A Time for Mission

Samuel Escobar

I. Christian mission in a new century

Jesus Christ, God’s son incarnate, is the core of the gospel, which as a potent seed has given birth to
innumerable plants. We can locate Jesus in a particular culture at a particular moment in history, for
‘the Word became flesh and lived among us’ (John 1:14)

Michael Nazir-Ali, Pakistani missiologist “From everywhere to everywhere”.

Lausane Covenant (par. 9): ‘Missionaries should flow ever more freely from and to all six continents
in a spirit of humble service’.

David Bosch, South African Missiologist: ‘our point of departure should not be the contemporary
enterprise we seek to justify, but the biblical sense of what being sent into the world signifies.’

‘missiology’ as an interdisciplinary approach to understand missionary action.

Missiology examines missionary facts from the perspectives of the biblical sciences, theology,
history and the social sciences.

In Berlin, John Stott opened for us a key dimension of the biblican agenda, “Mission in Christ’s way’.
In his Bible expositions dealing with the Great Commission in the four Gospels, he shifted our
attention from the classic passage of Matthew 28:18-20 to the almost forgotten text of the
Commission in Hohn 20:21, ‘As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.’ Here we have not only a
mandate for mission but also a model of mission style in obedience to the loving design of the
Father, patterned by the example of Jesus Christ and driven by the power of the Holy Spirit. At the
cross Jesus Christ died for our salvation and also left a pattern for our missionary life. Mission
requires orthodoxy, a concern for the integrity of the gospel, but it also requires orthopraxis, a
concern for the way in which the missionary practice is carried on. Before searching for methods
and tools for the communication of a verbal message we must search for a new style of missionary
presence relevant to this moment of human history. When we view the Great Commission within
the context of the whole gospel, the Jesus model acquires features that force us to revise our
present models.

II. Mud and glory

III. A brave new world-order

IV. Post-Christian and postmodern
V. We believe in a missionary God
First, a god who wants to be known and does not remain hidden, in contrast to the idea of a God who
hides himself away in mystery so that only a select elite may be able to approach him. Second, a God
who has revealed himself in and through historical events, and supremely in Jesus Christ, the one he
sent as the clearest revelation of his love and saving purpose.

“There is, there can be no private salvation, no salvation which does not involve us with one another. In
order to receive God’s saving revelation we have to open the door to the neighbor whom he sends as his
appointed messenger.” }
– Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“the word ‘mission’ can boast a respectable biblical pedigree. ‘Mission’ means ‘sending.’ This is the idea
expressed by the Greek verbs pempein, to ‘send’ (used 79 times in the New Testament) and apsotellein,
to ‘send forth’ (used 137 times, counting the 6 occurences of exapostellein in the sense of sending). The
‘missionary,’ the one sent, is the apostolos (79 times), and the apostle’s task is the apostole (4 times).
_Lucien Legrand, Unity and Plurality: Mission in the Bible

The mission to which God sends those he chooses is always a ‘Mission Impossible’, which becomes
possible only because God will act in order to accomplish his purpose.

Missionary enthusiasm and activism can sometimes take us to the point of acting as if mission is purely
human enterprise subject to human calculations.
... To keep an attitude of alertness to God’s initiative in mission, missionary life must include the
discipline of a continuous exposure to his Word, contemplation of Jesus as model, and humble
dependence on the Holy Spirit in prayer.

Mission exists because God is a missionary God who sends his people to be a blessing to all of
humankind. There is a human side of mission that is perceived in the movement of people, in the
collection of funds, in the development of missionary organizations, in the planting and growing of new
churches crossing geographical or sociological borders. But mission begins in the heart of God and it is
his initiative to which we humans respond.
If Christian mission is first and foremost God’s mission, Christians must always carry on their mission in
an attitude of humility and dependence on God. When the human dimensions of the missionary task
overtake and determine the way in which mission is carried on, it becomes a human activity without
redemptive power.

