What does it mean to wait for one another? What can it mean when our practice of the Lord’s Supper has become regimented, efficient, and, most importantly, disconnected from eating together?

Some, I suspect, will feel these evolutions are beneficial because they minimize the issues that afflicted the Corinthian churches. The challenges of class and social status matter little when bits of cracker and sips of juice are passed around on schedule. Or, at least, they are hidden. All are welcome, we say. And in many churches, it’s mostly true.

The thing about Christians eating together in the New Testament is that it’s part of a kind of life together. That life together is what makes waiting for one another possible. It makes many other “one anothers” possible, too, but this one is uniquely embedded in a practice that demands a way of life incompatible with most contemporary observances of the Eucharist. When the disparities of abundance and hunger no longer figure in the church’s remembrance of Jesus, something has gone awry.

The practice of waiting for one another demands that we seek to live life with those who have neither abundance nor freedom to be “punctual.” The Corinthian churches represented in Paul’s letters are often taken as the chief example of how first-century Christianity could be outlandishly problematic. Christians who chuckle today at those misguided brothers and sisters ought to ask themselves why the Corinthians, at least, had church members who made the command to wait for one another necessary. They may have failed to treat one another rightly, but at least they lived in communion with those who needed Paul to issue the command. The same cannot be said of most churches I’m familiar with today.

What, then, does waiting for one another require? At a basic level, it requires the decision to be together. The word “to come together” (sunerchomai) is programmatic for 1 Cor 11:17–34. It occurs twice in the verses about waiting for one another (vv. 33–34) and three more times at the beginning of the passage (vv. 17, 18, 20). Of course, read through the lens of contemporary church practice, “coming together” would mean nothing more than attending a Sunday service. But that way of life is not in view in 1 Corinthians. Rather, a life of radical togetherness is at stake.

Sunerchomai only appears twice more in the letter (14:23, 26). But a wider set of “together” words signals the meaning of “coming together” in Paul’s imagination:

• sunergos (3:9) - coworker

• sunagō (5:4) - gather

• sunanamignumi (5:9, 11) - associate with

• sunesthiō (5:11) - eat together

• summerizō (9:13) - share with

• sugkoinōnos (9:23) - participant

• sumpaschō (12:26) - suffer together

• sugchairō (12:26; 13:6) - rejoice together

• sunergeō (16:16) - collaborate

Moreover, this vision of life together is the subject of the letter as a whole, identified by Paul’s opening exhortation: “Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose” (1:10; NRSV). “Divisions” are not, in other words, one topic among many to be addressed in 1 Corinthians but Paul’s overarching concern. They are antithetical to “the fellowship (koinōnia) of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord” into which they were called (1:9). More than merely thinking the same thing, being “united in the same mind and the same purpose” is the way of life that emerges from receiving grace, every kind of instruction (logos) and knowledge (gnosis), spiritual gifts, and strength (1:4–8). It is the “mind of Christ” (2:16), incompatible with a merely human way of life (peripateō; walking about—journeying!) characterized by jealously and strife (3:3).

“So then, my brothers and sisters, when you come together to eat, wait for one another” (11:33) The assumption that the Corinthian churches regularly eat together repeatedly appears in the letter: eating together as the most fundamental act of fellowship (5:11); eating food sacrificed to idols in the presence of others (chs. 8 and 10); ministers and missionaries sharing the food of the church (ch. 9), and, of course, the Lord’s table itself (chs. 10 and 11). Eating together is integral to the way of life Paul envisions. But why wouldn’t it be? At least some of the Corinthian congregations meet in homes (16:19). The home—a gathering around a table—is the setting in which welcome is extended, meat is served, ministers are fed, and the Lord’s Supper is shared.

Am I saying, then, that this “one another” requires a church gathered around a table (or a serving dish, a fire pit, a floor mat, or whatever)? Well, yes. But of course, I know how impractical that is for many churches, especially large ones. And I know how improbable it is for most churches to reorient the practice of the Lord’s Supper, much less the whole notion of “coming together,” around a shared meal. Still, if I’m being forthright, I believe that is what it takes to live the Christian life envisioned in 1 Corinthians. So what, if such life together is neither practical nor probable for your community?

On the one hand, to continue being frank, there is a lot about Christian faith that is neither practical nor probable. But sadly, many church leaders are unwilling to call excuses what they are. There is too much at stake simply to shrug and carry on. “For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves” (1 Cor 11:29). I wonder whether it is possible to discern the body of Christ when we detach the practice of the Eucharist from life together. How many of us drink judgment against ourselves week in and week out because our practice does not afford the opportunity to discern the body? Yes, there are many interpretations of what this verse means, and we can be quite creative in our “applications.” For my part, I see little daylight between waiting for one another and discerning the body, and I’ve not yet experienced a version of the Lord’s Supper that comes close to table communion in its fulfillment of these obligations.

Still, my remarks about a way of life together refer to more than the Eucharist, which stands at its center. And I believe the Lord’s table is more than those fleeting Sunday moments. Waiting for one another means making space—in the hours of our days, at our tables, in our hearts. So, how will you make space? Whom will you wait for? What will remembering the Lord look like at your table?

In one sense, the Bible is about many people, many places, many times, many things. My question is whether, at the same time, all of it is about something identifiable. For Christians, that possibility depends not on consistency from author to author across time but on divine authorship—what we call inspiration. Or, from another angle, the many narratives of Scripture are part of God’s own story.

Once a confessional stance is taken, the question becomes theological. And the answer depends on one’s commitments. I’ve been influenced by many theologians who have addressed the aboutness question. Witness to Christ, salvation history, redemption, covenant, God’s presence, God’s glory, God’s kingdom, and more are serious options. The seriousness of these options is a function of the arguments marshalled in their favor. Though their arguments diverge and compete, they are often equally compelling. None of them is superficial or arbitrary—or completely misguided. They are, however, still a representation of theological commitments that shape the reading of the biblical narrative as a whole, and they are selective. I believe that neither of these conditions is avoidable. The argument one marshals is inevitably a defense of those commitments and selections.

My guiding theological commitment is straightforward: I believe God has purposes. I do not say “a purpose” out of respect for the diversity of the biblical story, even though, from a human perspective, it might be fair to speak simply of God’s purpose. Still, I intend here only to ascribe purposiveness to God.

This is a properly theological claim. I am beginning with an attribute of God, though not a classical attribute. It is, nonetheless, an attribution that the biblical story necessarily entails. From the beginning of the story to its end, God manifestly has intentions, aims, desires—purposes. The conventional language for this phenomenon is God’s will. But it’s important to recognize that God’s will is revealed narratively—in history and in Scripture. Indeed, one of the most charming things about the claim that God is purposive is that it’s a statement about the necessary shape of revelation. Human beings can only perceive reality in narrative form. That means truth has a beginning, middle, and end; it has a plot. If the agency of God is part of the story, God’s intention that the story go this way rather than that is inherent. God is purposive.

What, then, are God’s revealed purposes? Like all questions, this one elicits answers steeped in the subjectivity of its respondents. We are all prone to think that God wants what we want. The inevitable selectivity of our biblical references is liable to reflect our subjectivity. Below are the narrative points of reference that I find most compelling, not because they are comprehensive or objective but because they compose a throughline that looks the most like a plot.

• Gen 1:28 – the “cultural mandate.” God’s original command to humankind reveals God’s purpose: good creation filled with good people doing good. The multiplication of God’s image is in view. God’s benevolent rule exercised through his image-bearers is in view. The consequences of those possibilities are in view. All of it is intention—purpose—unfulfilled and dependent on human cooperation.

• Gen 12:3 – the blessing of the nations through Abraham’s family. Creation has begun filling with bad people doing bad, and the question is whether anything else is now possible. Having committed the divine self not to opt again for destruction (Gen 9:1–11), God begins a slow process of redemption with the election of Abram. God’s purposes for all the nations are in view, and their blessing depends on the cooperation of God’s chosen people.

• Exod 19:6 – the priestly vocation of Israel. As Abraham’s family, now a nation, begins life after liberation from slavery, the shape of their cooperation with God in relation to the nations yet to be blessed takes shape. The nation of Israel must become holy to serve as an intermediary between God and the nations. Cooperation with God’s purposes entails transformation into holiness, God-likeness, which is the recovery of the image of God.

• Isa 42:6; 49:6 – the role of Israel as a light to the nations. In the aftermath of Israel’s failure to cooperate with God’s purposes, God reiterates the commitment to make his people a means of redemption for the nations. Though the law has proven unable to make Israel a holy nation, holiness is still a proximate purpose that serves the ultimate purpose of the nations’ blessing.

• [Mark 16:9–16]; Matthew 28:16–20; Luke 24:44–52; John 20:19–23 (17:14–19) – the commissioning of Jesus’s disciples. The ending of each Gospel indicates where the story is going—and what the story was always about. The Messiah’s followers are the remnant of Israel in whom Isa 49:6 is fulfilled, sanctified and sent to cooperate with—participate in—God’s purposes.

• The Book of Acts – the cooperative praxis of the Holy Spirit and the Apostles. God’s Spirit is at work in God’s people to lead them into holiness for the purpose of bearing witness to the grace of God for all nations revealed in the Messiah. As the nations join God’s people, they too are sanctified by the Holy Spirit and sent to bear witness. The fulfillment of God’s purposes begins to manifest and points toward the final fulfillment of those purposes through the church’s collaboration.

• The various parts of the New Testament letters that reference Gen 12:3; Exod 19:6; and Isa 49:6. The gospel is about the fulfillment of Abram’s blessing of the nations (Gal 3:8). The church’s identity is the realization of Israel’s vocation to be intermediaries for the nations (1 Pet 2:9). The apostolic mission is for the sake of the nations (Acts 13:47). God’s purposes revealed in the Old Testament are at issue throughout the New Testament.

• Rev 5:9–10; 7:9–10; 21:1–8 – the vision of ultimate renewal. The final vision (not the end!) of the story is the renewal of all things and the fulfillment of God’s purposes. What Peter calls the restoration of all things (Acts 3:21) and Paul calls the consummation and reconciliation of all things (Eph 1:10; Col 1:20), Revelation envisions as all nations becoming “a kingdom and priests serving our God” (5:10), who ascribe salvation to God (Rev 7:10). So all things being made new (21:5) means good creation filled with good people doing good.

The Bible, then, is all about God’s purposes—God’s mission. To clarify terminology, “missions” (plural) is what the church does in participation with what God does. “Mission” (singular; “sending”) is what God does—and who God is. In other words, we ascribe to God the attribute of having purposes for which he sends his people. Human cooperation with God is the basic assumption of missional interpretation of Scripture.

The Gospel of John is a primary (though not exclusive) biblical point of reference for understanding mission in Trinitarian terms. God the Father sends the Son (John 5:22–23, 36; 6:38; 8:16; 12:49-50; 14:24; 16:5; and more). The Father and the Son send the Holy Spirit (John 14:26; 15:26; 16:7). The Son sends the church in the power of the Spirit to participate in the mission of the Son (John 17:18; 20:21). All of this “sending” aims at God’s purposes—that which God wills but is not yet the case. And reading these (and other) texts through a Trinitarian lens invites reflection on the attribute purposesiveness as a revealed communicable property of the Triune life. Or, as missional theologians are wont to say: God is missional by nature.

In short, Scripture narrates God’s mission. God’s mission is what the Bible is all about. Thus, God’s purposes guide our interpretation of Scripture.

This is a rudimentary rendition of one fundamental set of claims that missional interpreters of Scripture tend to make. My aim is to write about additional dimensions of “Missional Interpretation 101” from time to time. I’ll keep these pieces short, simplified, and therefore, in need of further explanation. Your comments and questions can help direct the conversation.

Recommended Reading

Heavy Lift

Wright, Christopher J. H. The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative. 2nd ed. IVP Academic, 2025. The 2006 first edition of this work was a watershed for missional interpretation. The recent second edition signals the vibrancy of this field of study in the last twenty years. Caveat lector: this one is not for the faint of heart. But if you want to dive deep, jump in here.

Lighter Lift

Bartholomew, Craig G., and Michael W. Goheen. The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story. 3rd ed. Baker Academic, 2024. A significant work that rehearses the biblical narrative with missional sensitivity. Academic but relatively quite readable.

Goheen, Michael W. A Light to the Nations: The Missional Church and the Biblical Story. Baker Academic, 2011. The most accessible of the works listed here—a great starting point.

Wright, Christopher J. H. The Mission of God’s People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission. Biblical Theology for Life. Zondervan, 2010. Half the length of The Mission of God and essentially an extension of that work. Still an academic work, but more approachable.

Wright, Christopher J. H. Great Story and the Great Commission: Participating in the Biblical Drama of Mission. Acadia Studies in Bible and Theology. Baker Academic, 2024. Still an academic work, but far more concise. Self-consciously engaged with the wider field of missional hermeneutics.

A few weeks ago, the Christian Chronicle published an article titled “‘We lost our mission.’” Of course, “mission” language catches my attention. But the “we” at issue is another area of keen interest—my church tradition. The combination of those two topics is bound to elicit some commentary on my part.

Furthermore, the article was about a gathering called ReMission, whose purpose and emphases are of special interest to me.

