksworth (2015: 110), in his exposition of Barth on prayer, gives us the helpful language of the divine–human agency as operating in an “asymmetrical framework of differentiated unity.” This affirms what George Hunsinger (1991: 186–187) has noted: that Barth’s notion of double agency is Chalcedonian in shape, with three formal patterns: asymmetry (God’s action is absolutely precedent, logically not chronologically, to human action); intimacy (representing a coexistence and coinherence of divine and human action); and integrity (that is, without confusion or mixture of the actions of the two). In other words, Barth is concerned in his concept of dual agency to differentiate the work of Christ by the Spirit from that of the Christian/ecclesial community, and set the divine work as primary and precedent, while still describing a true and real cooperation of the Christian/community in that work.
33
Barth parses this cooperation by insisting that the Christian’s differentiated action must not be improperly confused with what are rightly only God’s own possibilities and actions; that is, the Christian/church cannot be considered the reconciler or even co-reconciler of humanity to God; as one who “extends” the kingdom of God through its own actions; nor even as the revealer of God (1961: 599, 607). Rather, the proper expression of the Christian’s part as an active subject is that of “service” or “ministry” (diakonia) to Christ’s own self-revelation and reconciling acts by the Spirit, that is, through witness as a minister Verbi divini (Barth, 1961: 607, 676).
34
As Barth writes, the Christian’s “free action as servant consists in that he accompanies his sovereign Lord in His action, assisting, seconding, and helping Him” (1961: 602). It is only in and by the superior and precedent agency of God in Christ that a creature is granted the agency, capability, and freedom to undertake truly missional activity as a free human act, for there is no inherent human capacity to do so. Indeed, it is by miracle and grace in the event of God’s own action that the inherent and absolute human incapacity—that is, its human finitude and fallenness—can be overcome and its actions exalted to a cooperation in God’s own divine actions (Barth, 1975: 93–95).
35
However, in being raised up for the possibility of cooperation, there is a true participation in the divine work (ibid: 94), thus, rather than reflecting the active–passive dichotomy implied in the Great Commission model, Barth’s non-competitive notion of double agency echoes a kind of Chalcedonian simul, in which the action in question is wholly the work of God, and, simultaneously, the work of human beings (ibid.). The indwelling of the sanctifying Spirit in the Christian is what brings about this cooperation of Christ and human being:
In His form as the one Speaker of the Word of God, [Christ] not only makes Himself known to them [i.e. Christians] in the power of His Holy Spirit; He also takes up His abode in them, living in them in order that they for their part may live in Him … Being called by and to the Christ engaged in the exercise of His prophetic office, they have no option but to attach themselves to Him with their own action, to tread in His steps, to become with Him proclaimers of the reconciliation of the world accomplished in Him, heralds of His person and work. (Barth, 1961: 606)
Barth’s description of the Christian’s cooperative, servant role in Christ’s self-revelation has affinity with the missio Dei model, but is a renovation of it, and overcomes the great weakness of the Great Commission / mandate model, which often in practice has the Christian (or church) as the primary actor. The task of mission in light of Barth’s thought is clearly seen and understood as being primarily the work of God who, though without any need for assistance from the secondary human agent, in a “special demonstration of mercy,” calls and therefore enables Christians “truly and seriously” to cooperate with the divine action, in the form of the ministry of proclamation of the gospel, as witnesses to Christ, and as “signs” which accompany and confirm God’s self-revelation in Christ by the Spirit (Barth, 1961: 608). Herein, the dignity of full human participation as active subjects is preserved; the human agent is not a mere “channel” or “prolongation” of the divine action (Barth, 1958b: 785). As Barth affirms, “In its own place and manner [human action] takes place in participation in the history of salvation, and it may be incontestably described as the co-operation of the Christian in the work of Christ” (1961: 608). In Barth’s account of double agency, therefore, as Hunsinger summarizes,
The human being is affirmed in wholeness, cancelled in sin and mere finitude, and taken up into an inconceivable fellowship of participation in the eternal life of God … The miracle and mystery of double agency is thus understood to be patterned after the great miracle and mystery of the Incarnation, in which the former finds its basis, limit, and final hope. (1991: 223)
