Mission and Ministry Are for All Disciples in All Areas of Life
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REFLECTIONS ON MISSION
Chris Wright
The theology and practice of mission was close to John Stott’s heart, from the earliest days following his conversion as a schoolboy to the closing days of his ninetieth year on earth. The book in your hands emerged in the immediate aftermath of the First Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in 1974, in which he played such a significant role as the architect of its defining document, the Lausanne Covenant. And in the closing months of his life, when his eyesight had completely failed, he insisted that the Cape Town Commitment, the statement of the Third Lausanne Congress in 2010, should be read to him, section by section over a period of several days. He rejoiced in it, endorsed it and was greatly encouraged by the continuing commitment of evangelicals globally to world mission as understood in all its wholeness and fullness in those great documents.
So it is not surprising that the themes of this 1975 book retained his attention for the following decades before his death in 2011. If, at some future date, we may hope to have access to a searchable, digitized, complete works of John Stott, the key words of this book, mission, evangelism, dialogue, salvation and conversion, will turn up a gold mine of references and quotations for any researcher. For that reason, I begin by noting some of the enduring affirmations that Stott makes in this chapter, and then in each case I reflect on some of the ongoing developments over the following years—some of them under Stott’s own active leadership.
Our Mission Flows from the Mission of God
When Stott seeks to move beyond the polarized extremes of seeing mission as either exclusively evangelism or almost wholly sociopolitical action, toward what he calls “a better way, a more balanced and more biblical way of defining the mission of the church,” he rightly emphasizes a God-centered understanding of what mission is. “All of us should be able to agree,” he hopes, “that mission arises primarily out of the nature not of the church but of God himself. The living God of the Bible is the sending God.” This, of course, is a move that is characteristic of Stott’s habitual turn of thought. Whatever the problem or issue that he was seeking to address, he would ask, “What does the Bible say?” and “How does this connect with what we know from the biblical revelation about the character, purposes and actions of God, especially as revealed in Christ?” John Stott had a Bible-saturated, God-centered, Christ-focused worldview. Those were the spectacles he put on before settling his gaze on any issue.
It is a refreshing and challenging thing to do. When we get exhausted and frustrated with the constant questions, “What is the essential mission of the church? What should the mission of the church legitimately include (and what does it not include)?” it is worth reminding ourselves that the key question is not so much “What kind of mission does God intend for his church?” as “What kind of church does God require for his mission?” The church exists, in its historical journey on earth, for the sake of God’s mission in the world. So rather than asking only what the church should do (or not do), we should be asking what the church is for, and that drives us to consider the redemptive mission of God for all nations and all creation.
Now in this chapter Stott speaks of the mission of God only in terms of God as the sending God. That concept of “sending”—from the etymological root of the word mission, of course—dominates the meaning of mission here. When we “do mission,” we send people out to do something. But Stott’s point is, God was doing that long before we, the church, sent anybody anywhere. The “centrifugal” nature of God is seen in the way, in the three Persons of the Trinity, he is always “moving outward” toward his creation in self-giving love. And that then becomes historically rooted in a whole sequence of sendings throughout the Bible, beginning with Abraham and culminating in the sending of the Spirit, and of the disciples to the ends of the earth.
All this is the essential biblical background to any understanding of mission. The primal mission is God’s, for it is God who sent his prophets, his Son, his Spirit. Of these missions the mission of the Son is central, for it was the culmination of the ministry of the prophets, and it embraced within itself as its climax the sending of the Spirit. And now the Son sends as he himself was sent.
Sending is certainly a very important component of a biblical theology of mission. And indeed there are many more examples of God sending people than Stott mentions. However, a broader concept of mission includes not just the act of sending in itself, but the overall purpose, goal or plan within which those sendings take place and make sense. After all, merely sending somebody somewhere is meaningless unless there is some purpose behind it. A “mission” is not just the act of sending or the experience of being sent. It implies that the sender has a long-range purpose in mind, and that the one being sent participates in that wider purpose of the sender—whether or not they are conscious of the full extent of it.
So “the mission of God” has come to refer not merely to the God who sent and sends, but to the God who has an overarching purpose for his whole creation and is constantly “on mission” to accomplish it. When God sent people, in the Old or New Testament, it was in relation to this ultimate, universal purpose—at whatever specific point in the history of its outworking they happened to be at that point. Generally, God’s sendings fall into two categories: God sends some people to act—to be agents of his will, in salvation or judgment. And God sends people to speak—to be heralds and messengers of his word. But all those sendings participate in the different phases of the mission of God as it plays out through the whole Bible narrative.