1. Their website describes the year’s theme, “A Spirit-Filled Movement,” this way: “our prayerful longing for the Holy Spirit to rekindle our passion, renew our imagination, and realign our hearts with His mission for the church [read: a certain segment of Churches of Christ].” The ambition to start a renewal movement is clear enough. Framing it with pneumatological language that is foreign to the tradition is fascinating. Focusing on mission raises questions central to my scholarly work, especially considering their overtly “missional” language.

2. One session titled “Missional Values and Christian Education” highlighted a concern with higher education. The panel featured Bible department deans from numerous institutions affiliated with Churches of Christ, including ACU. As my readers know, I’ve thought a lot about the relationship between church and academy, and I agree that it’s a primary concern for the future of American Christianity, including Churches of Christ.

3. Even more than the pneumatological accent, the larger theological framing of the gathering is consequential. There was lots of talk about “orthodoxy”—language that has never characterized Churches of Christ and, indeed, treads near to contradicting an essential tenet of the Stone-Campbell Movement. What are we, who once shunned even the word theology, to make of an appeal to “orthodoxy”?

Churches of Christ, mission, higher ed, and theology—yeah, you’ve got my attention.

What I want to do at this point is raise some questions about what’s in evidence, especially in the Christian Chronicle article, but also in a couple of the recorded sessions.

What Is the Diagnosis?

My first question is about ReMission’s understanding of the situation that calls for a renewal movement. Diagnosis precedes treatment, and if the name ReMission indicates anything, it’s the gravity of the illness at issue. So what kind of cancer are we treating? What’s really going on in Churches of Christ?

Obviously, the claim that “we lost our mission” is diagnostic. But a couple of deeper assessments underlie it. First, “We moved from ‘We’re the only ones going to heaven’ to ‘No one’s going to hell.’ When we made that move, we lost our mission” (Rick Atchley). Second, “battles over issues unrelated to Christianity’s core purpose have contributed to thousands of churches closing” (Bobby Ross Jr., paraphrasing Jonathan Storment). Pressing questions arise.

What (the Hell) Motivates Us?

Does “no one’s going to hell” represent the thinking in the 168 congregations represented at the gathering? Did that pendulum swing really happen? Atchley says he left sectarianism behind, and, praise God, it seems that many Churches of Christ have as well—particularly the subset represented at ReMission. With that transition has come humility about making the kinds of judgments that belong to the Lord. I suppose that change in posture can read as “no one’s going to hell,” but a far more accurate representation would be “that’s not my call.” Does “that’s not my call” entail a loss of evangelistic zeal? Speaking from personal experience, no.

Certainly, the fervor of evangelistic revivalism in 1970s Churches of Christ was inseparable from fire-and-brimstone preaching. The threat of eternal punishment was a core motivation for evangelists and their listeners. If this represents the time period before our “mission drift” began in ReMission’s estimation, then we need to be very clear about something. That period was well before any broad-scale shift away from sectarianism. It wasn’t simply conversion to Christian faith but to “the Lord’s church” that provided an escape from hell—and motivated evangelism. So Atchley’s juxtaposition of “We’re the only ones going to heaven” with “No one’s going to hell” is insightful because it suggests a critical question: can “we’re not the only ones going to heaven and lost people are still going to hell” serve as an adequate motivation for evangelism? If it can, as ReMission implies, that would not be a return to our motivation before mission drift but a novelty in our tradition.

Which makes me wonder: what does the idea that we need hell at the center of evangelistic commitment reveal about our imagination regarding the motivations of Christian witness? We’re all in a post-sectarian reconfiguration, and I welcome the conversation about what motivates us now, but I have my doubts about the adequacy of recentering divine retribution in our kingdom work.

What Is Our Core Purpose?

Reference to “thousands of churches closing” reveals another element of the diagnosis. We’re in numerical decline (along with most of Western Christianity). Why? According to Storment, in part because we’ve focused on “battles over issues unrelated to Christianity’s core purpose.” Again, I’m puzzled by this reading of history. According to now-debunked folklore, Churches of Christ were the fastest-growing religious group in the US between 1950 and 1965. Regardless of hyperbole, that period was our golden era of growth. And since 1980—since leading theologians and educators began planting the seeds of our post-sectarian shift in earnest—we have only a statistical downtrend. So, to put it bluntly, is ReMission claiming that the problem since 1980 is that churches have focused on battles over issues unrelated to Christianity’s core purpose—that the 1950s Churches of Christ grew because they weren’t engaged in such battles? Really?

While I agree that focusing on secondary issues often has an enervating effect, and I applaud the emphasis on God’s mission (to the extent that God’s mission is indeed being centered rather than, say, hell), aren’t the dynamics of growth and decline far more complicated than this? Doesn’t our history indicate that focusing on secondary issues can actually be an engine of growth when they serve as a primary motivation? If that is the case, then why attribute to battles over today’s issues any more consequence than battles over the issues of yore?

And, more importantly from my perspective, is making growth itself a motivation truly compatible with focusing on Christianity’s core purpose? It may be that revival efforts rooted in a desire to reverse our decline will prove internally incoherent. It may be that church growth is not a good proxy for participation in God’s mission.

What Do We Mean by Mission?

The header of ReMission’s home page states: “Connecting Churches to God’s Mission and Each Other.” The language is heartening. But judging by the session titles, the operative definition of mission is limited to disciple-making and evangelism. Which, from the perspective of contemporary missiology, raises more questions. I’m an advocate—and teacher—of both disciple-making and evangelism. These are essential practices of the church. They are part of what participation in God’s mission looks like. And they are not God’s mission. So what are we going to center? What defines Christianity’s core purpose? Using mission language isn’t enough. Nor can this question be dismissed as a secondary issue.

The Christian Chronicle article chose an interesting quote from one attendee to represent the gathering: “What I saw in ReMission . . . was a group of ministers who were saying, ‘Hey, we need to refocus on saving souls and doing things that churches are all about rather than pursuing social justice or political conservatism or political progressivism.’” The idea that “saving souls” is what churches are all about tracks with the broader emphasis on recentering heaven and hell. The idea that churches are not all about “social justice”—that social justice should be lumped in with political partisanship as distractions from what churches are all about—tracks with the reduction of “mission” to disciple-making and evangelism.

As Storment puts it, “I think the question is, does the church have a gospel word for the world still?” If this is the question for ReMission, then I have a few more. What is that gospel word? Salvation from hell? What about the kingdom of God? What about the justice of God that Jesus commands us to seek along with the kingdom? What about the church living out good news in both word and deed? What about faithful witness to Jesus regardless of whether it’s perceived as good news, regardless of church growth? What about—and this is the crux of the matter—participating in God’s work in the world, which far exceeds telling people about how to escape from eternal consequences for the individual “soul”? The conversation in the “Missional Values and Christian Education” session called out the epistemological individualism of students shaped by secular relativism. What about the soteriological individualism of churches shaped by theological fundamentalism? Are we really trying to reclaim that as our core purpose? Seriously, what do we mean by mission?

What Does Moving beyond Divisive Squabbles Mean?

Says Ross: “Speakers and attendees alike expressed a love for their heritage in Churches of Christ while conveying a desire to move beyond divisive squabbles.” The article highlights two issues to demonstrate the point: “ReMission brought together Churches of Christ deemed progressive—in terms of praise styles and women’s roles—as well as more traditional congregations with exclusively a cappella singing and male worship leaders.” Presumably, these are the “issues unrelated to Christianity’s core purpose” earlier in view. They have certainly been major battlegrounds during the period of decline since 1980.

Out of respect for those who have been in the trenches on both sides of those fights, I have to ask: isn’t “squabbles” dismissive? I believe women in ministry who hear that the struggle to carve out a space to exercise their gifts was a squabble of (at best) secondary importance will be rightly discouraged. Likewise, I suppose missionaries whose support was pulled because they determined to use instrumental worship for contextual reasons will find “squabble” to miss the point. And more, isn’t the reason these issues have taken center stage that the question of how we interpret Scripture is central to the Restoration Movement? Do we move beyond these “squabbles” by simply sidelining the hermeneutical questions at the heart of our identity crisis, which has as much to do with our decline as any other factor one might identify?

Given that one of ReMission’s stated values is “an authoritative view of Scripture,” I suspect there will be some objections to the suggestion that they are sidelining hermeneutical questions. And I’m open to that conversation! This is my initial reflection on the evidence publicly at hand. Whatever an authoritative view of Scripture means here, it clearly doesn’t mean that Scripture is authoritative in such a way as to settle differences about instrumental music or women’s leadership. So some kind of sidelining is happening. In some sense, the authoritative function of Scripture in ReMission’s theological determinations is secondary to the church’s “core purpose.”

If we are going to sideline hermeneutical questions—indeed, if ReMission hopes to maintain cohesion among people with radically different conclusions about the issues identified—then something more than centering “mission” will have to replace our concern for understanding Scripture together. From what I can tell, an appeal to “orthodoxy” is serving precisely this function.

What Is “Orthodox Sexuality”?

Sexuality is clearly another issue on ReMission’s radar. Unlike instrumental worship and women’s leadership, however, it is not an issue about which ReMission will suffer dissent. Consider the gathering’s stated values:

• Discipleship and Evangelism

• Christ-centered, Spirit-led ministry

• Reconciliation and unity in the body of Christ

• An orthodox view of sexuality

• An authoritative view of Scripture

• Generous hospitality and humility

Let’s play a game: which one of these is not like the others? Now let’s play a harder game: what is an orthodox view of sexuality?

It’s a harder game because of the work “orthodox” is doing in ReMission’s language. The word is not an empty vessel in theological discourse; it means something specific. When you combine it with a word like sexuality, a cognitive impasse emerges. So the question becomes: what does ReMission mean by the peculiar phrase “orthodox sexuality”?

Echoing this language, Ross states, “Opposition has arisen within some circles of Christianity to the orthodox view of sexuality as reserved for marriage between one man and one woman“ (emphasis added). So we have a sense of what “orthodox” is supposed to mean here. Which helps us parse Atchley’s meaning when he says, “When I was in school, back in the Dark Ages, things like the authority of Scripture or commitment to orthodox sexuality . . . these were unquestioned.” . . . “It was not even in the realm of possibility that a teacher would have taught me differently. . . . Well, times have changed.” The perceived threat is teachers who teach that sexuality is not reserved for marriage between one man and one woman. Although fifty years ago, someone in Atchley’s place might just as well have said, “When I was in school, commitment to male church leadership was unquestioned,” ReMission’s response to interpretive battles about sexuality is not to call them squabbles but to make (one part of) a traditional sexual ethic an article of faith. The solution to the perceived threat, in other words, is an appeal to “orthodoxy.”

The point of doing so is precisely to make a particular traditional sexual ethic unquestioned—to remove teaching anything else from the realm of possibility. Farewell hermeneutics! But questions remain. First, what does “orthodox” actually mean? Second, do we really want to address interpretive differences this way?

What Is Orthodoxy?

There is a traditional Christian sexual ethic. Or, rather, there is a broad historical consensus on the particular questions related to “sexuality” that preoccupy ReMission. The clarification is necessary because it is not the case that Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestants share a traditional sexual ethic broadly speaking. Just take clerical celibacy as an example. If anything is a candidate for “orthodox” sexuality, clerical celibacy is on the table. Or consider Augustine’s belief that sex is for procreation, and sex for pleasure within the bounds of marriage is venial sin. Within the Western tradition, who could be more “orthodox” than Augustine? Is this what ReMission has in mind? Of course not.

It is one thing to affirm monogamous, heterosexual marriage as a traditional Christian norm for sexuality. It is another to use the label “orthodox” to circumvent further discussion. The fact is, orthodox does not refer to a consensus among the major historical Christian traditions on matters of interpretation or to authoritative theologians’ conclusions. It refers to the doctrinal determinations of the ecumenical creeds and the seven ecumenical councils. And guess what: they don’t talk about sexual ethics. There is no “orthodox sexuality” in Christianity; that is not what orthodoxy entails. In other words, one’s view of homosexual sex is not an article of faith.

So let’s ask the question: what is ReMission doing when it deploys this language? I can only observe what the language seems to do practically: it turns a matter of interpretive debate into a matter of authoritative predetermination, shutting down the discussion. It makes one of the most contested questions in our evangelistic context a foregone conclusion. It is a power play that makes agreement on this issue a criterion of Christian faith. Accordingly, Christians who do not think this way are not real Christians. So much for reconciliation and unity in the body of Christ, generous hospitality and humility, or post-sectarianism.

This misuse of “orthodox” is bad enough, in my view. But let’s also think about what this move means for Churches of Christ, which emerged from a rejection of creeds and confessions. Is this the way forward?

What Are the Consequences of Making Confessional Statements?

ReMission’s statement of values isn’t quite a confessional statement, but the use of “orthodox” brings it close. The Christian Chronicle article makes a revealing connection, however: “Harding [University] unveiled a comprehensive new statement of faith this past fall. All faculty and staff must adhere to it, including the belief ‘that human sexuality is God’s gift governed by the biblical boundaries for individuals and of marriage between one woman and one man.’” Reviewing this statement of faith, we could play the game again: which one of these is not like the others? The statement on sexuality appears to be a Trojan horse. Everything else, apart from the statement on the inspiration of Scripture, is an echo of the ecumenical creeds. In other words, everything else is uninteresting and unnecessary. I grieve to see my alma mater resort to this tactic. Why not just paste the Nicene Creed and be done with it? Because, of course, the Nicene Creed does not affirm “orthodox sexuality.”

