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2. Origins of a Word Mission as Missio Dei

When a walker becomes lost in the fells, they are wise to turn around and look back along the route from which they have just come. This will involve pausing on the journey, which may be frustrating, but it allows them to work out the direction in which they are heading. In a similar way this Studyguide is an attempt to help those engaged in mission to pause and turn and look back along the route from which they have come, so that they may have a clearer idea of where they are going.

A good way of beginning to do this is to ask how the use of the word ‘mission’ itself has evolved. An analysis of its genealogy reveals that before the sixteenth century it was not used to describe an aspect of church life but was found in a different context, to describe relationships within the holy Trinity. The Latin word ‘missio’, meaning ‘to send’, was used to describe the sending of the Son by the Father, and also of the sending of the Holy Spirit by the Father and the Son (Bosch 1991, p. 390). An early example is from the eucharistic prayer of Hippolytus, whose earliest extant version is in Latin and dates from the years 215–17 AD. In this prayer the Father is thanked for his beloved Son Jesus Christ ‘whom in your good pleasure you sent from heaven into the womb of a virgin . . .’ (in Evans and Wright 1991, p. 15). Another example comes from the Latin Vulgate translation of Romans 8.2: ‘for God . . . by sending his own son . . .’.

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries it was the Jesuits in Latin America who started to use the term in a more restricted sense, changing its subject matter from divine to human agency. They started to use it to describe the spreading of the Christian faith among the heathen of that continent and, subsequently, of the spreading of the Counter-Reformation Catholic faith among the Protestants of Europe. (See Neill 1964, pp. 202–4 for a description of the Jesuits in Paraguay.)

In the nineteenth century the word began to be used in an even more restricted sense, to describe the sending not of the whole Christian faith but of certain representatives of it, specifically the sending of missionaries to a designated territory where they would preach the gospel and convert non-Christian people. It was in this sense that the word was used in the naming of the new Church Missionary Society in 1801. This became the modern understanding of the term and is still used in the media and popular culture generally to this day.

Today, after the colonization of vast areas of the globe by the European powers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the complicity of the churches in that whole process, there is embarrassment about the word and the desire of many to abandon it: if that is mission then we want no more part of it.

But the Trinitarian roots of the word are a reminder that mission is about much more than what the churches attempt to achieve or fail to achieve.

Karl Barth

In the twentieth century, through the influence of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968) and his ‘crisis theology’, with its stress on the primacy of God’s initiative in salvation history, the churches have rediscovered a deeper and richer meaning to the word (Barth is more fully introduced in Chapter 10). Barth’s insight into the nature of mission came about at one of the lowest points of the twentieth century when the Nazis were about to come to power and any confidence in the idea of human progress finally evaporated. At that time Barth was teaching in Germany and knew very well what the rise of the Nazis meant for Europe (and for his own position in Germany). Nevertheless, when he addressed the Brandenburg Missionary Conference of 1932, a gathering of missionaries and theologians, he described Christian mission in defiant phrases as

a will and an order that does not conform to any system made up of human understanding, points of view, or reasons, even if these were made by the most enlightened Christians. Is not this free will and order something ever new, and always with the courage to begin anew, as read in Holy Scripture, as heard, and as understood? Its content may be an imperative to ‘go forward’, or ‘stop’, or ‘go back!’ Yet, no matter what, it indicates that we cannot will to be self-sufficient, but must always be open and prepared to find it. (Quoted in Thomas 1995, p. 106)

After the war, in 1952, when the churches were once again contemplating a renewal of mission at the Willingen Conference of the International Missionary Council, Barth’s influence took hold and his insight was expressed and developed in the conference resolution. It makes an explicit and important connection between church missionary work and the nature of God as Trinity:

The missionary movement of which we are a part has its source in the Triune God himself. Out of the depths of his love for us, the Father has sent forth his own beloved Son to reconcile all things to himself . . . We who have been chosen in Christ . . . are committed to full participation in his redeeming mission. There is no participation in Christ without participation in his mission to the world. That by which the Church receives its existence is that by which it is also given its world-mission. (Quoted in Avis 2005, p. 5)

This was a highly significant moment in the genealogy of the word ‘mission’ because it was reconnecting it with its early Christian roots in the doctrine of the Trinity. It led to the widespread adoption in ecumenical circles of the Latin term missio Dei to describe the real meaning of mission. Paul Avis unpacks its meaning:

The Latin term is necessary because it holds a depth and power that English translation cannot capture: the mission of God, the mission that belongs to God, the mission that flows from the heart of God. Missio Dei speaks of the overflowing of the love of God’s being and nature into God’s purposeful activity in the world. (Avis 2005, p. 5)

Mission, then, can be understood to be all about the missio Dei, God’s initiative in creating and redeeming the world. It is an outpouring of love that began with his words ‘Let there be light’ and continued with the diverse wonders of the six days of creation. It is a sending of love that continued with the calling of Abram and the birth of the people of Israel through the patriarchs. It continued with the story of the people being called out of slavery in Egypt, being offered the covenant as they travelled through the wilderness and were led into the promised land. God’s fatherly love was expressed through the sending of the prophets, the punishment of the exile and the restoration of the people to their land.