In other words, we have come to think of the mission of God in more comprehensive terms that embrace the whole Bible narrative, rather than solely as either multiple acts of sending or even a climactic single act such as the so-called Great Commission. To speak of God’s mission is to speak of God’s plan and purpose, or what Paul sometimes referred to as “the will of God” (thelēma; Ephesians 1:9-10), or “the whole counsel [boulē] of God” (Acts 20:27)—his ultimate goal of bringing the whole creation into reconciled unity in, through and under Christ.
Mission, then, is fundamentally the activity of God, driving this whole story forward and bringing it to its glorious conclusion. For this reason, when the Cape Town Commitment comes to define the mission to which we are committed, it begins by presenting a summary of the mission of God himself—in a paragraph full of biblical echoes.
We are committed to world mission, because it is central to our understanding of God, the Bible, the Church, human history and the ultimate future. The whole Bible reveals the mission of God to bring all things in heaven and earth into unity under Christ, reconciling them through the blood of his cross. In fulfilling his mission, God will transform the creation broken by sin and evil into the new creation in which there is no more sin or curse. God will fulfil his promise to Abraham to bless all nations on the earth, through the gospel of Jesus, the Messiah, the seed of Abraham. God will transform the fractured world of nations that are scattered under the judgment of God into the new humanity that will be redeemed by the blood of Christ from every tribe, nation, tongue and language, and will be gathered to worship our God and Saviour. God will destroy the reign of death, corruption and violence when Christ returns to establish his eternal reign of life, justice and peace. Then God, Immanuel, will dwell with us, and the kingdom of the world will become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ and he shall reign for ever and ever. [Genesis 1–12; Ephesians 1:9-10; Colossians 1:20; Revelation 21–22]
This has enabled a broader understanding of our mission, since it is wholly derived from God’s mission. Once we grasp the comprehensiveness of God’s great plan and purpose for all people and all creation, then there must be some analogous comprehensiveness to the way in which we are called by God to participate with him in that mission. Not, of course, in the sense that we do all that God does. God is God, and we (thank God) are not. We do not rule the world or save the world. As Stott puts it, “we cannot copy him in these things. We are not saviors.” Rather, in the sense that when God calls us and sends us out to participate with God in fulfilling God’s own great purpose for creation and humanity, he calls us into a very big agenda indeed. Or as Stott puts it in the opening statement of the following chapter: “The word mission, I have so far suggested, is properly a comprehensive word, embracing everything that God sends his people into the world to do.” And that “everything” is indeed broad and inclusive, if we take account of what the whole Bible shows us concerning what God requires of his whole people in their engagement with the world around them.
So this “whole-story-of-the-Bible” understanding of the mission of God lays a strong foundation for the more holistic understanding of mission that Stott advocates (with careful clarifications) in this book.
But not only do we arrive at a more fully biblical theology of mission, we also gain a more missional understanding of the Bible itself. “Missional hermeneutics” has become a serious discipline, with a community of scholars dedicated to exploring what it means to read the whole Bible from the perspective of God’s mission and the mission of God’s people. This movement has flourished particularly since the turn of the millennium, but just before that, Andrew Kirk had raised a significant question in his book What Is Mission? Theological Explorations. Speaking about the need for mission to inform the whole range of theological disciplines, he writes, “For example, what a difference it would make to biblical studies if full justice were done to the Bible as a book about mission from beginning to end, written by missionaries for missionaries! Given its content and intent, how could one study it in any other way?”
This was the motivating question behind my own efforts to read the Bible from that perspective, leading to two books, The Mission of God and The Mission of God’s People. The first of those had a very long gestation in thirteen years of teaching biblical courses at All Nations Christian College (ANCC), a training institution for a widely international and predominantly graduate, professional community of men and women called to various forms of crosscultural mission around the world. At ANCC we used to say that we did not teach “theology and mission,” but rather “theology for mission.” The whole curriculum of biblical, theological, historical, cultural, pastoral, religious and practical subjects was very consciously suffused with questions about how the material under study was relevant to, affected, challenged or illuminated by the realities of global mission. When David Bosch launched the 1990s with a call to transform the whole theological enterprise by recognizing its fundamentally missional nature, we at ANCC both welcomed his magisterial book and felt that we were already heeding its call!