And if ReMission is interested in orthodoxy, why not paste the Nicene Creed and be done with it? I think you know.

We need to deal with the fact that the Stone-Campbell Movement began with a commitment to doing without creeds and confessions. The Christian Chronicle article notes, “Stone and Campbell, both ordained Presbyterian clergymen, sought to unite Christians by abandoning denominations and relying solely on the Bible.” This terse summary only hints at what is at stake in ReMission’s appeal to orthodoxy.

Let me put my cards on the table. I think we should affirm the ecumenical creeds. I think there is a good argument for Trinitarian orthodoxy in our tradition, despite the rejection of creeds early on.1 And I think there is a critical difference between our attitudes toward the creeds and our attitudes toward confessions. The distinction is vital; it differentiates orthodoxy and denominationalism. Or more poignantly here, it differentiates orthodoxy and authoritarianism.

The creeds are statements of Trinitarian orthodoxy: the orthodoxy that defines Christianity. Confessions are denominational statements of additional beliefs. Creeds express the common faith of the church; confessions express the distinctive teaching of particular Christian communities.2 So the contemporary formulation of “statements of faith” among Churches of Christ is consequential, especially since they tend to skip the creeds and go straight to confessional particularities like sexuality. If there was any lingering question about whether Churches of Christ are a denomination in Campbell’s sense of the term, it has been answered by one of our more conservative universities publishing a confessional statement. To the extent that these public affirmations—and here I include ReMission’s—serve to define our orthodoxy, we have become full participants in the form of Christianity that the Restoration Movement rejected. Somehow, “no creed but Christ” has become “heterosexual, monogamous sex.” Does anyone else feel like that is bizarre?

I don’t think “no creed but Christ” ever really worked. I want us to affirm Trinitarian orthodoxy (and I was happy to see a long ReMission session on the Trinity). But I also want us to maintain a critical skepticism about making anything else “orthodox.” I want us to obsess about what Scripture means and to experience the freedom to follow our best understanding humbly and generously. I want us to resist the impulse to shut down the interpretation of Scripture in the name of an expanded “orthodoxy”. I want us to engage this process with a commitment to participation in God’s mission shaping our interpretation.

Years ago, I published an essay titled “Barton Stone’s Unorthodox Christology.”3 The gist of my argument is that Stone was a heretic, Campbell knew it, and Campbell joined with Stone anyway to prove the efficacy of rejecting creedalism and embracing biblicism for uniting Christians. It might appear that Campbell traded orthodoxy for restorationism, but that is not quite what happened. Rather, he traded theological interpretation of the passages related to Christ’s divinity for a biblicist recitation of those passages without regard for one’s understanding of what they mean.

Campbell and Stone agreed to jettison creeds and confessions as interpretive “opinions” in favor of merely parroting biblical “facts.” This decision followed from a failure to distinguish between the respective functions of creeds and confessions. The creeds are interpretive aids; the Trinitarian faith of the early church guides biblical interpretation. Confessions are interpretive statements; they articulate the conclusions that delimit denominational identity. Restorationist biblicism eschewed the theological guidance that biblical interpretation requires on the assumption that interpretation isn’t actually necessary because the affirmation of biblical statements is sufficient for delimiting Christian identity.

Put aside the naïveté of that assumption, given the inevitability of both theological presuppositions and the conflict of interpretations. Consider the overriding effect: selective biblicist recitation of the text plays the role of a confession, not for a denomination but for the “New Testament church” as such. Accordingly, the recitation of “sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts” (Eph 5:19) makes a cappella worship a confessional discrimen for who is a Christian and who is not. And “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent” (1 Tim 2:12) makes exclusively male church leadership a confessional discrimen for who is a Christian and who is not. And on and on. Here, the creeds don’t provide theological guidance for interpretation. As Stone proves, they don’t even serve as the discrimen for Christian identity. Restorationist biblicism made the Stone-Campbell Movement more rigorously sectarian, more thoroughly divisive, than denominational confessions ever could.

Now compare that procedure with labeling as “orthodox” a non-creedal position like “sexuality is reserved for marriage between one man and one woman.” Isn’t this the same essential operation: make the position an article of faith that is not subject to interpretive dissent? Whereas Restorationist biblicism forgoes interpretation by treating (selected!) biblical statements as articles of faith (we used to call them “salvation issues”), the misappropriation of “orthodoxy” language for (selected!) issues likewise forgoes interpretation by treating them as articles of faith.

My point is not that the claim “sexuality is reserved for marriage between one man and one woman” is wrong. That is utterly beside the point. The folks at ReMission seem to think this issue is of such significance that coming out with a confessional affirmation is necessary. What I’m saying is that the importance of this one issue—or any other that is not actually an article of faith as defined by the ecumenical creeds—pales in comparison to what is at stake in our tradition if we make this move. Stone and Campbell were wrong about many things, as humans tend to be. But I stand firmly in their tradition, sharing their commitment to return to Scripture together, as God’s people, instead of subscribing to predetermined interpretive conclusions. Some will see the creeds as predetermined interpretive conclusions and wonder whether I am being inconsistent. To the contrary, I repeat, the creeds are interpretive aids—minimal theological points of departure that guide the church’s ongoing interpretation of the biblical text.

Hence, I do not share Stone and Campbell’s desire to forego interpretive conflict, because I do not share their sense that Christian unity is defined by that conflict’s absence. Rather, because I’m also committed to their vision of congregational autonomy, which proscribes the magisterial authority necessary to formulate confessional statements, and because the history of the Stone-Campbell Movement has proven beyond any doubt that the consequence of this commitment is interpretive conflict, I therefore locate the unity of the church in the faith that the creeds delimit. In other words, what both Restorationist biblicism and the misappropriation of “orthodoxy” are attempting is the prevention of the conflict of interpretations. The latter is an echo of the former, and neither is necessary if we begin with a confession of faith in the Triune God.

Stone and Campbell’s refusal to rely on confessional statements was necessary, however, if indeed we want to preserve the church’s freedom, responsibility, and privilege to engage with Scripture anew in the hope that, as John Robinson famously put it, “there is yet more truth and light to break forth from God’s Holy Word.” Those are the stakes that far outweigh the prescription of “right teaching” on issues beyond the scope of the creeds. For the future of Churches of Christ and for the sake of God’s mission, orthodoxy matters, thus the meaning of orthodoxy matters.

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In this final post in the series, I’ll put my cards on the table, which is liable to provoke some additional disagreement. In fact, it may locate Richard in the moderate position in the discussion because there are some theological assumptions at work here that, I have reason to believe, Brad and I don’t share. If anyone is wondering why I jumped into the middle of this particular online exchange, the reason is twofold. I really enjoy both Richard and Brad and respect their work immensely. And this discussion happens to tread near the concerns that have occupied my heart and mind for over fifteen years.

Brad ended his post by pointing out that “The Overton Window is not set in stone,” the point being that some of the “contingent conditions” Richard assumes in his cultural analysis need not be taken for granted. In other words, we don’t have to “take secularism for granted.” Brad is not alone in thinking that the response to modern secularization need not be a journey through Ricoeur’s postmodern epistemological desert to a post-critical faith1; it might just be a return to premodernism.

I’m guessing that some of my readers might need a refresher on The Overton Window. The model refers to what is politically possible (basically assuming a two-party system).

Brad is right, the Window is not fixed, because what is popular, sensible, acceptable, radical, or unthinkable changes over time on both ends. Political debate is about shifting the window; policy-making is forced to live in the window.

To be clear, Brad is helpfully applying the model to a different domain of agreement/disagreement: the church’s life, specifically which shared vision of the church’s life is possible given divergent assumptions about the “contingent conditions” that determine what is sensible, popular, and agreeable for each side of the debate. Before portraying this continuum, let me put a fine point on what I think is at stake. “The church’s life” refers to Christian discipleship. Which practices of discipleship are necessary in the wake of secularization, and which are conceivable for normie Christians given our contingent conditions? Herein lies the conflict.

I’ve tried to plot the terms of the discussion fairly. It seems to me that the disagreement between Brad and Richard hinges on how feasible it is for normie discipleship to rely on spiritual automaticity (Brad: yes, Richard: no) or to aim for self-conscious purposefulness (Brad: no, Richard: yes). They agree that congregational liturgy is necessary and formative, though Richard insists it requires the same kind of choice-intentionality as other Christian obedience. Brad agrees that “obeying the teachings of Christ, setting one’s heart on the Lord, directing one’s attention to the Spirit” are commendable practices but aren’t what intentionality discourse is on about. Insofar as these practices reflect what I’ve labeled choice-intentionality, we’ve identified the limits of their agreement about normie intentionality.

For Brad, applying this kind of intentionality to awareness (self-consciousness) as such—making awareness-intentionality normal—is radical. Treating self-conscious purposefulness as a kind of virtue is unthinkable for normie disciples. For Richard, relying on Brad’s “spiritual automaticities” in the secular age is radical. Expecting congregational liturgy and minimal choice-intentionality to produce an unself-conscious faith that can survive in the secular age is unthinkable. In the end, Brad is right: what seems unthinkable is a function of assumptions about our contingent conditions. If the premodern conditions of Christendom are still operative, then spiritual automaticities and unself-conscious faith not only suffice but just are the reality of normie Christians. If not, then something more is required.

From my perspective, there is a third dimension to consider: we have to distinguish what is sufficient in our contingent conditions from the reality of normie Christianity. I happen to agree with Richard that the immanent frame is the Western church’s contingent condition, and there is no way through except the desert. The Western church can press on to a second naïveté, but it cannot recover the first naïveté. In the aftermath of Christendom, no few are clinging to that foregone possibility, and understandably so. The mass exodus of Millennials and Gen Z is, in large part, a consequence of that strategy. Why? In a word, the premodern approach is an insufficient witness in the postmodern world. More on which anon.

For now, let’s assume that the premodern approach is a viable pathway. The question remains: Was the reality of normie premodern Christianity a sufficient witness in the premodern world? Just because spiritual automaticities and unself-conscious faith were “normal” doesn’t mean they were the only option, much less the best option. It certainly doesn’t mean they constituted discipleship.

Given the option, I would not see the church return to the ecclesial assumptions of Christendom. I do not grant that the relegation of intentionality to the spiritual “elites” in that arrangement is necessary or good. There are many reasons for my critique of premodern spiritual classism. On the way to a conclusion, I’ll center one. Before the Protestant missions movement (beginning in the eighteenth century), Christian witness was, for a millennium, almost entirely limited to two possibilities: either (1) the passive witness of Christendom’s spiritual automaticities and unself-conscious faith, which amounts to the acculturation of immigrants or conquered peoples, or (2) the mission work of the subset of spiritual elites who set out to bear witness beyond Christendom. There was, in other words, no notion of normies undertaking mission work. Why? Because apart from the passive witness of life within Christendom, witness was an extension of intentionality, and intentionality was for the few, the proud, the clerical (paradigmatically, the Jesuits—who are not, by the way, monastics/contemplatives).

The recovery of the priesthood of all believers was an essential ingredient of the modern missions movement. It became possible to shift the expectation of missionary intentionality to normies—shoemakers, teachers, and physicians. But it was born in the latter days of Christendom, and even among low-church Protestants, the normalcy of the clergy-laity divide persisted well into the late twentieth century. Missionaries were still a special class engaged in a special activity, whose intentionality was not, therefore, characteristic of normies. It wasn’t until the latter half of the twentieth century that a significant theological discourse about the missionary nature of the church emerged among Roman Catholics and Protestants alike. Missional theology is the product (not the origin) of that discourse.

A foundational tenet of missional theology is that the life of the whole church is constituted by participation in God’s mission. Discipleship is missional life together. This claim sets a different standard for “normal” Christianity than merely what is the case most of the time, regardless of one’s contingent conditionals. More, it is a critique of the idea that Christendom represents the way things ought to be for normal Christian life and a rejection of the idea that doubling down on that defunct normal is the solution to the church’s travails in the secular age. In fact, those travails are largely a product of Christendom’s normal. The vast numbers of Christians who have lived or continue to live under the impression that little more than church membership and liturgical participation is “normal” for disciples of Jesus is a symptom, not a prescription. When churches suppose participation in God’s mission is a burden for spiritual elites that normies cannot bear, the intentionality that participation requires is naturally relegated as well. So our vision of discipleship attenuates along with our witness.

At this point, I may have parted ways with Richard and Brad in a variety of ways worthy of further discussion. There are at least two key ideas about which both of them seem to make different assumptions than I do. On the one hand, I’m saying the nature of discipleship is not individualistic. On the other hand, I’m saying the goal of discipleship is not survival.

