The Hsu’s Views

John Franke has penned a great article over at Allelon regarding the centrality of mission as the central organizing principle for the church. This stems from the character of God himself and is captured by the term missio Dei. How is God missional by nature?

This missional pattern is captured in the words of Jesus recorded in the Gospel of John, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (John 20:21). God is missional by nature. The love of God lived out and expressed in the context of the eternal community of love gives rise to the missional character of God who seeks to extend the love shared by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit into the created order. According to David Bosch, mission is derived from the very nature of God and must be situated in the context of the doctrine of the Trinity rather than ecclesiology or soteriology. In this context the logic of the classical doctrine of the missio Dei expressed as God the Father sending the Son, and the Father and the Son sending the Spirit may be expanded to include yet anther movement: “Father, Son, and Spirit sending the church into the world” (David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991], 390). In this context, the church is seen as the instrument of God’s mission and its various historical, global, and contemporary embodiments may be viewed as a series of local iterations of God’s universal mission to all of creation.

It is an excellent article even it if is a bit technical. His comments regarding how we should approach the doing and teaching of theology are important.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 at 3:58 am and is filed under Books, Missional, Theology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.