Then, above all, it found expression in the sending of his Son, ‘for God so loved the world that he sent his only son . . .’. The birth, life and death of Christ was the supreme expression of God’s mission, for this was where the depths of his love for his world were revealed, above all on the cross. The outcome of this outpouring was the rising again of Christ on the third day, his appearing to the disciples and many others, and then the sending of the Holy Spirit to empower and equip the disciples for spreading the good news about all of this. The completion of the missio Dei is awaited at the end of all things, when the love of God will bring all things into the perfection, peace and joy of the life of the holy Trinity once more.

‘Mission’ therefore is not ‘the Church going out and saving people’. Rather, it is God creating and saving the world, and this includes not only creating and saving people but the natural world and indeed cosmos as a whole. It is therefore something immensely greater than the Church. It is the primary fact, and the Church is secondary: the mission of God came first, and the Church was created as a response to that. So the Church is a product of mission, rather than the other way round. As Emil Brunner reputedly put it, ‘the Church exists by mission just as fire exists by burning’. Mission, as Bosch writes, ‘is thereby seen as a movement from God to the world; the church is viewed as an instrument for that mission . . . To participate in mission is to participate in the movement of God’s love toward people, since God is a fountain of sending love’ (Bosch 1991, p. 390).

What does this imply for the work of the Church? Bosch writes that Christian missionary activity

can not simply be the planting of churches or the saving of souls; rather, it has to be service of the missio Dei, representing God in and over against the world, pointing to God, holding up the God-child before the eyes of the world in a ceaseless celebration of the Feast of the Epiphany. In its mission, the church witnesses to the fullness of the promise of God’s reign and participates in the ongoing struggle between that reign and the powers of darkness and evil. (1991, p. 391)

During the 1960s and 1970s there was further development in this understanding. These years saw a growing realization that the missio Dei should not be restricted to the Church’s sphere of influence.

Since God’s concern is for the entire world, this should also be the scope of the missio Dei. It affects all people in all aspects of their existence. Mission is God’s turning to the world in respect of creation, care, redemption and consummation . . . It takes place in ordinary human history, not exclusively in and through the church . . . The missio Dei is God’s activity, which embraces both the church and the world, and in which the church may be privileged to participate. (Bosch 1991, p. 391)

Vatican II

The Second Vatican Council, the reforming and modernizing council of all the Roman Catholic bishops that met in Rome between 1962 and 1965, brought this thinking into the heart of the Roman Catholic Church. In its rousing decree on the Church’s missionary activity (Ad Gentes), a key document of the Council, it stated that

The church on earth is by its very nature missionary since, according to the Father, it has its origin in the mission of the Son and the Holy Spirit. This plan flows from ‘fountain-like love,’ the love of God the Father . . . Missionary activity is nothing else, and nothing less, than the manifestation of God’s plan, its epiphany and realization in the world and in history; that by which God, through mission, clearly brings to its conclusion the history of salvation. Through preaching and the celebration of the sacraments, of which the holy Eucharist is the centre and summit, missionary activity makes Christ present, who is the author of salvation. (Ad Gentes 2, 9, in Vatican Council II, pp. 444, 453)

But mission is not restricted to the Church: God’s saving activity is at work in the world as well as the Church, especially through the secret moving of the Spirit in human beings, advancing the salvation of people through love. And such secretive work may, by the grace of God, issue in a more humane world. So Gaudium et Spes, Vatican II’s ‘Pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world’, speaks of human progress in creating a more just social order in the modern world. It then declares,

The Spirit of God, who, with wondrous providence, directs the course of time and renews the faith of the earth, assists at this development . . . such progress is of vital concern to the kingdom of God, in so far as it can contribute to the better ordering of human society. (Gaudium et Spes 26, 39, in Vatican Council II, pp. 192, 204; quoted in Bosch 1991, p. 392)

Conclusion

The recognition that mission is God’s mission represents a crucial breakthrough in respect of the preceding centuries (Bosch 1991, p. 393). It transforms the whole way in which mission is viewed and liberates the Church from trying to depend upon its own limited resources. It is the starting point for the explorations of this Studyguide. It also allows us to return to the quotation which began this section of the book, from the poem ‘The Night’ by the Welsh poet Henry Vaughan (1622–95), which spoke of a ‘deep, but dazzling darkness’ where ‘not all [was] clear’. These words were quoted because they describe well the contemporary crisis of understanding over mission in the churches. But Vaughan’s verse goes on to welcome this night time because it allows him to enter into union with God:

O for that Night! Where I in Him

Might live invisible and dim!

The churches, now, might welcome the night of crisis for mission because it has allowed them to rediscover the way authentic mission springs from God himself. They now know they are fundamentally dependent on life ‘in him’ and that this Trinitarian life can liberate them from having to rely upon their own weak resources.

Discussion questions Can you detect the Spirit of God at work in the secular world? Describe some examples. How do these signs of the missio Dei develop or change your understanding of the mission of the Church?