Just as the church ceases to be church if it is not missionary, theology ceases to be theology if it loses its missionary character. . . . We are in need of a missiological agenda for theology rather than just a theological agenda for mission, for theology, rightly understood, has no reason to exist other than critically to accompany the missio Dei.
In my own Department of Biblical Studies at ANCC, that question haunted me, in a positive sense. I wanted to rename the course I taught from “The Biblical Basis of Mission” to “The Missional Basis of the Bible.” I was striving for a thoroughgoing “missional hermeneutic” of Scripture—and The Mission of God was the end result of that.
The impetus for a greater awareness of the centrality of mission, not only in biblical studies but in the whole theological enterprise, gathered strength throughout the decades following Lausanne 1974 and this book in 1975.
Lesslie Newbigin, who returned to the United Kingdom in 1974 after a long missionary career in India and within the World Council of Churches, spoke and wrote prolifically for the next twenty years on the need for missional engagement with Western culture, and for a fully biblical, trinitarian understanding of mission itself. His most significant contributions include Trinitarian Doctrine for Today’s Mission, The Open Secret, Foolishness to the Greeks, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society and Truth to Tell. The influence of Newbigin has been immense, and many of those who are now involved in current efforts to develop a missional hermeneutic of Scripture are consciously in his debt. He is the inspiration behind the Gospel and Our Culture network and the Newbigin House of Studies, under whose auspices a lot of missional study of the Bible along with biblical reflection on mission has taken place.
That influence is seen in two outstanding contributions to the theology of mission in recent years—both of which comprehensively expound the essentially missional nature of the whole canon of Scripture, as the narrative of the mission of God, from which all human mission must be derived: Michael Goheen, Introducing Christian Mission Today, and Scott Sunquist, Understanding Christian Mission. Sunquist combines a strong articulation and defense of a missional hermeneutic with an equally passionate trinitarian lens through which to see the whole Bible in relation to the person and mission of God.
So, then, the forty years since Stott wrote this book in the immediate aftermath of Lausanne 1974 have seen remarkable theological and biblical developments in the theology of mission—particularly in the evangelical community. This is something that I am quite certain he welcomed, both in the endeavor itself and in the broad direction in which it has moved.
Evangelism and Social Action Belong Together Within Our Exercise of Biblical Mission
This book was not the first in which Stott expressed the conviction, which he sustained throughout his life, that Christian mission in obedience to the Great Commission could not be confined, in definition or in practice, to the verbal proclamation of the gospel (evangelism) alone, but that mission legitimately and biblically includes the practical involvement of Christians in society in the wide variety of good works that constitute social responsibility, service and action. He insisted that both were inseparable partners in the task of Christian mission. Yet at the same time, he equally strongly affirmed (in the Lausanne Covenant, in this book and elsewhere) that evangelism has a certain “primacy” or “priority,” for reasons that we shall come to shortly.
The first thing we observe is Stott’s candid explanation that his own thinking on the matter had changed somewhat between the Berlin Congress of 1966 and the Lausanne Congress of 1974 (“Today, however, I would express myself differently”). One factor in this was his international travel in the 1960s and early 1970s to Majority World contexts where the realities of poverty and oppression were inescapable and could not be ignored by evangelicals committed to evangelism. Out of those travels developed close personal friendship with, and careful listening to, Majority World evangelicals such as René Padilla and Samuel Escobar—both of whom made significant presentations at the Lausanne Congress. The impact is seen in Stott’s writing of paragraph 5 of the Lausanne Covenant, on “Christian Social Responsibility,” where we read “Evangelism and socio-political involvement are both part of our Christian duty. For both are necessary expressions of our doctrines of God and humankind, our love for our neighbour and our obedience to Jesus Christ.”
But in this book he characteristically argues not from experience but from the Bible. He had come to a fuller understanding of the Great Commission from all four Gospels.
It is not just that the Commission includes a duty to teach baptized disciples everything Jesus had previously commanded (Matthew 28:20), and that social responsibility is among the things that Jesus commanded. I now see more clearly that not only the consequences of the Commission but the actual Commission itself must be understood to include social as well as evangelistic responsibility, unless we are to be guilty of distorting the words of Jesus.