The Nature of Discipleship

A quote from Brad that I’ve referenced, in part, a few times should be helpful for clarifying my view. He asks, “Is the church the corporate sacrament of salvation, whose liturgy is a foretaste of heaven and whose voice speaks with divine authority? Or is the church the company of disciples, a vanguard of urban contemplatives whose daily life together attests the kingdom of God?” I can’t imagine why these would be mutually exclusive affirmations. But the more interesting point is that “the company of disciples, a vanguard of urban contemplatives whose daily life together attests the kingdom of God” is very nearly exactly what I think the church is—taking into account my previous discussion of “contemplatives.” And it is the only place in the discussion where Brad represents the communal dimension to intentionality that is, in my view, nonnegotiable. Everything else in his portrayal of intentionality discourse is highly individualistic. To the extent that intentionality discourse is individualistic, it’s pathological, and he and I find common ground. To the extent that daily life together bearing witness to the kingdom of God is in view, I’m all in.

And the thing is, while I haven’t read Comer, I have read a lot about intentional discipleship. And a lot of it is about life together. But let me be more personal. I have little patience for personal liturgies or personal rules of life. That’s probably a function mostly of my own foibles and weaknesses, but it’s true. And whenever I have participated in discipling and being discipled, my intentionality discourse has been thoroughly communal. In fact, when I’ve worked on forming a rule of life with discipleship groups, I’ve complained long and loud about the fact that most of the popular resources act as though a rule of life can be personal. To be fair, that’s more a problem of the spiritual disciplines set than the intentionality set, but I suppose they overlap quite a bit and maybe more for Brad than for me.

In any case, maybe a rule of life can be personal. I just think that exercise misses the point of the historical referent (monastic [contemplative?] practices) and proves relatively impotent in comparison with a shared rule of life among disciples committed to life together witnessing to the kingdom of God. My experience, for what it’s worth, is that not only can normie Christians (and I have many real people in mind here, who are “worried about bills to pay and kids to raise and doctors appointments and that weird sound the truck keeps making”) engage in this kind of intentionality but that when they do, it is transformative in ways they didn’t know were possible. Because, of course, they’ve been told their entire lives that showing up for the liturgy and being a member of the tradition were supposed to be enough. But they’re not—not when paying bills and raising kids and going to doctors’ appointments and keeping the car running are weighed in the balance. I do not overstate my experience when I say that, consistently, highly intentional discipleship has proven life-giving for my friends precisely because they needed more than the tradition had given them well into their thirties, forties, and fifties. They need actual discipleship.

As far as I can tell, Richard’s discussion of intentionality is no less individualistic. His discussion is about personal faith, personal deconstruction, and personal reconstruction. If you look back at my first post, the list representing his view of intentionality is thoroughly wrapped up in individual attention, will, and choice. And I guess he would say that is both his interest as a psychologist and an inevitable level of analysis. No doubt, the people who chose to participate in my discipleship groups did so individually (or as couples). Every decision along the way—to engage, to stay, to do life together—is an individual choice. But of course. My point is that what people are intentional about is not a secondary concern. My wife and I have (intentionally) invited church members who have one foot out the church door into our discipleship groups: those who are in the midst of or basically done with deconstruction, even some who have landed on a firmly agnostic conclusion, for the very reason that they were looking for more than the church’s status quo, and they weren’t going to find it in personal practices of intentionality. Granted, some do. It’s possible. And the result of reconstruction through individual intentionality tends to be an individualist faith, not intentional life together bearing witness to the kingdom of God—church membership, not discipleship. Keeping your faith is a victory; it’s not the point of faith.

The Goal of Discipleship

Then what is the point of faith? Richard says something I quite like: “Acts of intention are a participation in the divine life”2 I’m not sure whether he wants to go as far as I do with the implications of that statement, but I’m glad we agree that much at least. Obviously, my “participation in God’s mission” language puts us in the same semantic field. I’ve argued fairly rigorously that missional participation should be understood as participation in the divine life.3 Here’s what I’m getting at: participation in God’s mission is normal for the church, and it requires intentionality, but that intentionality is not about the survival of one’s faith in the secular age. It turns out, that intentionality has the happy effect of securing, reviving, and nourishing one’s faith. But it does so because the most life-giving thing Christians can do is participate in what God is doing beyond themselves, even when the most they can say is “I believe; help me with my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). Even with the most they can say is “We have no more than five loaves and two fish—unless we are to go and buy food for all these people” (Luke 9:13).

There is a kind of spiritual narcissism in the intentionality discourse that I’m happy to jettison. It has nothing to do with becoming a company of disciples whose daily life together attests to the kingdom of God. I begrudge no one personal intentionality if it serves them. Not the deconstructing Christian who needs to practice personal attention to break the immanent frame, not the Christian who benefits from a personal daily liturgy, not the Christian husband who loves his wife but needs help remembering to show daily affection. But discipleship is a communal endeavor, no less than congregational liturgy, no less than the tradition. And discipleship is aimed at the cross, where our life together is broken open for the life of the world, be it premodern or postmodern.

Brad’s critique of intentionality discourse seems equally concerned with survival, not of the normie Christian deconstructing in the contingent conditional of the immanent frame but of the normie Christian overwhelmed with the contingent conditional of modern life. The tradition is, in his view, a lifeline for the regular person who can manage little more than letting faith operate in the background and showing up for the reinforcement of the congregational liturgy.4 I know who he’s talking about; I suspect most of us have been there, even if only for a little while.

My position is simply that while this may be common, it’s not normal: it does not represent the norm of Christian discipleship. If you need to worry about your house, fine; “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” If you need to bury your dead, fine; “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” If you need to tend to your family, fine; “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:57–62). These are hard words. They usually get sidelined with “turn the other cheek” and “sell your possessions” as some kind of hyperbole. Maybe they’re for the spiritual elite. Us normies can’t take that kind of talk literally. Only, that way lies the cross, and at some point, we have to tell the church, the whole church, the truth. Discipleship isn’t personal piety or even personal plans of spiritual formation. It’s not daily quiet time. It’s not church attendance. It is giving your whole life—bills, sickness, kids, and car trouble, along with raises, health, kids again, and leisure—for God’s purposes. And it’s for normie Christians.

God’s purposes. This brings me to my final thought. I mentioned “becoming a company of disciples whose daily life together attests to the kingdom of God.” Becoming is a key word.5 If (!) my adaptation of The Overton Window is accurate, the self-conscious purposefulness of normie Christians is somewhere around “acceptable” for Richard and “unthinkable” for Brad. Maybe the simplest way to plot my viewpoint in relation to theirs is to say that, for me, self-conscious purposefulness is the goal of discipleship. For the missional church, it belongs at the POLICY position. It is the point of congregational liturgy, choice-intentionality, and awareness-intentionality. When spiritual automaticities and unself-conscious faith fail to serve self-conscious purposefulness, they are a problem.

Referring to the previous post, self-conscious purposefulness is a virtue of the missional church—a product of intentionality. In this sense, it is not quite right to put it in the POLICY position. Virtue doesn’t work well as policy, generally. But if the centerpiece of The Overton Window suggests the agenda of the missional church, then make no mistake: liturgy, choice, and awareness, just like spirituality and faith, are means to the ends that the Triune God determines. God’s purposes are definitive, and the church—not just spiritual elites—is called to participate in them, consciously, intentionally, at all cost, without exception.

1. What Do Practices Have to Do with Virtues in Intentionality Discourse?

Richard says, “In short, when the habitus of Latin Christendom evaporated we lost our ability to cultivate virtue.”1 For him, intentionality is a substitute, or at least a strategy for compensating. “Intentionality directs the will and virtue stabilizes the will. Virtue doesn’t happen by accident.”2 In other words, intentionality is a practice for cultivating virtue. But which virtue?

On the one hand, this is Richard’s basic point about our context: absent the habitus of Christendom, it is necessary to “disengage the autopilot”3 of the secular age. So intentionality is the practice of disengaging, and the result is—what? Something like a perception of reality outside the immanent frame (the secular worldview). Let’s call this awareness for the sake of correspondence: on The Intentionality Spectrum, the practice of awareness vultivates the virtue of awareness. Perhaps this is best called a spiritual awareness for clarity.

For reference, here is The Intentionality Spectrum again:

On the other hand, Richard’s list of Bible verses points toward any number of virtues that intentionality might cultivate. “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you” (Eph 4:31) hints at a decision to obey the command that might result in a peaceful, patient character. “Make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Rom 13:14) suggests a decision to obey the command that might result in temperance. And so on.

The structure is simply iterative conscious choice —> unconscious virtue. Of course, this can be applied to awareness in particular: “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Colossians 3:2). In Richard’s argument, the list of biblical commands serves to demonstrate the role of choice-intentionality in all of Christian life, thereby establishing the legitimacy of intentionality as such. The central concern is the role of awareness-intentionality in perceiving “things above” in the midst of secularity. Thus, choice-intentionality regarding awareness-intentionality results in awareness-virtue (a habituated disposition to perceive things above, or eyes of faith).

I hope that, although it is not a classical virtue, we might count “awareness” as at least analogous to virtue in view of the paragraphs above. Perhaps not, but I’m going to move on from that presumption to focus on another aspect of the discussion.

Consider Brad’s construal of The Intentionality Discourse’s imagined results:

• “always-on ‘intentional’ people”

• “a kind of spiritual Navy SEALs—elite, ultra, for the special few”

• “urban contemplatives”

There are two things to say about this vision of intentionality. Well, three. First, this is certainly representative of a pathological idea of “maturity.” If intentionality is about that, then let’s boycott the language.

The other two things:

More importantly, Brad is focused on “normie” vs. [whatever is not “normie”] Christianity. Certainly, he does not mean that normal Christians are not aimed at maturity, much less that they cannot become mature (though perhaps that maturity is not normal?). Rather, there is something else that is not normal (for “most people”): leadership. This is the group (“leaders, writers, thinkers”) among which “some intentionality” might be necessary. Historically, the paradigm “elite, ultra, for the special few” is the “contemplative.” (Note the connection between the contemplative life and the cultivation of awareness-virtue.)

But of course, the “normal” church member is neither a church leader nor a contemplative. Is intentionality discourse really trying to put them on those paths? Maybe to the extent that church leadership depends on virtue and that the contemplative’s perspective is related to awareness-virtue. But otherwise, no. I think intentionality is rather about discipleship in the secular age.

Now we come to the crux of the matter. Brad says:

“I’m not saying Jesus isn’t calling them [“normies”], too, to follow him, to take up their cross like all disciples. I’m saying that there is a particular kind of discourse, a way of talking about the gospel and the Christian life, that both reflects and reinforces a specific, local, non-universal sub-group or class of people’s way of being in the world. And it’s not obvious why we should generalize this group’s mode of inhabiting faith to everyone else.”

I’m sympathetic to Brad’s perspective given his construal of what intentionality discourse is aimed at. Again, if he’s right, we agree to a great extent. “Always on” isn’t possible. But that’s true for everyone, not just normies. “A kind of spiritual Navy SEAL” is equally unrealistic. I’ve never met such a person, and I’ve met some pretty spiritual people (and some of them were what I think Brad means by “normie”). “Urban contemplative” is a little more ambiguous. What work is “urban” doing? Are the likes of Comer and company’s readers typically urban, rather than rural? Probably, though I’m not sure why that matters here; I know some pretty intentional rural people. But as I’ve said, the average Christian is certainly not a contemplative, which is a fairly extreme lifestyle. So yeah, if the caricature is representative (and caricatures often are), let’s not go that way.

I think, however, that the real tension here is about what discipleship—for the normie Christian in 2025—means and what it is aimed at. I haven’t talked to Brad or Richard about this claim, so I don’t know what they would say, or whether they would even grant that this is what the conversation is about, but from my perspective, it is.

2. What Does Iteratively Intentional Discipleship (Taking Up the Cross) Look Like Given The Intentionality Spectrum?

To maintain continuity, I’ll put it like this: discipleship is a set of practices aimed at being more “on,” more contemplative, more spiritual. In the theological sense, “perfection” is the goal, and I don’t think we should be coy about that, but stating the goal even that absolutely should not cloud our vision of what discipleship is as a set of practices for all Christians: “teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Matt 28:20). What is necessary for learning to obey the teachings of Christ?

I said “iteratively intentional discipleship.” Let me clarify. Discipleship is an iterative practice. We chose to take up the cross daily. We make choices. Some of discipleship—ideally a lot of it—becomes habituated, unconscious, virtuous. But not all of it, not ever as far as I can tell. Christians have to be “on” at least some of the time. Probably a lot of the time if they are not yet highly habituated. In other words, choice-intentionality is especially commendable for those who are not elite, spiritual, or contemplative.

Likewise, practices are necessarily intentional, at one level or another. As Richard points out, you can opt into iterative practices like the liturgy, and even then, “intentionality cannot be avoided.”4 You have to make an intentional choice to engage. But in any case, practices are choices. You either do or do not practice something. The decision this choice entails is inherently intentional. Inheriting a tradition is no exception. As adults, we always decide what to do with our inheritance, familially, communally, and culturally. Some parts of this process remain unconscious. Other parts do not. Tradition and culture are fluid and contested, always.

So what does discipleship look like in relation to The Intentionality Spectrum? At this point, I have to register the opinion that the difference between discipleship and church membership in the secular age is decisive. Brad’s claim that “the local congregation’s got it covered” does not comport with my experience in Churches of Christ. And I doubt that it’s true in high-church traditions, not least because I’ve discipled quite a few former Roman Catholics. I think I’m pretty clear-eyed about what ardent participation in the tradition does.

