This past week the Cape Of Good Hope District met in its Synod to continue looking deeply and exploring once again the call for the church to be missional in Her witness. First of all, God’s mission is to inspire people to work with the materials he provides to bring forth new and good creations and to order the natural world. The world God created is good, and when humans begin to work alongside God in creation, things become very good. Unfortunately, because of the Fall of humanity, the world comes up far short of God’s intent, and the human condition ranges from very good still, at times to dismal or worse. Nonetheless, over the entire course of history concentrated first in the nation of Israel, centered on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and continuing in God’s people today God gives people the grace to return to him. He heals the World’s brokenness, and he opens the way to fully restore his original intent for the world, including humanity’s role of co-creativity with him. Both the creation of the world and its redemption by God’s grace are therefore the mission of God. Christians participate in the mission of God through every activity of life that expresses God’s creativity, sustains God’s creation, and cooperates with God’s redemption.
The church including church-related organizations is the one body exclusively dedicated to advancing the mission of God, so all Christians are part of the church. Of course, the church itself is not the kingdom of God, and church work is not the only way believers go about the work of advancing God’s kingdom. As Dallas Willard put it, ‘The church is for discipleship, and discipleship is for the world’. Gathering in churches, Christians advance the mission of God through a wide variety of activities. Scattered into an amazing variety of workplaces, we have opportunities to advance the mission of God through daily work in every sphere of society. Anglican Bishop D.T. Niles of Ceylon pointed out that ‘the Church is the only society which exists for the benefit of its non-members’.
The church comes into contact with non-members primarily through its people’s daily interactions with people in their places of work. The result is that churches do the mission of God themselves, and they equip Christians to do the mission of God in other spheres of life and work. The latter role equipping Christians for work outside church bodies is essential, because unless Christians are trained and supported for it, our work is likely to have little positive effect toward God’s mission. Churches that support Christians at work find themselves on a journey in mission. Their focus has expanded from concentrating on what God is doing in the church to include what God is doing in the world. They also help church members gain a glimpse of the God who goes before them into their workday worlds and invites them to operate as partners in God’s work there. God’s mission is not primarily about getting people more involved in what churches are doing, but getting churches more involved in what God is doing in the world. It is a shift in emphasis from attracting crowds to church meetings towards equipping and supporting followers of Jesus for their work in the world. This is not to suggest that gathering for worship and church meetings is not still important to these churches. Rather these churches recognise the importance of both gathering Christians together and sending them out to do the work of God in the world. Sending people out has become a more serious attempt to forge stronger links in people’s experience between Sunday and Monday in order to help them become more effective participants in God’s work in the world.
Solomzi