Those two sentences are very significant and could do with a lot of unpacking, but they have not found universal agreement by any means. The question of how evangelism and social responsibility are to be related to each other continued to be a divisive issue among evangelicals, from the years immediately following Lausanne until today. For example, in their book What Is the Mission of the Church? Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert quote John Stott in his use of the Johannine form of the commission (“As the Father has sent me, even so I send you,” John 20:21, along with John 17:18), but they disagree with his view that it means our mission (like Christ’s) must be characterized by serving (not just evangelizing), with an “incarnational” model of costly involvement in people’s lives. In their view, the Great Commission is narrower and does not include or imply good works and social action as part of the mission of the church (though they do insist strongly that such practical works of love and compassion are indeed very important as part of our Christian obedience). “The mission consists of preaching and teaching, announcing and testifying, making disciples and bearing witness. The mission focuses on the initial and continuing verbal declaration of the gospel, the announcement of Christ’s death and resurrection and the life found in him when we repent and believe.”
During the 1980s, the Lausanne movement continued to debate and explore what the Lausanne Covenant had affirmed, in an effort to sustain its commitment to a holistic understanding of mission on a firm biblical and theological foundation. John Stott, as chair of Lausanne’s Theology Working Group, and as one who was deeply supportive across the spectrum of evangelical mission agencies involved in both evangelism (such as the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students and Scripture Union) and social action (such as Tear Fund), convened a landmark International Consultation on the Relationship between Evangelism and Social Responsibility, under the auspices of both Lausanne and the World Evangelical Alliance. It met in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1982.
The lengthy report of that event speaks of three kinds of relationship (which in some ways echo the terms Stott uses in this book) between social action and evangelism. Social activity can be, first, a consequence of evangelism, and second, a bridge to evangelism. But the third, and most important, point of the report is the one Stott makes in this book. They are partners.
They are like the two blades of a pair of scissors or the two wings of a bird. This partnership is clearly seen in the public ministry of Jesus, who not only preached the gospel but fed the hungry and healed the sick. In his ministry, kerygma (proclamation) and diakonia (service) went hand in hand. . . . His words explained his works, and his works dramatized his words. Both were expressions of his compassion for people, and both should be of ours. . . . Indeed, so close is this link between proclaiming and serving, that they actually overlap.
This is not to say that they should be identified with each other, for evangelism is not social responsibility, nor is social responsibility evangelism. Yet, each involves the other.
To proclaim Jesus as Lord and Saviour (evangelism) has social implications, since it summons people to repent of social as well as personal sins, and to live a new life of righteousness and peace in the new society which challenges the old.
To give food to the hungry (social responsibility) has evangelistic implications, since good works of love, if done in the name of Christ, are a demonstration and commendation of the gospel. . . .
Thus, evangelism and social responsibility, while distinct from one another, are integrally related in our proclamation of and obedience to the gospel. The partnership is, in reality, a marriage.
The report immediately goes on to reaffirm the “primacy” of evangelism within this partnership, in the same terms as the Lausanne Covenant. This is partly a matter of logical priority: “The very fact of Christian social responsibility presupposes socially responsible Christians, and it can only be by evangelism and discipling that they have become such.” But it is also because,
Evangelism relates to people’s eternal destiny, and in bringing them Good News of salvation, Christians are doing what nobody else can do. Seldom if ever should we have to choose between satisfying physical hunger and spiritual hunger, or between healing bodies and saving souls, since an authentic love for our neighbour will lead us to serve him or her as a whole person. Nevertheless, if we must choose, then we have to say that the supreme and ultimate need of all humankind is the saving grace of Jesus Christ, and that therefore a person’s eternal, spiritual salvation is of greater importance than his or her temporal and material well-being. . . . The choice, we believe, is largely conceptual. In practice, as in the public ministry of Jesus, the two are inseparable. . . . Rather than competing with each other, they mutually support and strengthen each other in an upward spiral of increased concern for both.
At the end of the decade, the Second Lausanne Congress in Manila, in 1989, made essentially the same affirmations as the Consultation on the Relationship between Evangelism and Social Responsibility report on this matter:
The authentic gospel must become visible in the transformed lives of men and women. As we proclaim the love of God we must be involved in loving service, as we preach the Kingdom of God we must be committed to its demands of justice and peace.