That said, I’m a big fan of tradition. I love the Great Tradition of Christian faith. I’m conscious of the way tradition functions salubriously in religion and culture. I have advocated the recovery of theological tradition in my tribe. And I have worked to establish tradition on the congregational level. All of this might connect with the practices of discipleship, and none of it is discipleship, per se.

Tradition simply cannot do what discipleship does, and vice versa. Once someone has opted into and engaged tradition, it can work on the level of unintentional formation. Discipleship works on the level of intentional formation. Both are necessary. Our debate comes down to what is sufficient formation for “normie” Christians. I would say no one is exempt from the intentional, iterative practices of discipleship.

And I would say that most church members in 2025, at least in my experience, are profoundly unintentional in this sense. Most Western Christians, to be blunt, have never been discipled. And this is almost always because church membership—liturgical attendance—is presumed to be sufficiently formative. So I tend to be open to authors who are calling for more intentionality. Does every church member need to create a personal plan of spiritual action or personal daily liturgies? No. Are these useful options for many who find mere (regular, lifelong!) membership insufficiently formative? Yes.

Personal plans of spiritual action or daily liturgies are, in other words, a more structured variety of intentional choice. The message should not be that people who make such choices are elite or especially spiritual. In fact, I think such people usually recognise that they are quite the opposite. They need the intentionality because the tradition isn’t doing it.

Still, I want to end with my departure from this vision of “personal” discipleship. One thing tradition does well is communal formation. And discipleship should be communal, too. It is not a solo sport. To the extent that intentionality discourse is individualistic—which seems to be most of the time—I’m against it. In the next and final post in the series, I will specify what I mean by iterative, intentional discipleship. Spoiler alert: its result is the virtue of purposefulness.

Still, there is a point of overlap between all three of our perspectives that grounds the conversation and bears on the most interesting tensions. I don’t know how to put my finger on it without considering the technical meaning of intentionality. So I’m going to make the attempt to explain the technical definition, in the hope that Ricoeur is right: explain more in order to understand better.

To begin, Brad avers, “I don’t think popular talk about ‘intentionality’ shares much substantive content with technical theological definitions of the will and intention.” I disagree; the substantive overlap between popular and technical notions of intentionality is exactly where the three of us are having the same conversation as well. To be fair, the technical theological definitions of the will and intention are not strictly synonymous with corresponding philosophical definitions. And in this narrower sense, I still disagree.

Modern philosophical reflection on “intentionality” has a starting point: the Scholastic conception of intentio (Latin) that I presume Brad has in mind. I’ll let the arch-representative, Thomas Aquinas, speak for the technical theological definition: “The will does not ordain, but tends to something according to the order of reason. Consequently this word ‘intention’ indicates an act of the will, presupposing the act whereby the reason orders something to the end.”1 In short, Scholastic intentio is the act of human reason that directs the will toward an end, real (grab that apple) or imagined (go find an apple). There is no “intentionality,” per se, in this discussion except by inference.

Beginning with Franz Brentano in 1874, the referent of intentionality began narrowing to the relationship between consciousness and its objects. In this sense, intentionality is technically the mental states through which your consciousness apprehends everything you are conscious of, including things you are not actively thinking about.

Another technical term is relevant now: attention. Reminiscent of Aquinas’s “tending to,” attention is the philosophical word for the specific mode of awareness (what you’re actively thinking about) directed at a particular intentional object (an object on which your consciousness is operating).

Phenomenologists will have to excuse my quick and dirty explanations. My point is that, to a significant extent, this entire conversation is about a specific mental state (we might more accurately call it attention) operative within the philosophical conception of intentionality. The fact that it is imprecisely called intentionality in popular Christian discourse (which I will continue to do) shouldn’t distract us from the fact that we’re still debating the direction of the will toward an end.

Though faith is not exactly a mental state, I hope it is uncontroversial to say that faith entails the direction of the will toward certain ends and not others. By faith, I don’t mean the even-demons-believe consent to the existence of God or the Lordship of Christ. I mean pistis Christou: trust of and obedience to Christ based on the faithfulness of Christ. And I think it is straightforward to say that faith, therefore, always everywhere entails attention (in the technical sense) to the ends of trust of and obedience to Christ. We do not attain these ends (or others I might list) passively, without attention. Our faith/faithfulness does not merely happen to us. Here I betray my Arminian prejudices. But still, I think Scripture makes this an unavoidable conclusion.

Richard ends his series with a long list of passages that exemplify what he understands to be the biblical “call for intentionality.” Let me reduce this list to a single idea: every single biblical imperative (explicit or implicit) that a believer might obey, if they are not yet habituated to do so, requires intentionality. Not necessarily the version Brad has in mind—”a personal plan of spiritual action,” “daily liturgy,” or “continuous stream of conscious thoughts about following Christ.” But intentionality of some kind nonetheless.

Brad makes a caveat that is critical at this point: “I’m not saying Jesus isn’t calling them (“normies” [read: regular church people], along with “the loser, the mediocre, the motions-going-through-er, the wheels-spinner, the perpetual relapser, the self-loathing, the nominal, the failure”), too, to follow him, to take up their cross like all disciples.” On this we agree fully. But a major part of our disagreement seems to be about what taking up the cross to follow Jesus (discipleship) requires and how possible it is for “normies.”

I’ll leave the possibly of normie intentionality for a later post. For now, what does the cross entail for those who believe? I can’t think of a more comprehensive term for the answer than intentionality. Yet, I don’t think this because of the particular socio-cultural circumstances that Richard has in mind. I agree with him that faith in the secular age evidently requires a greater degree of attention to choices than it once did. But faithfulness always required a high degree of attention to choices, and I’m not sure the differential is as significant as he argues. And ultimately, he’s making two different points, one about the particular importance of intentionality in our context and one about the biblical basis of intentionality.

I’m focused here on the latter, though I would expand my concern to the theological basis of intentionality. Scripture represents how faith might direct the will toward God’s ends: by stating them, writing them, reading them, understanding them, attending to them, and acting toward them. So what does taking up the cross mean? Nothing less. And every bit of this is intentional. I’m not talking about achievement, much less perfection. There is no special status, ability, or gifting in view here. There is only the call that, Brad admits, every normie Christian responds to. That response just is iteratively intentional.

The question of what that intentional response might be is a separate matter. The possibilities lie on a spectrum, call it the intentionality spectrum, that runs from Richard’s awareness and choice to Brad’s personal plan and self-conscious purposefulness.

Behind these possibilities lies another issue, the relationship between practices and virtues in the intentionality discourse. I’ll address both questions in the next post.

Since this is a conversation among academics, let’s define terms. What is intentionality?

Brad’s Representation of Intentionality in John Mark Comer and Popular Christian Discourse More Broadly

The following quotes from Brad’s post represent the intentionality he has in mind:

• “calling on individual believers to form a personal plan of spiritual action”

• “attempts to personalize daily liturgies”

• “the resolve to audit their spiritual habits, fashion a personalized plan of attack, and execute it”

• “‘on fire’ . . . constantly self-conscious in their faith”

• “the church the company of disciples, a vanguard of urban contemplatives whose daily life together attests the kingdom of God”

• “always-on ‘intentional’ people”

• “stepping back from one’s life, assessing it, making plans and goals, and being self-consciously purposeful”

• “a continuous stream of conscious thoughts about following Christ as I follow him?”

I haven’t read Comer’s Practicing the Way, but I have my doubts that Comer, or many others who might count as representatives of Christian “intentionality discourse,”1 would recognize their viewpoints in much of this list. I suspect Brad is rhetorically signaling the potential “pathologies” that are the underlying concern of his take—where the emphasis on intentionality seems to lead. And this is an important indication of how he and I may really disagree, as I’m more concerned with the pathologies of the church’s unintentionality—where it has led—both now and in much of Christian history (not least, the part that Brad looks toward as an alternative).

In any case, there’s a lot to object to in the intentionality that Brad represents. If this is indeed what intentionality means in popular Christian discourse, then we agree it’s a problem. Only, I don’t concede that’s what it should mean. To do so risks losing what is good about this idea of intentionally and, more, what is necessary for the church. I’ll let my subsequent discussion indicate which parts of intentionality discourse I’d like to preserve—and which parts of Brad’s and Richard’s definitions I’d like to avoid.

Richard’s Conception of Intentionality

• “intentionally disengaging my social autopilot”2

• “intentional in how we direct and invest our attention”3

• “to become more aware of a default state of mind and relating to the world, relationally, spiritually, and psychologically”4

• “Instead of a givenness where I can find rest within, faith has become a perpetual effort of will”5

• “Re-enchantment is, rather, being intentional in making yourself open and available to sacred encounters”6

• “We are re-enchanted because we have encountered--really and truly--a reality other than our own. What re-enchants us isn’t intentionality but ontology. The role of intentionality in my call for enchantment is to make us increasingly open, available, and receptive to these ontological encounters. Again, what re-enchants isn’t choice but experience.”7

• “the traditions themselves must be embraced through an intentional act, a choice”8

• “There is a synergy between the divine and human wills that demands an intentional response from our side”9

• “Intentionality directs the will and virtue stabilizes the will. Virtue doesn’t happen by accident.”10

• “Acts of intention are a participation in the divine life”11

It’s fairly easy to see that Brad and Richard are talking about significantly different things. I don’t think Richard is missing the point of the Christian intentionality discourse. At the same time, Brad’s post adds a significant angle on the phenomenon. Where I perceive a point of contact between the two, there is substantive disagreement about what faith entails in the first place and what is possible for any believer.

I might put it this way: Richard is focused on what is necessary for the possibility of faith in the midst of post-Christendom secularization. Brad is focused on what is not even possible for most people throughout Christian history—and wasn’t necessary anyway.

In the next post, I’ll discuss the intentionality that faith requires.

I was recently reminded of the way many Evangelicals still answer this question: the “unreached people groups” of the world need to hear the gospel. Technical definitions of “unreached” have developed (see the link). People, in other words, are lost and need the opportunity to be saved. Hence missions.

I was raised on a close analogue of this mentality (Churches of Christ not being Evangelical, exactly, but close enough). It is certainly a part of what motivated my youthful commitment to mission work.

There are other theological commitments underpinning this perspective, which I’ve written about previously. These make it exceedingly difficult to shift gears. That’s how theological systems (like other systems) work.

Still, I’ve always been at least a little suspicious of the pomp and circumstance around motivating the church with such claims. Suspicion of pomp and circumstance is a natural endowment of my personality. But that suspicion grew as I committed to serve in urban Latin America, which is on no one’s list of unreached people groups.

At this point in my journey, little of that old perspective remains. Both theological shifts and historical consciousness have led me elsewhere. Not least, the rise of world Christianity in the wake of Western colonialism has provoked questions that few of us, if any, know how to answer well. Granted, missiology has matured, and modes of missionary engagement have improved radically among those who have learned from it. Postcolonial missiology exists. God grant that tribe increase.

At present, I wouldn’t say an increase is the trajectory. I had the strange feeling at Urbana 25, a gathering with impeccable Evangelical credentials and motivations to suit, of being with “my people” for the first time in a long time. There were moments of dissonance, but it was as special as it always has been to gather and worship with people unwaveringly committed to saying yes to mission. And that commitment is, as far as I can tell, still rooted almost entirely in the idea of unreached peoples.

Strangely—at least in comparison with many of my compatriots who have made the theological shift away from this mentality—I find myself no less motivated to encourage and advance world missions. In fact, I feel more motivated than I was as a young man planning his future around a calling to the foreign mission field.

I suspect that my compatriots have shifted away from the unreached-people-group mentality toward no other motivation for missions, or toward motivations too anemic to justify the sacrifice that cross-cultural mission work demands. This explanation is too reductive to be an explanation of much, but I think Western Evangelicals are losing the same battle, albeit slowly. The decline of Western churches, and therefore church budgets, does not suffice to account for the dwindling of the Western missionary endeavor. We’ve historically done far more with far less. The once-dominant motivation for missions has simultaneously become more difficult to defend. Fewer and fewer young people are going to give their lives for it.

My shift has been from that old mentality to a different, deeper motivation for missions—or rather, participation in God’s mission. Happily, at Urbana 25, I was also reminded of a quote from Lesslie Newbigin:

We want to be able to show that we accomplish something, produce results; that we have rescued some perishing souls. I don’t read the New Testament that way. I think that the deepest motive for mission is simply the desire to be with Jesus where he is, on the frontier between the reign of God and the usurped dominion of the devil.1

Newbigin is on my Mount Rushmore of twentieth-century theologians. He is also the forefather of missional theology. The idea of being with Jesus where he is, on the frontier of God’s reign, gets to the heart of missional theology. But I don’t think it has replaced the old missionary fervor for producing results, even among missional church advocates. It should, but it hasn’t.

Let me explain. Missional theology persists despite its many cultured Christian despisers. It’s not going away any time soon. And Newbigin-esque language abounds among its ranks. But part of the pushback is quite practical. The call to live missionally requires not just a small group of missionaries but whole congregations to give their lives for God’s mission.

Most churches are still content, if they support missions, to send those few zealots to pursue results. But they are not about to make their own churches’ lives about the same thing. And why would they? They might be surrounded by unconverted people, but they are not in the midst of an unreached people.