Valdir Steuernagel, Brazilian Lutheran missiologist, in his book about models of missionary obedience,
shows how tat principle worked in the early church, in the Franciscan movement and in the Moravian
experience that was the cradle of Protestant missions.
Howard Snyder, a Free Methodist missiologist, has written several books pointing to the same principle,
especially as it was operative in the Methodist movement tat was a missionary response to the needs of
Britain at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Lausanne Covenant Par.1: We affirm our belief in the one eternal God, Creator and Lord of the world,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who governs all things according to the purpose of his will. He has been
calling out from the world a people for himself and sending his people back into the world to be his
servants and his witnesses, for the extension of his kingdom, the building up of Christ’s body and the
glory of his name. We confess with shame that we often denied our calling and failed in our mission by
becoming conformed to the world or by withdrawing from it. Yet we rejoice that even when borne by
earthen vessels, the Gospel is still a precious treasure. To the task of making that treasure known in the
power of the Holy Spirit we desire to dedicate ourselves anew.

VI. Christ: God’s best missionary

As a young man, Toyohiko Kagawa’s imagination was fired by the story of the young carpenter, Jesus of
Nazareth, and he became an ardent disciple whose vocation of service took him to be a missionary in
the miserable slum district of Shinkawa, Kobe.
Gonzalo Baez-Camargo, taught and wrote, studied theology, became a bible translator, and thousands
of Mexicans read his contemporary version of the Jesus’ story from his weekly columns in Excelsior.
A young woman born in Yugoslavia from an Albanian peasant family consecrated her life to Jesus,
became a nun and went as a missionary to India. After seventeen years as a teacher, Mother Teresa felt
called to serve the poorest of the poor, adopted Indian dress and nationality and founded the
Missionary of Charity Order.

Jesus was sent by God the Father and he was God’s best missionary, the true model for Christian
mission. Jesus is the Christ, the ‘anointed one’ whom the missionary God promised as his missionary
par excellence, the ‘Messiah’ whom the people of the Bible expected. This is why we have come to
know him as Jesus ‘Christ’.

‘Missionaries have gone to remote, hostile and dangerous parts of the world and won over their
enemies.’
‘Knowing, loving and serving a transcendent and personal God is at the root of all western
volunteerism. Missionaries are usually the most heroic expression of that volunteerism because
they give their whole lives to it.’ – Vishal Mangalwadi

Summary of the gospel about the nature of evangelism, Lausanne Covenant, 4 th par:
“To evangelize is to spread the good news that Jesus Christ died for our sins and was raised from the
dead according to the Scriptures, and that as the reigning Lord he now offers the forgiveness of sins
and the liberating gift of the Spirit to all who repent and believe.”

Manila Manifesto of 1989 section ‘Good News for Today’:

“We rejoice that the living God did not abandon us to our lostness and despair. In his love he came
after us in jesus Christ to rescue and re-make us. So the good news focuses on the historic person of
Jesus, who came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and living a life of humble service, who died for
us, becoming sin and curse in our place, and whom God vindicated by raising him from the dead. To
those who repent and believe in Christ, God grants a share in the new creation. He gives us new life,
which includes the forgiveness of our sins and the indwelling transforming power of his Spirit. He
welcomes us into his new community, which consists of people of all races, nations and cultures.
And he promises that one day we will enter his new world, in which evil will be abolished, nature
will be redeemed and God will reign forever.

What the gospel announces, according to the New Testament, is not just what Christ offers people
today, but what he once did to make this offer possible. The apostolic gospel brings together the
past and the present, the once and the now, historical event and contemporary experience. It
declares not only that Jesus saves, but that he died for our sins, and was raised from death in order
to be able to do so. The gospel is not preached if the saving power is proclaimed and the saving
events omitted, especially the cross. – John Stott

McGrath relates this to the high view of Scripture to which evangelicals are committed: ‘Christology
and scriptural authority are inextricably linked, in that it is Scripture, and Scripture alone that brings
us to the true and saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.