Evangelism is primary because our chief concern is with the gospel, that all people may have the opportunity to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. Yet Jesus not only proclaimed the Kingdom of God, he also demonstrated its arrival by works of mercy and power. We are called today to a similar integration of words and deeds. In a spirit of humility we are to preach and teach, minister to the sick, feed the hungry, care for prisoners, help the disadvantaged and handicapped, and deliver the oppressed. While we acknowledge the diversity of spiritual gifts, callings and contexts, we also affirm that good news and good works are inseparable. It has been said, therefore, that evangelism, even when it does not have a primarily social intention, nevertheless has a social dimension, while social responsibility, even when it does not have a primarily evangelistic intention, nevertheless has an evangelistic dimension.
The language of “dimension” and “intention” is significant here, and almost certainly (since the Manila Manifesto was drafted by John Stott) reflects Stott’s awareness of the origin of that distinction in a 1959 book by Lesslie Newbigin, whose writings on mission Stott admired. The distinction helps to protect us from Stephen Neill’s famous (and much quoted) warning that if everything is mission, then nothing is mission. Simply put, everything the church does has a missional dimension, since the church exists for the sake of God’s mission, but some things the church does have specific missional intention. Michael Goheen summarizes Newbigin’s point as follows, and then goes on to discuss its implications more fully:
An important distinction emerged between missional dimension and missional intention. Lesslie Newbigin observes that this distinguishes “between mission as a dimension of the Church’s whole life, and mission as the primary intention of certain activities. Because the Church is the mission there is a missionary dimension to everything that the Church does. But not everything the Church does has a missionary intention”; certain activities can be considered to have a missional intention when they are “an action of the Church in going out beyond the frontiers of its own life to bear witness to Christ as Lord among those who do not know Him, and when the overall intention of that action is that they should be brought from unbelief to faith.”
In personal correspondence on this distinction, Michael Goheen wrote to me, concerning the life of Christians within the church and the world:
What Newbigin was trying to do was to affirm the growing consensus that mission was all of life, that is, every part of a Christian’s human life witnesses to the renewing work of God. But he wanted to protect certain activities that had as their specific and deliberate intention the purpose of sharing the gospel with folk to invite them to respond in faith. I believe the distinction is way more important than most people realise. It would clear up so much confusion around mission.
Both of those documents (the CRESR Report and the Manila Manifesto) owe a lot, of course, to Stott’s own drafting skills. But his most worked-out defense of a holistic understanding of Christian mission followed a few years later, in 1992, in his chapter “Holistic Mission” in The Contemporary Christian. There, he explains the context, surveys the biblical foundations for his position, answers some common objections and gives some historical examples.
By the time of the Third Lausanne Congress in Cape Town in 2010, the phrase “holistic mission” was already being somewhat overtaken by the phrase “integral mission.” The shift in emphasis picks up on the language of “integrally related” (CRESR), and “integration of words and deeds” (Manila). So, rather than seeing the two activities (evangelism and social action) as simply partners that happen to stand or work alongside each other, this conception sees mission as an integrated system of interrelated activities—in which the proper functioning of each is essential to the functioning of the others, and to the health and “success” of the whole enterprise.
The human body is an integrated system. There is the respiratory system, the digestive system, the circulation of the blood and so on. Now these are separate and distinguishable “activities”; they are not just different words for the same thing. But in a normal, living human body they have to function integrally, essentially and inseparably. It makes little sense to talk about the primacy or priority of one over another, except in extreme circumstances where one has to pay attention to one above another, such as a near-drowning or a serious road accident, where breathing, blood loss or heart failure would take priority over giving somebody food or drink. But in everyday life, all the bodily functions are necessary, are integrated and contribute each in their own way to what it means to be a living human being. Likewise, integrated mission binds together all the dimensions of our Christian obedience to Christ to serve God’s purposes in the world. Evangelism and social action are thus integral to each other—different, but necessary, functions within the total life of mission.
The Micah Declaration on Integral Mission (2001) put it like this:
Integral mission is the proclamation and demonstration of the gospel. It is not simply that evangelism and social involvement are to be done alongside each other. Rather, in integral mission our proclamation has social consequences as we call people to love and repentance in all areas of life. And our social involvement has evangelistic consequences as we bear witness to the transforming grace of Jesus Christ. If we ignore the world, we betray the Word of God which sends us out to serve the world. If we ignore the Word of God, we have nothing to bring to the world.