So what about an alternative, deeper motivation? Will churches send missionaries to be with Jesus as the kingdom breaks in, results be damned? Very few. Will churches (not committees, not programs) commit to mission in their own location, with all that entails? Fewer still. Missional ecclesiology faces a serious challenge: it requires a motivation that matches that of missionaries who sacrificed comfort, health, finances, safety, and often life for results. Is participation in God’s mission enough?

My point is this: I think motivation for cross-cultural missions among Western churches will be a strong correlate of the viability of missional churches in the West in the years to come. Those of us in the missional theology world like to talk about alterity, and maybe there is hope for alternative motivations among a minority. But that is not good enough when we’re talking about the reason for the church’s existence. If Western churches cannot accept that participation in God’s mission is a sufficient reason for some people giving everything abroad, they will not accept that motivation as a sufficient reason for their own people giving everything at home. If they do, transformation will follow, and nothing, not even the gates of hell, can stop what comes next.

If you don’t know what Conformity Gate is, this one’s not for you.

It was the year of our Lord 2000. The teaser for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring dropped. Some of us lost it. Could it be? For the first time ever, there would be a big-budget, high-production-quality, fittingly epic fantasy movie (a trilogy, even!), and they decided to start with the GOAT. No more crappy, cringy flops. No more assuming that fantasy can’t sell. Peter Jackson went for it.

Living through the debut of Fellowship was surreal for those of us who knew what Tolkien had done. It was unbelievable that in our lifetime, the rest of the world might finally get a sense of why the fantasy nerd fandom was so diehard. Sci-Fi had been mainstream for decades. But there was a mysterious gap. Conan the Barbarian, The Beastmaster, Willow—these fantasy flicks had done well in the 80s. Then the 90s gave us dross like First Knight and Dragonheart, as well as low-budget miniseries and direct-to-DVD embarrassments. Where was the fantasy equivalent of Star Wars?

The release of X-Men in 2000 was a sign of the times—comic book fandom and fantasy fandom compose a Venn diagram with a massive overlap. Apparently, a generation of creators was convincing the money people that there was profit in telling these stories well. Then LotR was one of the highest-grossing film franchises ever. And the MCU took off. And the rest is history. Behind the success, however, was the coming of age of a generation. There are a lot of Millennials, and we grew up on this stuff. Between Tolkien’s amazing writing and the success of the movie trilogy was the slow but inexorable expansion of the fantasy fiction section of Waldenbooks that Tolkien, along with C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Robert E. Howard’s Tales of Conan, and other lesser-known sword-and-sorcery authors, had birthed. Readers read. High fantasy’s following grew.

Then Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson gamified fantasy storytelling with Dungeons & Dragons, and a whole new dimension of fantasy fandom appeared. Those of us who grew up in the 80s and 90s reading these books and playing D&D knew their unbelievable potential for cinema, despite our relegation to nerd subculture. And we got to see it all play out once we grew up and became consumers with income.

Now we live in the era of Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, and The Witcher. And we finally got a D&D movie that didn’t suck. But something sad happened as fantasy won the day—which I think usually happens when a subculture becomes mainstream (I reserve comment on the catastrophe that is the MCU). It wasn’t just the loss of being in the know, though we all feel that when our favorite indi artist gets popular or that unknown author we read back in the day lands on the bestseller list. More than that, it felt like a loss of innocence, a loss of the childhood that no one else could understand without being there, rolling dice late into the night, making obscure Tolkien references. These fantasy stories were a whole internal world that had become crowded with bystanders and looky-loos.

Enter Stranger Things and the next generation of creators. Now we weren’t just the consumers. The Duffer brothers (two years my junior) created what we needed: they infused a fantasy/sci-fi story built around a D&D scaffolding with nostalgia. They captured the feeling of those years, full of awkwardness, freedom, and imagination. Of course, Stranger Things couldn’t be more mainstream. That’s not really the point. My kids experience Stranger Things the same way I experienced The Wonder Years. It provokes a familiarity that makes no sense. They wish they had grown up in the 80s. I get it.

And now we’re hours away from the moment of truth. Either Conformity Gate is real, or it isn’t. The realists say there is no way. Netflix would never allow it. Episode 8 is the end, and the fans are crazy. Maybe so. But I’ll say this: the evidence for a different ending is compelling. And if the Duffer brothers didn’t build all of those clues into the story, then, with all due respect, the fans are better writers. Fan fiction is never better than the real thing. So at the very least, we’ll get one unprecedented result. But what the story has accomplished so far makes me think they understand the opportunity to pull off something far bigger. And that this is the moment to do it. Lord of the Rings shouldn’t have worked either; it was too expensive and too risky. So give us what only this generation of creators would dare. Break the mold. Do the unprecedented.

As for episode 8, it’s not just a bad ending (like Game of Thrones); everything about the story signals that it’s the wrong ending. Part of telling this story, the main reason for the nostalgia, is the reality of the loss that’s coming. It’s not a TPK, but it’s not a happy ending. Things were never what they seemed. How could they not give us a secret, surprise ending? Vecna lives. That’s canon.

#ibelieve

Then the story seems to invite an examination of the prejudices (Jonah evidently hates the Ninevites) that interfere with missionary obedience. Who are “our Ninevites”? Who does God love and send us to serve despite their otherness from our perspective?

And, even if it’s not really spelled out, the text dangles a useful threat over the conference. What will happen if you refuse to go? One of the speakers even exhorted the audience to “skip the whale”!

There might be some problems with this use of Jonah. I can imagine some Old Testament scholars cringing—or yelling at their screens (to be fair, I suspect they might do the same with my reading). And I can imagine careful readers wondering about some important details that get lost in this use of the text.

I would like to offer a brief missional reading of the text for comparison. Hopefully, it will indicate some similarities and differences between missional hermeneutics and interpretation that merely centers “missions.” I’ll consider Jonah 1–2 from four angles: theology, narrative, location, and equipping.

Missional Theology

It’s right to begin with God, who speaks to the church through the text of Scripture. We ask not only what Jonah “says” but what God is communicating. Already, we might attend to our location as readers—the here and now of God’s communication. For now, however, I’m thinking about some broader theological points of departure.

The purposes of the Triune God revealed in the sending of the Son and the Holy Spirit guide our reading. God sends Jonah to “cry out against” the “evil” (raah; 1:2) of Nineveh (capitol of the ancient superpower Assyria, perpetrator of atrocities) in keeping with God’s good purposes revealed in the law and the prophets and embodied in the work of Jesus through the power of the Spirit.

Notably, Jonah 1 emphatically calls the reader’s attention to the presence of God (1:3, 10). Jonah’s flight to Tarshish (in modern Spain) is not, as one might suppose, away from Nineveh but from the presence of the Lord. As the narrative and Old Testament theology more broadly affirm—and Jonah evidently (and ironically!) knows well—this is a futile endeavor. But the phrasing highlights the question of where God is present and, from a missional perspective, presently at work. Jonah’s prayer from the belly of the fish focuses on God’s presence in the temple (2:4, 7), further suggesting a contrast between God’s special relationship with Israel and his presence in Nineveh.

Jonah clarifies his motives later in the book: “That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing” (4:2). He realized that his mission (sending) to cry out against the evil of Nineveh was not about vindictive judgment but an extension of the grace and love that Israel knew through redemption and covenant even to their violent, oppressive enemy. This is the nature of the God whose presence Jonah did not want to meet in Nineveh.

There is no need to import a version of Christian missions into the Old Testament. Jonah is not sent to make disciples or even converts to Judaism. He is not a herald of the good news of the kingdom of God in the Christian sense. He is, however, a type (in the sense of biblical typology) of Christ—at least according to Jesus himself (Matt 12:39–41). As Jonah was delivered from “the belly of Sheol” (2:2) after three days and then extended God’s grace to the nation of Nineveh through repentance, so Jesus was delivered from the realm of death on the third day, resulting in the extension of God’s grace to all nations through repentance. In other words, Jonah prefigures not only Jesus’s death and resurrection but the broadening of God’s redemptive purpose through it.

There is a robust theological connection between Jonah’s mission and Christian mission, but not simply because God sent Jonah as a messenger to a foreign nation like Jesus sends his disciples as messengers to foreign nations. That is not the primary analogy! A Christological reading is not about our story but Jesus’s and, therefore, the Triune mission of God at work through recalcitrant messengers like Jonah because of the power of the resurrection at work in him.

Missional Narrative

This Christological clue to the meaning of Jonah is a sign of what holds the whole of Scripture together as one story, the story of the work of God in Christ through the Spirit, the story of the Triune God. Some accounts of the biblical narrative of God’s mission focus on the role of God’s people (the cultural mandate in Gen 1:28; the blessing of the nations through Abraham’s family in Gen 12:3; the priestly vocation of Israel in Exod 19:6; the role of Israel as a light to the nations in Isa 42:6 and 49:6; the commissioning of the disciples in Matthew 28:18–20 and John 20:21–23; the ambassadorship of the church in 2 Cor 5:18–21; and so on). Certainly, these indications form part of the backdrop of reading Jonah missionally. But the primacy of human agency in such renditions can obscure the story behind the narratives of God commissioning his people: the mission of God in which God’s people participate throughout history.

The story is not really about what the messengers do or fail to do. As Jonah learned to confess the hard way, “Salvation belongs to the LORD!” (2:9). The mission is God’s. Human participation in God’s mission is secondary, derivative, and contingent. It is shot through with our finitude and fallibility. It is a part of the story, but it is not what the story is about.

Not only through Jonah but despite Jonah, God is at work to bring the Ninevites to repentance. It is the resurrection of Christ, in whom all things always have and always will hold together, that drives the narrative forward.

The question, then, is not how to “apply Jonah to our lives.” After all, Jonah is not a model for us to imitate. This is why “skip the whale” does such violence to the text. It begins with the assumption that interpretation is picking and choosing which parts of the narrative are meant to be prescriptive. Do this, don’t do that. Obey the commission, don’t run away. Love “your” Ninevites, don’t be prejudiced. Celebrate their repentance, don’t be resentful. But that’s a distortion of what narrative does. Instead, the question is how our lives are being written into the same same story that Jonah’s so painfully was—the ongoing story of God’s mission.

Missional Location

So how is the story continuing around us? Where is God specifically, presently at work? In what sense is God saying, “Get up; go,” now? What is the evil? What is the message? How are we, the church, responding? (Notice I didn’t say, “How should we respond?” As with Jonah, an honest account of failure might be the point.) How is the power of Jesus’s resurrection at work in and despite us (Eph 1:17–22)?

The answers to all of these questions vary according to our “location.” There are no pat answers. Not just because we are in diverse contexts but, more fundamentally, because what God is doing, where, when, and in whom is God’s prerogative. The Spirit blows where he wills. And human participation is a variable in a multitude of ways.

Yet, the text itself invites us to examine a few locations by analogy.

Reading in relation to the empire

Here the question is not who “my Ninevites” are (the people to whom God is sending me even if I don’t like them or their culture) but what Nineveh is. Who, in other words, is the empire? We may or may not be reading “in” the empire—though if you’re a US American, I’ve got some bad news for you—but we rightly read in relation to the empire. This isn’t about disliking a people group for their particularity but hating a people who dominate, wage war, kill, and oppress for their own sake. Reading Scripture missionally requires the same consciousness that Jonah had.

Of course, if we’re part of the empire, our location is different from Jonah’s. Still, we may hate the empire from within. We should. The song we don’t get to hear Jonah sing but that resides in his heart is imprecatory, like Ps 137. Jonah’s vengeful rejection of the idea that the empire should be forgiven its sins is the right starting point. Why? Because God detests those who do what empire does, and so should God’s people. Vengeance belongs to the Lord, but his hatreds are ours to share. We can’t skip the whale, and we can’t skip the condemnation.

Why do you think Jonah is God’s prophet in the first place? He’s not just a neutral vessel regardless of his own inclinations; that’s not how participation works. He hates what God hates. He approves of the judgment. He can speak wholeheartedly against the evil of Nineveh. We'd better be willing to do the same.

Of the missional questions my friend Michael Barram has taught me to ask, here are four that come to mind as I think about my relationship to empire:

• “In what ways does this text proclaim good news to the poor and release to the captives, and how might our own social locations make it difficult to hear that news as good?

• Does our reading of the text reflect a tendency to bifurcate evangelism and justice?

• Does our reading of this text acknowledge and confess our complicity and culpability in personal as well as structural sin?

• In what ways does the text challenge us to rethink our often-cozy relationships with power and privilege?” Michael Barram and John R. Franke, Liberating Scripture: An Invitation to Missional Hermeneutics (pp. 78-79)

But Jonah’s problem is his relationship to the empire. He doesn’t want to participate in God’s relationship with Nineveh, which is more than hatred and condemnation. It is grace and mercy, patience, steadfast love, and forgiveness. So how is God working in the empire? Where? In whom? These questions specify what it means to speak against its evil and call for its repentance. And what it means to extend its people grace.

Some of us are too comfortable, too complicit to share Jonah’s hatred. Some of us are too angry, too vengeful to participate in God’s grace. How we read in relation to empire is a critical dimension of our missional location.

