I’m currently working on a ULC book based on my doctoral thesis on the mission of God and pastoral and church collaboration. I’m hopeful to have it published in 2025. Below is an excerpt.
I’d also like to invite you to join our ULC Missions Course! Starting October 6, we’ll release a few of the modules at a time. The first full module will be free for you, pastor, and your team to walk through together. We hope you’ll use it as a discipleship tool to mobilize your leaders for the mission of making Jesus known. God has a mission. God’s mission has a Church.
Access the class here and use discount code FOLLOWULC25 for 25% off.
Enjoy the excerpt.
We’d love to hear your comments on both.
The Mission of God to the World
The Scriptures are God’s mission document, yet not every Christian views the Scriptures in this way. Missiologist Darrel Guder says, “To interrogate mission fruitfully, we must give attention to the urgent need for a missional hermeneutic that will enable the church to encounter Scripture as the testimony God uses to form his people for their missional calling” (Guder, Called to Witness, 56).
The embodiment of collaboration in mission is found throughout the Scriptures, especially in the Trinity itself. In the New Testament, Jesus makes audacious statements about His collaboration with the Father. John the Baptist asserts that to see Jesus is to experience the reign and mission of God (the Father) in all of its fullness (Matthew 3:2). Jesus says in Matthew 10:32-33, “So everyone who acknowledges Me before men, I also will acknowledge before My Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies Me before men, I also will deny before My Father who is in heaven.”
The Triune God is the epitome of collaboration in mission.
In The Open Secret, Lesslie Newbigin says, “Once again (in Matthew 10:32-33) the reality of the reign of God is effectively present in Jesus in its double character of blessing and judgment. And those who are sent in Jesus’ name are also the bearers of the presence, for ‘he who receives You receives Me, and he who receives Me receives Him who sent Me’”(Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 1995), 42-43). The collaboration of the Triune Godhead extends to both claim and empower God’s people for collaboration in that same mission to make the Triune God known. This collaboration of the Triune God to send His people in mission is seen extensively in the Scriptures.
The reign of God is also all inclusive. The Father sent His Son, and the Father and Son sent the Holy Spirit in order to carry out God’s reign on the earth. That reign includes making right everything that is wrong. This reign and mission transformation includes amending everything that is broken physically, spiritually, mentally, and emotionally. Jesus is the fulfillment of Isaiah 61:1, “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me, because the Lord has anointed Me to bring good news to the poor; He has sent Me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound.” Jesus came to make humankind fully human once again. Humankind experiences that fullness in part now, but on that Day when Jesus returns, all humankind found in faith in Jesus, and creation itself, will experience the mission and reign of God in all of its fullness (1 Corinthians 13:12).
Newbigin says, “The reign of God is over all things.” Isaiah 9:7 states, “Of the increase of His government and of peace there will be no end”(Rev. 22:13, ESV). His reign extends from the beginning into forever. Our Triune God is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning, and the end. From the fall and our ongoing active rebellion against God, the Triune God has collaborated on a mission to draw God’s people, and all of creation subject to futility and groaning, back to Himself. Genesis 9 recounts the story of Noah and the seventy nations that would flow from God’s command to Noah to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 9:18, ESV). Newbigin says, “These ‘nations’ will be the background of the story that follows, but at the outset we are reminded that their existence is the fruit of God’s primal blessing. There follows the sad story of the effort of the nations to create their own unity” (Newbigin, The Open Secret, 31). The Genesis mandate to be fruitful and multiply is intimately connected with the New Testament’s Great Commission: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). The Great Commission displays the collaborative Triune God sending His church out to multiply the mission of the risen Jesus. The Triune God has always been on mission to draw wayward people and nations back to Himself.
Lutheran churches consistently pray the Lord’s Prayer in weekly worship. One of the petitions says, “Thy kingdom come.” This petition displays the collaborative nature between the Son and the Father. Jesus is yearning for the kingdom of God to reign in all of its fullness here and now through the hearing of God’s Word, reception of the Sacraments (namely, Baptism and The Lord’s Supper), and through the sending of Jesus’ church to be “salt and light” in a dark and dying world (Matt. 5:13-16, ESV).
Martin Luther loved reflecting on the Kingdom of God in the Large Catechism. Luther observed that though God’s kingdom comes without our prayer, we should pray that it “may also come to us through the preaching of the Word and the Holy Spirit.” God uses means, namely Word and Sacrament, to expand His kingdom (LC III 50, 54; Kolb-Wengert, 446-47).
Great excerpt, Tim! I’m looking forward to the book. Many LCMS churches and individual Lutherans see their church bodies as private clubs of likeminded people meeting weekly to recapitulate a particular set or rites. This dismissive take on the Great Commission seems to be a trait held commonly by those who also seek to substitute the centrality of the sacramental essence of the Gospel with the sacrificial product of their personal piety. A reticence to proclaim our risen Lord, and turning Gospel into law are predictable consequences of the Fall that can only be overcome by and through Christ.