God’s Mission Has A Church (Part One)

What is God's Mission?

God's mission has a church! If you have been around church circles for any time, you may have heard the term “mission” or “missionary.” Generally, what we have learned is the Church has a mission or sends missionaries for its mission. It is not wrong but backward and incomplete. You see, the Church does not have a mission. God has a mission, and His mission has a church. The Church is the vehicle for God's mission.

God is a missionary God, and the whole of Scripture is the unfolding of His story as He engages His world through His people. He has one goal—to form a family for himself from all people. 

In His kindness, He has invited his people, the Church, to participate in His mission. There is, though, an issue. The Church can quickly turn inward, becoming a group of huddled Christians wholly disconnected from their true identity and God's calling of sharing in His mission with Him. 

The Church is meant to be a sent people in the world. 

What is the Church?

The Church is the multiethnic community of the cross. God calls people together through Jesus' sacrifice on the cross out of self-worship and self-exaltation. 

God's Spirit compels those people to live for Him and each other and not for themselves, striving toward living life as we will live it when Jesus returns. The Church is a glimpse into God's new city. He calls His family to reflect gospel-changed hearts and lives to those who have yet to return to the community with Him. 

How beautiful the family of God is, called and sent to perfectly reflect what life looks like under the rule of Jesus. Leslie Newbigin, a famous British missionary, rightly said that “the church is the hermeneutic of the gospel,” meaning that the Church is the living interpretation of the gospel and all its implications.

Being the life-giving, living expression of the gospel is not a solitary endeavour or the responsibility of any individual but that of the collective community. Why? God exists perfectly and eternally in perfect community with Himself, and this community is what His people and His Church are supposed to show the world.

Come back next week for part two of this Theology of the Church series.