Reading on the ship

All of us have often and in many ways fled from God’s presence. This is not about mere “foreign missions” by a long shot. Nor, in a more literalist vein, is it about being a specially called prophet in the Old Testament sense. The Reformers did important work with the recovery of the priesthood of all believers (1 Pet 2:9). But a failure to recognize the prophethood of all believers (Acts 2:17–18) persists. The church, missional by nature, is inscribed in the story of God’s mission and, thus, the narrative of Jonah through a prophetic vocation that we continue to resist. We are to join the presence of God in the midst of empire and speak about both justice and mercy. Instead, we flee.

So we find ourselves on the ship with Jonah, trying our best to ignore what God is doing. Sleep is my preferred mode of avoidance too. Stress me out, overwhelm me, push me to do work I don’t want to do, and I’m going to bed. But there is more than one way to retreat into unconsciousness. The church is quite able to ignore, avoid, and resist God’s work. There is nothing inevitable about Jonah’s participation, or ours. This is not a story about God’s “sovereignty” forcing Jonah’s hand, any more than he forces Jonah’s perspective (spoiler: Jonah never gets on board, so to speak). There is no inevitable conclusion to this tale.

Our identity, by contrast, is a foregone conclusion. In response his shipmates’ numerous question, Jonah says the one thing that really matters: “I worship the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land” (1:9). That is who he is, even in flight. The church is God’s people constituted by God’s mission for participation in God’s mission. That is who we are, regardless of resistance. Resistance is not futile; it’s dangerous. God’s pursuit of his people doesn’t end with conversion. As Susan Pevensie learned in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, Aslan isn’t safe, but he’s good. What is true for the Ninevites is true for Jonah, and for us. Both judgment and grace are on the table. I recall a church leader sharing a vivid dream that his congregation was a viking ship caught in a terrible storm, about to capsize. I believe his dream was true, but it wasn’t a viking ship. It was a ship from Joppa bound for Tarshish.

God pursues his missional people, and our resistance builds into a raging storm that puts us and those around us in danger. And then God does something ironic. God uses others—those who are not his missional people—to wake us up, call us to account, and throw us back on course. Every criticism of the church—hypocrisy, inconsistency, complicity, corruption—is a version of “What is this that you have done!” (1:10). Sometimes God’s work in the people around us is about provoking our participation in what God is doing in others.

Strangely, Jonah doesn’t simply jump overboard. Would the result have been the same if he had? Is he continuing to choose a passive role? Or is this an embrace of their part in his obedience to God’s will? If Jonah is a type of Christ, then at the very least, this moment in the story is a sign of submission to the cross at the hands of others. As for the sailors, they don’t know God and don’t know what to expect: “Please, O LORD, we pray, do not let us perish on account of this man’s life. Do not make us guilty of innocent blood; for you, O LORD, have done as it pleased you” (1:14). In other words, forgive us Lord, for we do not know what we are doing! These unwitting participants in God’s salvation of Nineveh play their part and end up making sacrifices and vows to the Lord (1:16), calling to mind the centurion who recognizes the Son of God on the cross.

Reading on the ship involves waking up and coming to terms with who we are, putting ourselves in the hands of others who have a role to play, and submitting to the cross so that the resurrection can do its work in our lives.

Reading in the belly of Sheol

Before resurrection comes death. Jonah’s song comes not only from the belly of a fish but from “the belly of Sheol” (2:2). All who would take up their cross and follow Jesus must learn to sing along.

Self-denial, death to self—these precede Jonah’s repentance (change of direction). Cruciformity is the only path toward God’s presence in the lives of others. “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it” (Mark 8:35). This is the structure of Jonah. This is the story God’s missional people are written into.

No one, Jesus included, wants the cross. It is a place of terror and loneliness. The imagery of Jonah’s prayer is fittingly horrific: engulfing waves, the oppressive deep, noose-like seaweed, a place of imprisonment. And the irony deepens. Jonah, who fled from God’s presence, now cries out, “‘I am driven away from your sight; how shall I look again upon your holy temple?’” (2:4). But again, his “death” is the path to the presence of God, not in the temple but in Nineveh. His former view of God’s presence must die in the deep.

Then he can remember the Lord (2:7) and, therefore, what he owes the Lord. In a provocative parallel with the sailors’ sacrifices and vows, Jonah finds his resolve in Sheol: “But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay” (2:9). This recollection, through death, of who the Lord is and who we are is an invitation to such resolve and to confession: “Salvation (yeshuah) belongs to the LORD!” Cross and resurrection weave together memory and participation.

Missional Equipping

My interpretation of Jonah recommends a variety of practices that equip the church for participation in God’s mission. I’ll highlight three.

First, the church needs to learn to sing imprecation. That is to say, we take the wrong lesson from Jonah by concluding that the moral of the story is how much God loves the Ninevites and how much Jonah should have too. We need to put our anger and disgust at evil into words. If we can’t even say it to ourselves, how can we be expected to say it to the empire? Damn injustice, violence, abuse, avarice, and indifference. Damn the empire. Sing it out loud.

Second, we need to follow the story-teller’s lead by practicing irony. I highlighted a couple of points of acute irony, but there are many in Jonah. The literary device runs rampant in the story. And that irony is about us. It is part of coming to terms with who we are, how we flee God’s presence, and how God leads us to repentance. It is honesty. Unless we own our place in Jonah’s story, participation in God’s mission is terribly difficult. Let Scripture’s unrelenting bluntness about God’s people shape the story we tell about ourselves, lest it fail to be ultimately the story of God’s mission. But let Scripture’s artistry guide us too. Irony is honesty about internal contradictions told slant. Tell it slant.

Third, the church needs to learn to pray from Sheol. It’s a harrowing proposition, but let’s not be coy about cruciformity. On the way to participation in God’s mission, we often find ourselves in belly of the fish, in the belly of Sheol, waiting for a resurrection power that is not our own. Can we find the words for drowning? Can we lament with Jonah? Can we pray our way to memory of God’s faithfulness? Can we, from those depths, confess that salvation belongs to our God? There is no need, if we can skip the whale. Which is to say, there is great need. “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there” (Ps 139:7–8). Praying like we believe it might make all the difference for the church’s participation in God’s mission.

• The joy of vocation at ACU

• The grief of the move to Abilene

• Hebrews 2 and freedom from the fear of death

• The church: not a hospice but God’s people called to love and good works

• The implications of Charlie Kirk’s assassination for the university

• A Christian response to the idea that words are violence

• An upcoming series analyzing an episode of the Flagrant podcast

Unsurprisingly, this was an outstanding session. I’m sure there were many others, but of those I was able to attend, this one was especially rich in content. I’ll admit, I sat in more than one that was a bit thin. I mentioned in a previous post that there was a need to tailor the presentations for an introductory level. However, as a university instructor, I’m aware of the level of content that undergraduate students can process—and want! Chris is an old pro at this game, and he nailed it. We all walked away glad we learned a lot and challenged to learn more.

I’ll ask for Chris’s forgiveness in advance. I’m not an expert in honor-shame stuff, and I’ve learned a lot from him over the years. So I’m going to do my best to relate what I took from his session. Chris, have mercy! (The first time I emailed Chris, over a decade ago, I accidentally typed his name as “Christ.” So yeah, word play.)

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First, the idea of honor-shame cultures is a myth. Every culture and all humans are steeped in honor-shame dynamics. They just look different in different cultures. And, yes, they are especially prominent in some cultures. But that prominence is actually an artifact of the myth. Western cultures in particular are guilty of telling themselves that they are more advanced, more “civilized,” and have, therefore, left behind honor-shame dynamics. That lie pushes honor-shame into the background, where it has the same power but not the same level of attention.

Second, recent Western social-psychology, most notably the work of Brené Brown, has been helpful. It identifies the power of shame even for us Westerners. But it does not recognize the “redemptive power” of shame from a Christian perspective. Analyzed through an anthropological lens, there is more than one kind of shame. Chris spelled out a handful, which I won’t detail. Maybe I can get him to write a guest post... But the big takeaway here is that there are “good” kinds of shame. Shame can do important work. And understanding that can help us do important work.

Third, understanding shame’s various facets helps us interpret Scripture (at this point, biblical scholars are well aware that honor-shame is critical for understanding biblical cultures and biblical theology). More, it helps us contextualize interpretation, which is pretty consequential for relationships steeped in honor-shame dynamics all the time, everywhere.

Because of the myth of honor-shame cultures, it’s easier to recognize how the gospel addresses these issues in some contexts. East Asia comes to mind. The classical Reformation doctrine of salvation that emphasizes forgiveness of sin (legal guilt) doesn’t land with the same power in cultures that recognize the importance of honor and shame. “The cross addresses your guilt” produces a kind of meh in such contexts. But “the cross restores your honor” is tremendously impactful when it lands.

So what about cultures like mine, where honor-shame has been forced into the background? If “the cross restores your honor” doesn’t resonate powerfully, then why bother? Maybe it’s good to be aware of these dynamics when the culture is aware of them, but what difference do they make when the myth prevails? Chris has convinced me that this is largely a translation problem. Honor and shame are just as important for US Americans as for Thai people, even if they don’t recognize it. Tapping into that power is the work of contextualization.

As I listened to the presentation, two examples came to mind. The first is a clip from an interview with Steve Harvey. It made the rounds (I don’t know what “viral” means anymore, but it got a lot of clicks), and it certainly resonated with me.

The line I have in mind is, “When my daddy died, I didn’t have nobody to say they was proud of me. That fucked me up. ‘Cause you know my dad used to call me and say, ‘Man, I’m so proud of you.’ And when he died, man, nobody said that to me no more. Nobody.” A lot of people have others in their lives who say, “I love you,” and it feels good. Most of those people have no one in their lives who can say, “I’m proud of you.” The difference between the two is profound.

The second example is a mashup of two videos: the induction of Mr. Rogers into the TV Hall of Fame and an old clip of him singing to a disabled boy.

This one is almost too good. It’s meta. The induction ceremony is one of the ways that honor still functions above the surface in Western society. We “honor” recipients of such awards. They say they are “honored.” But the mashup connects what Mr. Rogers did for that disabled boy with what was happening in that ceremonial moment: the lyrics “It’s you I like, it’s you yourself, it’s you” confer real honor. “On behalf of millions of children and grownups, it is you that I like.” What could honor someone more?

Together with Chris’s teaching, these clips made me rethink Jesus’s baptism. The Father says, “You are my beloved son; I am well pleased with you” (Mark 1:11).

I learned from Henri Nouwen, N. T. Wright, and my friend Tod Vogt at Mission Alive to understand these words as something God says to us at our baptism. This is an essential part of the good news. Adopted into God’s family in Christ, we are beloved of God. With us, God is well pleased. But neither of those words—beloved or well pleased—means much to Westerners. I concede there are ways to unpack their meaning that do connect to US Americans. I’ve tried to do so in the last decade, and I think sometimes it has landed. It has for me.

Still, the honor-shame lens adds something incredible. Why does the Steve Harvey clip touch so many people? Because, as important as “love” is, the word “beloved” is diluted in our culture in a multitude of ways, but a father’s “I’m proud of you” conveys honor uniquely. Why does Mr. Rogers’s song mean so much as it is reflected back to him? Because “well pleased” sounds modest by comparison with what we all want: to be genuinely liked, despite everything. Being liked is a fundamental kind of honor.

Chris’s session was about shame, not honor. The two are inextricable, but they are not the same topic. My examples have focused on honor, so let me highlight the inverse. What is Steve Harvey lamenting? What does it mean if God is not proud of you? What is Mr. Rogers healing when he tells a disabled boy, “I like you.” What does it mean if God doesn’t like you? What do you actually feel when you are unloved and unliked? Shame.

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“The scripture says, ‘No one who believes in him will be put to shame’” (Rom 10:11). If that means nothing to you as a Christian, it’s time to consider what it means when God says, “I’m proud of my child, whom I like.”

Dr. Sunquist is a missiologist whose work I have long admired. His book Understanding Christian Mission: Participation in Suffering and Glory (2013) is a serious piece of work. So I attended this session with high hopes.

Here’s the thing that might be surprising: missional hermeneutics and missiology have little to do with each other. There have been points of contact along the way, and early on in the development of missional thinking, there were more. But there are few bona fide missiologists in the missional hermeneutics conversation, which is quite postcolonial and, therefore, suspicious of the traditional “missionary” agenda that survives in some Evangelical circles.

To be clear, the missional hermeneutics folks I run with would tell you, I have been saying for years that the perception of traditional “missions” as just an extension of old colonialist (ethnocentric, oppressive, etc.) interests is badly wrong, not only in terms of academic missiology (which has, in many ways, been ahead of progressive Christianity regarding incarnational, culturally adaptive, solidary insights and practices) but also in terms of the on-the-ground commitments and practices of long-term missionaries trained in such missiology. Including the InterVarsity sort of Evangelicals I’m hanging out with this week!

So, it’s a pretty big deal that we’re bringing the Forum on Missional Hermeneutics to the American Society of Missiology annual gathering in 2026. Likewise, Dr. Sunquist’s session here at Urbana 25 might be a sign of the times.

Keep in mind, this is a massive conference. The session offerings are tremendously diverse, and many of them are on urgent, sexy, or intriguing topics. So I had pretty modest expectations about how many twenty-somethings would show up for “How to Read the Bible Missionally.”