But integration requires a “something” within which, or around which, everything is integrated. All the systems of my body are integrated within the person that I am. What is the integrating center of mission that binds together evangelism and social action? It is surely the gospel itself—meaning the gospel as the biblical good news of all that God has done in Christ to save the world and inaugurate the kingdom of God under Christ’s lordship. In other words, “the gospel” is not merely the mechanism by which individuals can be saved, but the story, the facts, the saving acts of God—and their implications for us when we respond to hearing about them.
The Cape Town Commitment integrates mission around that gospel core.
The integrity of our mission. The source of all our mission is what God has done in Christ for the redemption of the whole world, as revealed in the Bible. Our evangelistic task is to make that good news known to all nations. The context of all our mission is the world in which we live, the world of sin, suffering, injustice, and creational disorder, into which God sends us to love and serve for Christ’s sake. All our mission must therefore reflect the integration of evangelism and committed engagement in the world, both being ordered and driven by the whole biblical revelation of the gospel of God.
That final phrase in (added) italics is crucial. It evokes the image of a wheel. The driving wheel of a car is an integrated object in which the hub (which is connected to the source of power, the engine), is integrated with the rim or tire (which is connected to the road). Every point of connection with the road (the context) has to be energized by the power transmitted from the engine through the hub (the gospel). The hub and the rim must be integrated with each other, and through their integration both are connected to, and driven by, the engine.
Thinking of the whole task of mission with this analogy, I find myself preferring to speak of the centrality of the gospel rather than the primacy of evangelism. If we do still wish to speak of the centrality of evangelism (at the heart of mission, as some have said), it would be not primarily (though of course truly) because it addresses the greatest and most ultimate need of human beings (being lost in sin and alienated from God), but because it connects everything that we do to what God has done in Christ. We are gospel-centered because we are God-centered, not merely as another way of being human-centered.
Thus, again, Cape Town, in its section on evangelism, says, “Let us keep evangelism at the centre of the fully-integrated scope of all our mission, inasmuch as the gospel itself is the source, content and authority of all biblically-valid mission. All we do should be both an embodiment and a declaration of the love and grace of God and his saving work through Jesus Christ.” Although, as noted above, there is still a strong case being argued by some for confining the definition of the word mission (and therefore the missional task of the church) to a narrower interpretation of the Great Commission, as solely the preaching and teaching work involved in making disciples (for example, Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert’s book), this more integrated understanding seems to have convinced many within the evangelical community who are equally as committed to biblical authority and the truth and centrality of the gospel. We have seen that such an integrated and holistic understanding permeates the mission theology (and practice) of the Lausanne Movement. It is also the understanding of mission adopted by the World Evangelical Alliance, through both its Mission Commission and its Theological Commission. It has been at the heart of the International Fellowship for Mission as Transformation since its beginnings in 1980 and its official formation in 1987.
Among those who conceive the mission of the church in this holistic or integrated way are some with outstanding qualifications in both practical missionary experience and extensive missiological reflection and teaching, both in the West and the Majority World. To mention but a few, these would include Dean Flemming, Michael Goheen, Scott Sunquist, Samuel Escobar, René Padilla, Rosemary Dowsett, John Dickson, Vinay Samuel and Chris Sugden.
An interesting point that both Goheen and Sunquist make is that the effort expended in struggling to relate or integrate the two aspects of Christian mission (evangelism and social engagement) would have been unnecessary if we had not pulled them apart in the first place. The hostile dichotomy that Stott laments in this book, as between the ecumenical emphasis on the sociopolitical realm (to the neglect of evangelism), and the evangelical emphasis on evangelism (to the neglect of social engagement—at least in the first half of the twentieth century), may owe its power and longevity to the dominance of Enlightenment dualism—in both camps. That is, we have imported into our thinking distinctions and rankings that do not really reflect the wholeness of the biblical worldview and teaching. We insist on taxonomies where the Bible calls for simple obedience to the totality of its mandates on the lives of God’s people—or in Jesus’ simpler words, “to obey all that I have commanded you.” Goheen writes,
The original split between the fundamental[ist] and liberal traditions was born of a shared dualism. When the imbalance was recognized, the two parts were artificially joined together. Two dimensions of the church’s mission—word and deed—were abstracted from their original context of the full-orbed mission of the church. Each was given a life of its own. This forced a choice about which of the two has priority, and that was given to the word because (in keeping with a deeper dualism) the eternal had priority over the temporal.
