The Meaning of Mission in the Bible

PASTORAL THEOLOGY (MISSION): A Review and Assessment of Book Chapters on Mission

The key ideas in these chapters are that the idea of mission is rooted in the Bible and in the actions of the early Church, as the missionaries spread throughout the world taking with them the Word of God and giving it to those individuals and groups of people/communities who embraced it and wanted to live their lives according to this Word. The Word was the Mission Statement, so to speak, of the early Church, and the Bible makes this very clear. From the beginning, God's chosen had an affinity with the non-chosen, that is, the Gentiles, of whom Our Lord counted Himself as one. Thus, the perspective of the early missionaries was this: they were not going out to preach to people they did not know but rather to people who were indeed their brothers in sisters in Christ (they just didn't happen to know it yet). As Senior and Stuhlmueller observe, even Israel "at its best moments recognized other signs of deep solidarity with the nonelect nations and with the dynamics of secular history outside the annals of its covenant" (315). In other words, the Jews were responsive to the sense that they bore some important relation to those individuals who were not Jews and had not the faith in the One, True God. Christ, of course, would come to make that relationship all the more apparent -- and the early mission of the Church was to build on that transparency.

This sense of Senior and Stuhlmueller indeed builds on and is consistent with the perspective of Clare Watkins when she states that "the Church is, after all, a human organization" and that its size and elaborateness "involves it in complicated decision-making processes" (369). The concept of mission thus precluded a sense of organization and of hierarchy. Leaders were needed, and station heads were appointed, so to speak. In order to keep the faithful united in the faith, it was imperative that the missionaries continue to follow up with them, to steer them even from afar and to correct them when they went off the righteous path. David Bosch also observes this universal human aspect in the Church's character as being one of the fundamental reasons for the need for missionary activity in the first place: Christ came to heal all sinners -- not just Jews. He came to reach all who believed in Him, and thus the missionary could not limit himself to any one particular group -- unless, of course, that was his designated group to which he was sent by one of the early Church leaders. After all, every human organization needs organizers and some sort of structure to keep it going and the early Church was no different from any other.

The authors differ somewhat on their approach to understanding the defining concepts of missionary activity, however. Senior and Stuhlmueller, for example, approach it from a Biblical basis, going back to the Old Testament even to do so. They root their assessment in the very foundations of God's Word -- the oldest living testimony in existence: the first books of the Old Testament when a covenant was made between God and Man. Out of this covenant emerged the entire story and history of the relationship between all men and God -- whether those men were anointed ones like David or the castaways like Ishmael. God still saw over them all and rejected only those who rejected Him -- men of bad will like Cain who slew his brother. Essentially, it was this hatred for his brother that made Cain hateful to God. For the early missionaries, there could be no hate -- only love for all. It was, after all, what Jesus taught: not an eye for an eye but a cheek for a blow. By loving one's enemies you could heap coals upon them and thus vanquish their hatred. It was the Christian way that had stood for all time, since man had been created -- he simply did not know that was what it was.

Thus, the concept of being a missionary is born in this age-old narrative that all men and women are brothers and sisters, separated by trials and disputes over the years, yet still belonging to that same ancient tribe -- the tribe of Adam.