“Missional Vocation: Called and Sent to Represent the Reign of God”
Missional Church 25 Years Later [4]
Chapter 4 of Missional Church advocates a recovery of the vision of the kingdom of God cast in the Gospels in contrast to the status quo of Christendom ecclesiology (accommodation to the dominant culture and subsequent domestication, institutionalization, and loss of identity). Recovering a biblical kingdom theology is the basis of missional vocation: “the church is being reconceived as a community, a gathered people, brought together by a common calling and a vocation to be a sent people” (81). This reconception depends on numerous theological shifts in the twentieth century—prominently, (1) to a theocentrism (God-centered theology) that prioritizes God’s mission over the church’s missions, (2) to a trinitarian theology that determines the church’s nature,1 and (3) to an understanding of the classical marks of the church that takes “apostolicity” to entail sentness (81–83).
The contrast between church and kingdom serves to disentangle the two on the one hand and reconfigure their relationship on the other: “the church (ekklesia) and the reign of God (basileia) are separate conceptions, but . . . the two are intimately bound together” (98). The missional church understands, embodies, and proclaims the gospel holistically in terms of Jesus’s kingdom proclamation. So the chapter lands practically in the notion that “the church represents the reign of God” (100) as a community, a servant, and a messenger.
These three roles come into expression in response to the book’s cultural analysis. First, “churches are called to be bodies of people sent on a mission rather than the storefronts for vendors of religious services and goods in North American culture” (108). Second, “the calling to seek first the reign of God and God’s justice means orienting our public deeds away from imposing our moral will onto the social fabric and toward giving tangible experience of the reign of God that intrudes as an alternative to the public principles and loyalties” (108–9). Third, “in a plural world of relativized perspectives and loyalties, and with a gospel of the knowledge of God through the incarnate Christ, the churches must learn to speak in post-Christendom accents as confident yet humble messengers of the reign of God” (109).
I’ll focus in the remainder of this post on these three roles because my question remains essentially practical. How have missional churches in the last twenty-five years embodied the communion, service, and communication that Missional Church derives from kingdom theology of the Gospels? To make that assessment, it’s necessary to unpack what each role entails.
For the authors of Missional Church, the church “must take its cues from the way God’s mission unfolded in the sending of Jesus into the world for its salvation” (102). Communion, service, and communication are the essence of this way. Rather than simply summarizing the brief subsections that sketch these ideas, I attempt to capture how the whole chapter informs each.
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