Sunquist takes the integration back to Christ himself, and deplores the kind of approach that injects a division between Christ’s words and deeds as a basis for creating a dichotomy between evangelism and social justice (whichever way we prioritize the dichotomy thus created). It seems to me that Sunquist agrees with the thrust of what John Stott says (while rejecting his “partners” metaphor), but urges us to go back behind the “dichotomy problem” to a more fundamental integration.
In evangelism, we start with a single quality of God in Jesus Christ—love—rather than starting with a dichotomy of word and works, or evangelism and justice, or preaching and social justice [a dichotomy assumed in the Lausanne Covenant, paragraph 5].
We should be a little suspicious if a person talks about “both sides” of the life of Jesus. In the past it was common to use such language, to talk about the mission of God as two dance partners (evangelism and social justice) or as two sides of the same coin. But these analogies are not just inadequate, they are misleading. Jesus was a whole person, filled to overflowing with the kenotic, self-emptying love of God.
Before leaving this section we should take note of one further area of integration in evangelical theology of mission that has developed since the publication of this book in 1975. That is the embracing of creation care as a dimension of Christian responsibility, and something that can legitimately be included in the overall category of Christian mission. There is still, of course, a wide variety of opinion on this, amounting to rejection of the whole environmental agenda in some evangelical quarters. But increasingly evangelicals are realizing that the Bible itself includes creation (here meaning specifically the earth in which we live) in the consequences of sin, in the redemptive purposes of God and in the reconciling accomplishment of the cross.
The earliest hint of awareness of the ecological dimension that I can find in the Lausanne documents is in the Manila Manifesto (1989), where, in paragraph 4 on “The Gospel and Social Responsibility,” we read that “among the evils we deplore are . . . all forms of exploitation of people and of the earth” (italics added). Already, however, evangelicals were responding to the growing awareness of ecological crisis through humble but prophetically significant organizations such as the Au Sable Institute (founded in 1979) and A Rocha (founded in 1983). The Evangelical Environmental Network was founded in 1993 and later published the Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation. Indeed, since Lausanne 1974 there has been steady and increasing flow of serious evangelical and biblical writing on the issue, to which John Stott and I have both contributed. In fact, Stott included a chapter on creation care in the very last book he wrote—The Radical Disciple. So I know that he endorsed the way the Cape Town Commitment went beyond the integration of only the two spheres of evangelism and social concern to embrace creation as well. Notice, in the following quote, how the integration is once again clearly done around the centrality of the gospel, focusing on the lordship of Jesus Christ—the first and crucial affirmation of the Great Commission itself.
“The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.” The earth is the property of the God we claim to love and obey. We care for the earth, most simply, because it belongs to the one whom we call Lord [Psalm 24:1; Deuteronomy 10:14].
The earth is created, sustained and redeemed by Christ [Colossians 1:15-20; Hebrews 1:2-3]. We cannot claim to love God while abusing what belongs to Christ by right of creation, redemption and inheritance. We care for the earth and responsibly use its abundant resources, not according to the rationale of the secular world, but for the Lord’s sake. If Jesus is Lord of all the earth, we cannot separate our relationship to Christ from how we act in relation to the earth. For to proclaim the gospel that says “Jesus is Lord” is to proclaim the gospel that includes the earth, since Christ’s Lordship is over all creation. Creation care is thus a gospel issue within the Lordship of Christ. . . .
The Bible declares God’s redemptive purpose for creation itself. Integral mission means discerning, proclaiming, and living out, the biblical truth that the gospel is God’s good news, through the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, for individual persons, and for society, and for creation. All three are broken and suffering because of sin; all three are included in the redeeming love and mission of God; all three must be part of the comprehensive mission of God’s people.
Mission and Ministry Are for All Disciples in All Areas of Life
My third and final reflection on Stott’s chapter on mission picks up comments he makes in the first part of the section on practical implications. He affirms that mission and ministry are the privilege and responsibility of all believers, not only for those called into crosscultural missionary work or ordained pastoral ministry. He argues that we need “to gain a truer perspective in this matter of vocation,” and of ministry. All Christians are called into ministry, and for some that will mean crosscultural missionary service or ordained pastoral ministry. But ministry—serving God and others—applies to all forms of work and service that a Christian may be engaged in, whether in an employed capacity or not. Although Stott had a very serious personal commitment to the biblical validity of ordained pastoral/teaching ministry within the church, he passionately believed that it was damagingly unbiblical to confine the concept of “ministry” to the clergy. He affirmed that ministry and mission were the calling of all disciples of Christ—in all their varied vocations.
