None other than Karl Barth would seem to suggest that mission is indeed the source of all theology. In a paper presented to the Brandenburg Mission Conference in 1932, Barth identified a foundational understanding of mission primarily as an attribute of God, before it could be considered an activity of the Church:
Must not even the most faithful missionary, the most convinced friend of missions, have reason to reflect that the term missio was in the ancient Church an expression of the doctrine of the Trinity–namely the expression of the divine sending forth of the self, the sending of the Son and the Holy Spirit to the world?[1]
Soon after (1933), Karl Hartenstein argued a similar position and coined the phrase ‘missio Dei’ in response to a church-orientated understanding of mission. The missio Dei both precedes and initiates the missiones ecclesiae, while the latter cannot be understood without reference to the former. In more popular terms (and as frequently cited), ‘It is not the church of God that has a mission. It’s the God of mission that has a church.’[2]
An extensive and influential treatment is found in the missiologist David Bosch’s classic text, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. Following Barth, Bosch noted that
Mission was understood as being derived from the very nature of God. It was thus put in the context of the doctrine of the Trinity, not of ecclesiology or soteriology. The classical doctrine on the missio Dei as God the Father sending the Son, and God the Father and the Son sending the Spirit was expanded to include yet another “movement”: The Father, Son and the Holy Spirit sending the church into the world…
Our mission has not life of its own: only in the hands of the sending God can it truly be called mission. Not least since the missionary initiative comes from God alone … Mission is thereby seen as a movement from God to the world; the church is viewed as an instrument for that mission. There is church because there is mission, not vice versa. To participate in mission is to participate in the movement of God’s love toward people, since God is a fountain of sending love.[3]
The re-discovery of the ‘sending of God’ (missio Dei) has arguably been one of the most profound re-framing of what we understand as ‘theology’. This provides profound answers to the question, ‘What on earth is God doing?’
It also has a remarkable capacity to bring a deeper common purpose to the church: there is nothing quite like partnering side by side in the mission of God to realise a oneness of spirit.
Ecclesiology and missiology are not two separate spheres, but one and the same, and the separation of the two had disastrous consequences both for mission and the spiritual malaise of the Church.
The separation of these two things which God has joined together must be judged one of the great calamities of missionary history, and the healing of this division one of the greatest tasks of our time.[4]
Where mission is set to one side, “the Church simply falls to the ground. We must say bluntly that when the Church ceases to be a mission, then she ceases to have any right to the titles by which she is adorned in the New Testament.”[5]
All of which is a pretty good reason to go deeper in exploring the mission of God!
[1] Karl Barth, ‘Theology and Mission in the Present’, as extracted in Norman Thomas (ed.), Readings in World Mission, (London: SPCK, 1995), 104-106.
[2] This is one of many similar statements, largely based on a fuller statement by Jurgen Moltmann: “It is not the church that has a mission of salvation to fulfill in the world; it is the mission of the Son and the Spirit through the Father that includes the church” The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution to Messianic Ecclesiology (SCM Press, 1977), 64.
[3] David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, (New York: ORBIS, 20th Anniversary edition, 2011), 399.
[4] Lesslie Newbigin, One Body, One Gospel, One World: The Christian Mission Today. (International Missionary Council, 1958), 26.
[5] Michael W. Goheen, “‘As the Father Has Sent Me, I Am Sending You’: Lesslie Newbigin’s Missionary Ecclesiology,” International Review of Mission, XCI, 362 (July 2002), 366 (with reference to Lesslie Newbigin’s Household of God, 163.)
