This month’s key issue is longer than usual! A special feature on the Running on Empty? conference in December 2006, gives us an opportunity to engage together on how the Trinity shapes our involvement in mission. We hope that these articles give a feel for the event and a greater understanding of the key issues raised.
Combined Fuel
A whole people need a whole God
Rose Dowsett gives a précis of her presentation 'Combined Fuel: a whole people need a whole God'at the conference. Rose is an OMF mission partner and Vice-Chair of the Missions Commission of the WEA, Global Missiology Task Force. A full version of the paper is downloadable from the Global Connections website.
Ask most professing evangelicals whether they believe in the Trinity, and they would be likely to say yes. Ask them what that means to them in the ordinary business of daily life, and they are more likely to be rather puzzled and unsure of how to respond. Go one step further, and ask how the doctrine of the Trinity should shape our understanding of what mission is and how we do it, our policy setting as well as our praxis, and many would look at you completely blankly.
One of the great vulnerabilities of the British church, and indeed the global church, is that there is widespread biblical illiteracy, and a disconnect between what we (rather vaguely) claim to believe and the way we actually function in everyday life. We are running on theological empty, still busy, but in grave danger of spluttering to a halt before long. It is not only in Africa that the church is a mile wide but only an inch deep. And this has enormous implications and challenges for those of us in the mission community as well as for the church at large.
The modern mission movement was birthed largely out of the Pietist movement of the 18th century, a wonderful corrective to much of the spiritual barrenness of the time, but so focused on salvation in a rather narrow sense, and so focused on individual response to the gospel, that much of the balancing breadth of biblical revelation was ignored. The basis for mission tended to be limited to a few texts rather than from the whole sweep of Scripture, and in it’s upholding of the Lord Jesus Christ as Saviour the fullness of the Godhead was often sidelined. Eager to see people saved, and with life-expectancy brief, most missionaries had neither time nor inclination to invest in deep theological training: that became largely the preserve of non-evangelicals. That has shaped the world church ever since, and still shapes much evangelical understanding and praxis of mission today.
By contrast, the early church focused a great deal of prayerful energy on establishing the doctrine of the Trinity. Where we too often feel that this is much too difficult to begin to talk about with an unbeliever or a young believer, the New Testament and much subsequent writing plunges deep in. They knew that they must show decisively that Jesus was fully God as well as fully human, that the Spirit was fully God, both equally so with the Father, with no hierarchy or subordination. This was fundamental whether they were engaging monotheistic Jews or pluralistic pagans.
It is this Trinitarian God who in all three Persons creates, sustains, reigns, judges – and from the beginning has been a missionary God. Throughout the whole Scripture, not just little bits of the New Testament, the thread of God’s missionary heart shines out. And then, the most fundamental truth about human beings is that we are made in the image of the Triune God. This means that it is in the essential DNA of Christians – all of them! – to be missionary people, reflecting the heart of God himself. Mission is not at rock bottom a task to engage in, or a task to be completed, though it clearly involves action; rather, mission is a matter of our authentic being – our true nature - as we carry the image of the missionary God. This means, for instance, that we will be more cautious about creating strategies (however useful they may be as tools), and pay more attention to what God is like, is doing and saying, and seek to align with that.
Further, God brings together in complete integration character and word and deed. He does what he says and says what he does. He does what he is. This is the way in which we find the resolution of the proclamation and social action tension: if we reflect God with faithfulness we will ensure that word and deed and character are all involved as equally essential elements of authentic mission. If we speak without deeds and character to back it up, the unbelieving world will rightly see a lack of integrity. As James puts it, faith without works is useless. If we engage in good deeds without gospel words of explanation, pointing to God himself, unbelievers will simply see attractive humanitarianism. That is not authentic mission, either. If our words and deeds are not backed up by godly character, unbelievers will see us as hypocrites and despise the message. Much of the world mission movement is still polarised over whether mission is evangelism in the sense of proclamation only, or wholistic (which can sometimes mean everything except proclamation…) Understanding that we are to reflect the wholeness of the Godhead – creator, judge, saviour, sustainer, life-bringer – enables us to see that such polarisations are tragic, and tragically wrong.
Thinking about the Trinity also helps us to find the resolution to another polarisation, the church and agency debate. As the people of God-as-Trinity, we are created to live in relationship, not just as isolated individuals. But wherever a group of believers come together, there is the people of God. We relate in many different configurations, of which local church congregation and mission agency are just two. But in both of those instances, we are still God’s people, the ecclesia of called-out ones, an expression of the family of God. No single configuration is exclusive or pre-eminent. A local congregation is church precisely because it is an expression of our communal life. An agency can equally be church, when it too is an expression of communal life under the leadership of the Lord, and manifests the characteristics of commitedness and shared life, complementary gifts, and above all the DNA of mission (some agencies, of course, are simply ‘placing mechanisms’, and have few of the characteristics of a family of God’s people).
There are many more ways in which Trinitarian doctrine helps us shape mission in a manner that reflects the character of God. Sadly, too much mission policy and praxis in the last fifty years has been more shaped by the behavioural sciences than by thoughtful theology. Useful as they are as tools, the behavioural sciences are thoroughly secular in their presuppositions, and are very bad masters when it comes to Christian life. Let us work together to recover policies and praxis which flow from God’s Word, and from the doctrine revealed in it. Above all, let us recover theology – the study of the Triune God, father, Son and Holy Spirit – as the ground and basis of all that we are and do.