Rene Padilla has expressed well an evangelical perspective recovered from a fresh reading of the
Gospels: ‘Jesus Christ is God’s missionary par excellence, and he involves his followers in his
mission.’

In Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection is a pattern that shapes mission which is done in
the name of Christ. The Christological paradigm of mission found in the Gospels is incarnational: ‘
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among un’ (John 1:14).

John Stott remunds us that “The Son of God did not stay safe immunity of his heaven, remote from
human sin and tragedy. He actually entered our world. He emptied himself of his glory and humbled
himself to serve.”
“Biw ge sebds ys ubti tge wirkdm as tge Fatger sebt gun ubti tge wirkd (John 17:18; 20:21). In other
words our mission is to be modelled on his. Indeed all authentic mission is incarnational mission. It
demands identification without loss of identity. It means entering other people’s worlds as he
entered ours, though without compromising our Christian convictions, values or standards.

Jesus’ mission was marked by the cross, which also points towards a spirit of sacrificial service
clearly defined in his words already quoted: ‘the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to
serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’ (Matt. 20:28)

Mission according to Jesus’ pattern is also mission carried on in the power of the resurrection, by
the gift of the Holy Spirit. In all four versions of the Great Commission it is the resurrected Christ
who sends the disciples on their mission.

Sri lankan theologian Vinoth Ramachandra:

Along with the unassuming and meek posture Jesus demonstrates in his relationships with other
people, there are also the extraordinary and startling claims he makes, both implicitly and explicitly,
 concerning his person and vocation;; it is these that eventually prompt the progression from
puzzlement to hostility and to outright rage.

VII. The Holy Spirit and Christian mission

The chief actor in the historic mission of the Christian church is the Holy Spirit. He is the director of the
whole enterprise. The mission consists of things that he is doing in the world. In a special way it consists
of the light that he is focusing upon Jesus Christ.
This fact, so patent to Christians in the first century, is largely forgotten in our own. So 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.”
- Bishop John V. Taylor, The Go-Between God. (missionary in Africa).

David Barret is considered to be one of the best-informed specialists in statistcs about Christianity. In
1988 there were 332 million Pentecostals.... From this total 71 % were non-white, 66% lived in the Third
World, 87% lived in poverty and the majority were urban settlers.
Walter Hollenweger, Pentecostal from Switzerland: The classic Pentecostal churches, the charismatic
movements withind traditional churches, and the emergent indigenous non-white churches.

Pentecostal missiologist Gary McGee says of this initial generation that they believed that the apostolic
‘signs and wonders’ that had characterized the advance of the early Christianss in the book of Acts had
been restored: “Traditional Pentecostalism distinguishes between the work of the Spirit in regeneration
and his work in empowering believers for ministry. When one has received this empowerment it is
referred to as the baptism of the Spirit. This person knows that she/he has received this baptism if, at
that time, she/he spoke in tongues. Speaking in tongues is called “the initial evidence”,’
- Gary McGee, Initial Evidence

Lausanne (Par.14) We believe in the power of the Holy Spirit. The Father sent his Spirit to bear witness
to his Son; without his witness ours is futile. Conviction of sin, faith in Christ, new birth and Christian
growth are all his work. Further, the Holy Spirit is a missionary Spirit; thus evangelism should arise
spontaneously from a Spirit-filled church. A church that is not a missionary church is contradicting itself
and quenching the Spirit. Worldwide evangelization will become a realistic possibility only when the
Spirit renews the church in truth and wisdom, faith, holiness, love and power.

Brazilian missiologist Valdir Steuernagel calls for such an attitude: ‘Mission understood in
pneumatological language is one act with two steps. It is first to perceive the blowing of the Spirit and
the direction from which it comes. And then it is to run in the same direction from which it comes. And
then it is to run in the same direction to which the Spirit is blowing.’ (Missionary Obedience and
Historical Practice)

VIII. Text and context: the Word through new eyes

IX. Mission as transforming service
X. A new way of looking at the world