It was standing-room only in a big room. I’m guessing a couple of hundred students were crammed in there. In the midst of their exploration of God’s call, these young people are hungry for an understanding of Scripture.

Now, three of the four students I brought from ACU are missions majors at a Christian university where they study a lot of Bible (and the fourth is my daughter, a missionary kid raised by a missionary-theologian). I’ve been tickled to hear them express a desire for more serious biblical interpretation in the keynote addresses. They already have a pretty high bar (shout out ACU DBMM!).

The issue is that Urbana is not really designed for them. Of the thousands of university students in attendance, the vast majority are in other majors at secular universities. They are in the process of discerning their role in God’s mission, and Urbana aims to “mobilize” them. In a sense, it’s a gigantic intro. to missions event. Which means most of the presentations are rudimentary. So it was with “How to Read the Bible Missionally.”

I’m confident Dr. Sunquist thoughtfully contextualized his presentation for this audience. So, although I might have hoped for more evidence of interaction with the missional hermeneutics conversation, I understand why the session had to be very basic.

I won’t recount his presentation in detail since the content is his to share, and he mentioned the intention to write a book on the subject. I hope he does! But here are the essential elements:

• John Stott’s presentation at Urbana in the early 1970s in which he asserted that God is a missionary God. And Sunquist adds, the Bible is a missionary text. (It’s important for missional theology folks to recognize how early this claim was being made among Evangelicals. Newbigin’s work at the same time is the point of departure for missional hermeneutics folks. Stott was right there with him.)

• A multifaceted rendition of the basic message of the Bible in missionary terms.

• A rendition of the basic narrative of the Bible (using the popular “four acts” model) in missionary terms.

• An account of four major biblical themes (these were a mix of common ideas, with Richard Bauckham’s Bible and Mission seeming to contribute, and choices that appear particular to Sunquist) in missionary terms.

• The conclusion that the Bible is a missionary book for a missionary people.

It’s noteworthy that Sunquist alternated between the adjectives missionary and missional without differentiation throughout his presentation. This is a sticking point in missional theology that will be a significant issue as missional hermeneuts and missiologists increasingly interact, particularly in settings where the traditional “missionary” role is a working assumption. Again, that role is contested even at Urbana, where the controlling ideas are still global evangelism and church growth. I’m excited to see where the conversation goes!

Urbana is a massive production. We’re at the Phoenix Convention Center. The whole thing is curated to a tee. The audio-visuals are impeccable. The worship experience is top-tier. (High-production-value, full-band, elite-vocal, 100-decibel worship is not my style, but still.) The energy is palpable. We’re talking thousands and thousands of college students from all kinds of backgrounds who are serious about missions. The crowd looks like a snapshot of the global church’s diaspora presence in the US. It’s cool.

And of course, the keynote speakers are notables in one way or another. I heard a variety of thoughts tonight, some more agreeable, some less. And I heard some nonsense. What deserves comment here? You guessed it: the nonsense. Or at least one part of it.

I heard a major speaker say, “We are living, I think, through the most important moment in history.” That’s very close to a direct quotation, anyway. No, I’m not going to name the speaker. It doesn’t matter. The statement represents something typical.

The hubris of the claim is staggering. It is, on one level, an attempt to exercise prophetic authority based on dreams and visions—and status! On another level, it’s the run-of-the-mill hubris (which is still staggering) that one finds throughout history. We all tend to think we’re the center of not only the universe but also human history—and, by extension, divine history.

But no one is the center of history, human or divine, except God. And one thing is for sure: every human who ever thought their culture, their moment, and their contribution were at the center of history was proven dead wrong. So I state equivocally: We are not in the most important moment in human history. Probably. That’s up to God. And I wouldn’t presume to make that judgment from a human perspective. Nor should you. Nor should a speaker who is trying to motivate university students to participate in God’s mission. Not even the Son of Man knows the day or time.

Motivation is the issue, almost always, when people say such things. Granted, motivation is a difficult, important question. And when you have thousands of eager prospective missionaries hanging on your every word, it’s tempting to say too much. I’m certainly not immune to that temptation.

Still, theologically, I think it’s important to note that the church’s motivation for participation in God’s mission lies elsewhere. The issue is not whether we’re in the most important moment in history but whether we’re faithful in our moment in history, however important it may be. What God is doing in the most unimportant moments in history (whatever that might mean) is still what God is doing. How could anything be more important to us?

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A long-time faculty member of Abilene Christian University’s Department of Bible, Missions and Ministry recently told me he had resisted the establishment of an ACU magisterium (that is, giving ACU profs. too much teaching authority) at the church where I’m now a member. There are many ACU professors at this church, including many of my department colleagues, who serve as teachers. His intention appears to be futile. But more, I think it’s mistaken.

Why would anyone resist scholars teaching—or even being the presumed teachers—at a local church? Why would anyone entrust the theological education of university students to professors whom they would not also especially entrust with the theological education of church people?

As always, my church tradition looms large in my thinking. It looms large in any attempt among Churches of Christ to limit the influence of formally educated biblical scholars and theologians. If you come from where I do, the reason for such a limitation is fundamentally a populist impulse that animates our vision of the church. We don’t need scholars to teach the church because anyone who is capable of understanding the Bible is capable of teaching the church (other presumed qualifications notwithstanding)—and in the Restoration Movement tradition, everyone is capable of understanding the Bible on their own, without formal training. Scholarship, therefore, is not necessary in the first place, and it is certainly not a criterion for identifying teachers of the church. This underlying perspective still predominates in the twenty-first century to a considerable extent.

But there are other reasons to resist a magisterium that values the distinctive contributions of scholarship. Three stand out:

1. The narrowing of teaching authority by disregarding gifting and other kinds of understanding. The reasoning goes: if the church validates the need for scholars to teach the church, then scholars will arrogate teaching authority to themselves. The church will learn not to appreciate the wisdom of teachers who do not have academic qualifications. The role of the Spirit will be obscured, and the gifts of knowledge and teaching will be reduced to the attainment of formal education.

2. The disconnection of the teacher’s role from equipping the saints as teachers. Because scholars do not teach in the church in order to cultivate more scholars—that activity is restricted to the university or seminary—relying on scholars for teaching will result in a failure to equip the church for the work of teaching. However much church members learn from their scholarly teachers, they will not become scholars and will not, therefore, become teachers of the church.

3. The relationship of scholarship to the full spectrum of the church’s learning capacity. What scholars are able to teach the church that others in the church are not able to teach is a kind of knowledge that is inaccessible to a large portion (the majority?) of the church. Specialized, technical knowledge is of no use to church members who cannot evaluate it and ultimately results in scholars making appeals to the authority of those who can—themselves.

All of these reasons point to legitimate concerns but fall apart under scrutiny. Stated as they are, they treat possible consequences as necessary. But I don’t think I’ve constructed a straw man; these statements represent the disposition of large parts of the church, at least in the US American context. They point toward an overall sense of fear about what the “professionalization” of theological education in the church inevitably effects.

It seems to me that pastoral sensitivity addresses all of these perceived risks. That is, scholarship alone is never a sufficient qualification for teaching in the church. And not for nothing, “pastors and teachers” in Eph 4:11 refers to a single role. Conversely, pastoral sensibility alone is not a sufficient qualification for teaching in the church—nor is any other important consideration, such as spirituality, communication skills, emotional intelligence, or practical experience.

I think the greater concern is not what the church risks by relying on scholars for teaching (when that is an option) but what the church risks by conceiving of the teaching role without scholarship playing an essential role. We’ve seen the consequences a million times; ignorance (a lack of information or understanding) has devastating effects.

All that said in the abstract, I’m thinking about the role of the scholar in the church concretely and personally.

I’ve experienced the challenge not of determining the role of the scholar in the church but of being a scholar in the church who has to find a place. Regardless of one’s tradition or local church practice, scholars have to decide how to position themselves. Most recently, I’ve found myself in a (largish) small group situation where I have to decide when to speak up and when to hold back. Interestingly, this group includes other professors, including biblical studies faculty. A number of the members are church teachers, including some who aren’t Bible scholars.

My approach to new church contexts is to go slow, say little, and listen a lot. This is essentially a missiological posture: become a learner first, understand the culture, and form relationships before doing anything else, especially teaching. Interestingly, a group leader has already encouraged me to speak up more. This leader, who is not a biblical scholar, also reflected on the challenge that biblical scholars face when it comes to deciding what to say in a setting like ours, where everyone is encouraged to chime in with relatively uninformed personal reactions to the biblical text. I appreciate both the invitation and the generous implication that I’m being careful not to shut down the conversation. As it happens, that’s something I’m always careful about, though the line between making space for diverse perspectives and correcting blatant misperceptions is difficult to walk, especially when misperceptions proliferate in the absence of scholarship.

In any case, what I’m actually focused on is learning the dynamics and expectations of this group in order to determine what role I should play. In part, I’m watching my colleagues in theological studies to see what role they choose to play. I’ve been fascinated by the general tendency to leave scholarly input to the side. Of course, they may be approaching the situation the same way I am. Or they may simply want a place to be a member without doing their day job. So the observation is of limited value.

I’m also curious about both the leaders’ and the other members’ engagement with the biblical text. What do our discussion questions presume about interpretation? What do participants’ answers presume? What relevance does theological scholarship have for our understanding? What happens when it plays no role in our conversation?

For example, we’ve been focusing on a different expression of the fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5:22–23) each week. Last meeting, we were discussing faithfulness (pistis). Our three discussion questions were, roughly: (1) What Old Testament story comes to mind when you hear faithfulness? (2) Where do you see faithfulness expressed in the life of Jesus? (3) How did you practice or experience faithfulness this week?

The underlying question is, what does faithfulness mean? But of course, we aren’t simply turning to a lexicon for the definition. In practice, the question is, what does faithfulness mean to me? I’m constantly squirming when this is the approach to biblical language because what the English word faithfulness means to me may have little to do with the Greek word in the context of its usage. Not that referring to a lexicon solves this problem. Far from it. Rather, here is what I basically have in mind when we interpret a biblical term:

1. How words mean in the first place (semantics)

2. How words are used in a historical context (lexicography)

3. How a word is used by an author in a writing (discourse analysis)

4. How a word is used in the New Testament (intertextual analysis)

5. How a word in the New Testament is used to translate a word or idea in the Old Testament (canonical analysis)

6. How translation of a term conveys meaning (translation philosophy)

7. How a term is understood by a reader (hermeneutics)

8. How a term has been understood by readers (history of reception)

9. How a reader’s theology shapes understanding (theological interpretation)

10. How a term affects a reader (reader response)

Of all the words Paul used to represent the fruit of the Spirit, pistis is the one that stands at the heart of his letter to the Galatians (it appears 22 times). I’ll spare you the details, but relative to the other terms we’ve discussed, pistis conveys something quite specific in Galatian.

Moreover, our first discussion question is one Paul himself answers: “faithful Abraham” (Gal 3:9)! The fact that this answer did not come up in our discussion was dumbfounding. And, our second discussion question focuses on Paul’s primary concern in Galatians: the pistis of Jesus Christ. Surely we need to consider how Paul represents the faithfulness of Christ in order to understand the word in Gal 5:22!

Of course, I might have made these observations as we talked. There were a lot of people in the room, and almost everyone had something to say. I chose not to comment, instead paying attention to how the conversation played out. The reader-response approach dominated.

I’m not dismissing how a term affects readers—what it brings to mind, how one responds to it, what one makes of it. In fact, my academic work has focused on the role of the reader in the production of meaning. Nor am I suggesting a small group shouldn’t focus on that question. That is for leadership to decide. What I am wondering is how I should participate in the conversation as a scholar when the other nine concerns I have in mind require considerable explanation and make many naïve responses to the term dubious, if not problematic.

The question changes little in other situations, whether a more formal Bible class or a discussion of a sermon over lunch. What role does scholarship rightly play? Is it dispensable? When?

I have feelings about the question but not an answer. I don’t suppose there is just one answer. But I think it’s a serious question, especially for churches (church cultures, church members) that treat scholarship as dispensable.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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I don’t mind being offended. In fact, I kind of like it. Offense has somehow become an excuse among many Christians for disengaging from dialogue. That’s partly a New Testament interpretation problem—so feel free to throw some proof texts about “not giving offense” at me if you want to go there. And it’s partly a thin-skin, pearl-clutching problem.

I have neither of those misconstruals in mind when I say I was offended by Schiess’s portrayal of Christian political theology. Instead, I think offense is a helpful indicator that we’ve got to the stakes of the conversation. Offense tells me what I actually care about; it’s a kind of excitement. It tells me to lean in.

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Explaining why I was offended would ideally require either that you listen to the episode or that I represent Schiess’s claims thoroughly. I’m going to rely on the former in the interest of relative brevity. So here’s the gist of her position:

Christian political realism requires us to be cautious about using the exile metaphor because American Christians are in a complex situation in which our lot is still bound up with the lot of our neighbors. We are, therefore, responsible for bringing the full strength of Christian conviction to bear on public life. Exile is a problematic metaphor because, while it is true of all Christians in all places in some sense, it tends to give us permission to abdicate responsibility by disengaging from the practical work of influencing policy.

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