Although Barth’s focus is characteristically christological, emphasizing the cooperation of the Christian in the ongoing missio of the Son, there is nevertheless a strong underlying pneumatological note. This is evident in two ways: first, Barth holds that it is by his Holy Spirit that Christ “takes up His abode” in Christians, “living in them in order that they for their part may live in Him” (Barth, 1961: 606). This accords, second, with Barth’s emphasis elsewhere that the Holy Spirit is the personal presence of Jesus Christ; “the One in and by whom Christ Himself is invisibly present as the living Head” of the church, his body (Barth, 1956b: 725). In accordance with the Great Commission, it is with and by the Holy Spirit that the Christian community, for Barth, is led and empowered and sent into the world with the task of confessing Christ (Barth, 1961: 796ff.). In the sophisticated structure of volume IV of Barth’s Dogmatics pneumatology and ecclesiology are closely interwoven: the Holy Spirit gathers and upbuilds the Christian Community specifically so that it might be sent into the world in the Spirit’s own missio to witness by word and work. As such, the church “is the earthly-historical form of existence of Jesus Christ Himself … His body, created and continually renewed by the awakening power of the Holy Spirit” (Barth, 1956b: 660). Because of this close relationship, within the freedom of God to operate outside the church, yet the close identification of Christ with the church by the Spirit, both the existence and witnessing function of the church “remain necessary for salvation” (Barth, 1960b: 63). To be sure, the church’s agency must be kept within proper bounds: for Barth, the Christian church as an indisputably human phenomenon (Barth, 1956b: 652) “transgresses the limits of its mission and task, is guilty of culpable arrogance and engages in a futile undertaking if it makes [what is properly only attributable to divine agency] the goal and end of its activity, assuming responsibility both for the going out of the Word of God and its coming to man. If this takes place at all, it does so in the power of the Holy Spirit over whom it has no power. Its task is simply to serve this happening” (1961: 833). Nevertheless, within its proper limits, the church is promised that as his Body, bound to him by his Spirit, and “Appointed by [Christ] it may go with Him, work with Him, serve with Him, achieve results with Him, and be His witnesses” (Barth, 1961: 842).
Barth is thus helpful for addressing the issue of the limits and possibilities of the church’s participation in the divine mission. What of those actions of the church which do not align with God’s own activity, are sinful, fallen, and not a participation in God’s own activity? Here Barth’s language of correspondence (Entsprechung) may be apt. In short, it might be said that those human actions of the Christian community which correspond to the divine activity might be regarded as a true cooperation in the divine mission, while those actions which do not, remain merely human, and not cooperative, activities. 36
Finally, the Great Commission may also have utility in offering general limits to the human agency of the missio Dei. As noted above, when understood pneumatologically as the sending of the ecclesial apostolate in the Spirit as the continuation of Christ’s own mission, the ecclesial agency emphasized in the Great Commission prevents the missio Dei from devolving into anything and everything, for, to paraphrase Stephen Neill, if everything is missio Dei, then nothing is missio Dei (1959: 81). Situated within the missio Dei the Great Commission may help the missio Dei concept retain a due emphasis on the church as the human locus of the divine mission in the world.
Implications for theology and practice
This article has argued that the sending of the apostolic community in the Great Commission should be located within a more trinitarian framework for mission, such as a renovated missio Dei theology which is itself supplemented by the Great Commission, and insights from Karl Barth on divine/human agency. In closing, the following summation and implications for a theology and praxis of mission can be offered:
God is always the primary Subject and leading Actor in the triune reconciliatory and redemptive work in the world. God’s agency is both active and precedent to human action. God is Lord of God’s mission.
By grace, God invites the church into service of the divine mission in the form of an asymmetric cooperation in God’s triune reconciliatory and redemptive work in the world. In this, human actions, while secondary in terms of agency, nevertheless have a real fellowship in the divine mission.
Nevertheless, human actions are only mission, in the true and real sense, in and as they correspond to what God the Spirit, sent by the Father and continuing the mission of the Son, is doing; human actions are imbued with real agency only because of the prior and primary agency of God the Spirit. Mission is never “handed over” to human or church agency. Rather, human agency is to be given over to God by walking in the Spirit, obeying and following the leading of the Spirit of Christ.
Christ is the primary human agent of divine mission. It is, therefore, Christ’s continuing work and parousia by the Spirit which constitutes and determines human actions as true and actual mission.
Christian mission, therefore, to be Christian mission, must surrender to the Lordship of the Spirit of Christ, making human mission activities vulnerable both to God’s sometimes mysterious plans (cf. Acts 16:6–7; 16–24), which may include suffering and sacrifice, obscurity and humiliation—reflecting the character of what Barth termed the Son’s own journey into the “far country.” 37
Mission, thus understood, should be characterized by humility and circumspection, listening and following, and a posture of non-triumphalism.
The mission activity of the church should thus be understood dynamically and pneumatologically: Christians cooperate in the divine missio not simply because they are sent by him but because and as they are led and filled with the Spirit of Christ, who not only sends, but leads, accompanies, and includes them, by grace, in the revelation of his Word and works to the world, and his continuing redemption thereof.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.