He was calling, though not in so many words at the time, for the eradication of that toxic sacred-secular dichotomy that has so infected Christian thinking, namely the view that God is interested in the religious area of life (church, worship, prayer, evangelism and so on), whereas the rest of life as it is lived in the “secular” world of work and leisure is of little or no relevance to God or to the mission of the church. In place of that he wanted a return to the strong theology of work and vocation found in the Reformers and Puritans, in which every kind of honest work can be done for the service of others, for the benefit of the community and for the glory of God and in a way that “adorns the gospel”—which of course is the clear teaching of the apostle Paul (Ephesians 6:5-8; Colossians 3:22-24; Titus 2:9-10).
Stott expanded on this theme in The Contemporary Christian (1992). It is worth quoting some sections at length, to sense the passion of Stott’s conviction on this point. I quote the first paragraph with some nostalgia, having heard him say these words on many occasions, more or less verbatim, in one of his favorite addresses.
We do a great disservice to the Christian cause whenever we refer to the pastorate as “the ministry,” for by our use of the definite article we give the impression that the pastorate is the only ministry there is. . . . I repented of this view, and therefore of this language, about twenty-five years ago, and now invite my readers, if necessary, to join me in penitence. Nowadays, whenever somebody says in my presence that “So-and-so is going into the ministry,” I always ask innocently, “Oh really? Which ministry do you mean?” And when my interlocutor probably replies, “The pastoral ministry,” I come back with the gentle complaint, “Then why didn’t you say so?!” The fact is that the word “ministry” is a generic term; it lacks specificity until we add an adjective. . . .
There is a wide variety of Christian ministries. This is because “ministry” means “service,” and there are many different ways in which we can serve God and people. [There follows a discussion of the events in Acts 6] . . . It is essential to note that both distributing food and teaching the word were referred to as ministry (diakonia). Indeed, both were Christian ministry, could be full-time ministry, and required Spirit-filled people to perform them. The only difference between them was that one was pastoral ministry, and the other social. It was not that one was “ministry” and the other not; nor that one was spiritual and the other secular; nor that one was superior and the other inferior. It was simply that Christ had called the Twelve to the ministry of the word and the Seven to the ministry of tables. . . .
It is a wonderful privilege to be a missionary or a pastor, if God calls us to it. But it is equally wonderful to be a Christian lawyer, industrialist, politician, manager, social worker, television script-writer, journalist, or home-maker, if God calls us to it. According to Romans 13:4 an official of the state (whether legislator, magistrate, policeman or policewoman) is just as much a “minister of God” (diakonos theou) as a pastor. . . .
There is a crying need for Christian men and women who see their daily work as their primary Christian ministry and who determine to penetrate their secular environment for Christ.
It was precisely this conviction about the missional importance of lay Christians in their everyday workplaces that led Stott to found the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, in 1982, “with the core belief that every part of our lives comes under the Lordship of Christ, and that all of life is a context for worship, mission, ministry and active Christian engagement.” The present director of the institute is Mark Greene, who emulates John Stott in his passion for equipping Christians to be committed and fruitful in the ministry and mission God has for them in the world of work and all the rest of our surrounding culture. In addition to his books, Greene was on the team that led workshops on the workplace at Lausanne, Cape Town 2010, and contributed to the section on “Truth and the Workplace” in the Cape Town Commitment.
The Bible shows us God’s truth about human work as part of God’s good purpose in creation. The Bible brings the whole of our working lives within the sphere of ministry, as we serve God in different callings. By contrast, the falsehood of a “sacred-secular divide” has permeated the Church’s thinking and action. This divide tells us that religious activity belongs to God, whereas other activity does not. Most Christians spend most of their time in work which they may think has little spiritual value (so-called secular work). But God is Lord of all of life. “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men,” said Paul, to slaves in the pagan workplace [Colossians 3:23].
I have no doubt that John Stott endorsed the robust missional theology and practical relevance of this paragraph, and would have seen it as entirely in line with, and the fruition of, the insights and summons he put forward in this book in 1975.