The eCrozier

From our Catechism:

Q.     What is the mission of the Church?
A.     The mission of the Church is to restore all people to
unity with God and each other in Christ.

The Church really does not have a mission, per se. Now please wait and hear me out. The Church does not have a mission, but God does, and it is restoring all people to unity with God and one another in Christ. But that mission is God’s property, not ours. The Church then should not be the grammatical focus of any sentence that contains the word mission. In other words, the Church does not have a mission to the world. Rather, God has a mission to the world and God compels the Church to participate in what God is up to in that mission through Jesus Christ.  Thus, the Church is a strategy that God has deployed to accomplish God’s mission.

When we understand mission from this perspective, we remove ourselves as the Church from the center of the story as if the Church were an end in itself. It was not God’s goal to establish the Church as a result of the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. Rather the Church is God’s strategy for the ongoing living out of the mission of God in Jesus.  Seeing the Church as God’s strategy rather than as God’s goal reorients our focus and helps reorder our understanding of mission.

It is very easy to fall into the trap of understanding the Church as God’s goal. When we do this, we tend toward complacency, self-satisfaction, and, historically, toward triumphalism. This leads us to a mindset that results in our making sure we have churches in as many places as possible so people can come to us when they are ready. If we are an end unto ourselves, if we as the Church are God’s ultimate end, then it stands to reason that we should wait patiently until those outside the Church come to their senses, so to speak, and arrive at the doors of our churches. And when they do, of course, we will welcome them. This sort of triumphalism, however, disorders the Church and distorts our understanding of the Church’s role in God’s mission.

So, the Church is God’s strategy and not God’s goal. The Church should be more verb than noun. This should be liberating news to us for this is more than mere semantics. It is the news that mission is not only about what goes on inside our churches. To be sure, our worship and discipleship formation inside our churches matters. But they matter in so far as they compel and constrain us to leave the confines of our churches and incarnate the Good News of God in Christ in our communities. We cannot restore all people to unity with God if we are hunkered down inside our churches.

This is cold water in our faces during Lent. It has the power to wake us up out of any complacency or triumphalism into which we may have fallen. If we are not participating in God’s mission, then God will surely seek out others who will participate in being the hands and feet and heart of Jesus in the world.

+Scott