Letters to Peter, 4

(My friend Peter has set me a challenge for 2024: each month he is going to ask me a question for me to answer. I want my answer to come from the heart, so I will try not use books, except the Bible. And I will try keep it to around 500 words. Thanks for the challenge Peter. I hope others find it helpful too.)

                             

                                    April 2024

4. How does the impact of family breakdown in our society today negatively impact our church life and how should the church respond as the body of Christ?

There is no doubt that family breakdown has greatly affected the church in the UK, as it has in other countries, particularly in the West, where divorce is at such high levels.

Nothing I say here should be taken as a criticism of any particular person who has been through divorce: you can rarely make an informed judgment on how much someone is a victim rather than a perpetrator. And no one whose parents divorced should feel any shame for the failure of their parents' marriage. 

But, from memory, studies have shown an alarming similarity between family breakdown in the church and in wider society.

I suppose it should not surprise us: the church is a subset of that wider society. We live in the world and are subject to all the same pressures that are faced by our acquaintances outside the church. The same was true of the early church: Paul says of the Corinthians that, among them, some were sexually immoral, others idolaters, adulterers, men who have sex with men, thieves, greedy, drunkards, slanderers and swindlers (1 Cor 6:9-11). 

And divorce was a feature too. After all, our Lord himself made it clear that divorce was allowed under the Mosaic law as a concession because hearts were hard (Matt 19:1-9). It was bound to affect the NT church too. So it should not surprise us that broken families would be present in the local church. 

How does family breakdown impact the church?

1. The emotional toll it takes is bound to hamper the ability of the family members affected to benefit from involvement in church. I'm talking about benefitting from the means of grace: Bible study, preaching, close fellowship with God's people, etc. Children might become withdrawn due to the trauma that they have gone through, making it harder to engage them in spiritual conversation.

2. It will also take an economic toll: legal fees; dividing into two parts, each with a need for accommodation; the cost of getting children from one parent to the other each weekend, especially if one partner moves away. Believing divorcees will have less money to contribute to the work of the Lord in the church and elsewhere.

3. It will take a social toll: how many broken families will be able to host a church house group or offer hospitality to needy people? Even if the will is there, shifting to a smaller house may make hospitality very difficult.

4. And there is often a spiritual toll: In some cases children are absent from church week after week because they are with an unbelieving parent on weekends. So children with a believing parent are denied spiritual nurture from the church. It is a wonder if they do not drift away from the faith altogether.

And how should the church respond?

1. Teaching: Prevention is better than cure. It is vital that the church recognises the pressures that families are under and seeks to strengthen families so that they have the resources to resist the influence of the world. That means, surely, that biblical ethics are taught from the front, on Sundays, and at home groups and other small groups. (See my last letter.)

2. Warning: Church members must be warned of the pervasive influence of the world through technology, particularly social media - surely the most pressing face of the world in the church today. Pornography, I read somewhere, makes up 40% of internet traffic! It devastates marriages and devastates children - I think I read that 70% of children have seen pornography by the age of ten.

3. Prayer. We must pray for our families in the midst of such pressures. We need to pray that marriages will  be preserved in the face of conflict and the inevitable influence of the world. The devil is always prowling around seeking whom he may devour (1 Pet 5:8-9). We need to pray that husbands and wives will resist him, standing firm in the faith.

4. Community: The church is the family of God. We need to encourage our people to open their homes to others in the church, listen to their troubles, pray with them, help them out, play with their children. And we who are given responsibility as leaders must lead by example: The quality of being hospitable is a requirement of elders (1 Tim 3:2). Broken families must be welcomed into the community (and encouraged to stay in the community). It will speak volumes to the wider society if we are serious about this.

5. Confidence: As I wrote above, the Corinthian church was made up of people with very broken histories. But the wonderful thing was, God was still at work: they were washed, sanctified, justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of God (1 Cor 6:11). That's the beauty of the gospel. We have all these resources to build up the body of Christ to be the bride that she is meant to be.

Should All Missionaries Be Elders?

Phil Remmers has recently published an article - Biblical Eldership and Global Missions A Vital and Necessary Union - on the 9Marks website, on the selection, training, and funding of missionaries, and especially on the relationship between missionaries and their sending church.

Remmers has had extensive experience of ministry in Asia and now is involved in publishing reformed literature in many Asian languages.

He writes many good things in the course of the article, for which I am thankful. The comments on funding are especially helpful, though hardly groundbreaking - people have been saying stuff like this for decades. But it is worth banging on about the broken system that has been developed and continues to be pursued. In fact, in my opinion he could have gone much further. Why, for instance, is a family needing $8000 a month for their salary? I can imagine some situations - ministry in Singapore or Tokyo, for instance, where this level of support is necessary. But if, as I have observed myself many times among certain mission organisations, the family is living in a posh compound with a brand new imported jeep, in a community in which even well off locals can only dream of that lifestyle, further questions need to be asked.

He says that at least half of the missionaries he encountered in his ministry location (unspecified for security reasons) should not have been there at all because they were unqualified for the ministry and in any case tended only to stay for 2-3 years and leave without bearing fruit. And that is not counting 'short-term missionaries'.

Although I can see how he can come to such a judgment, I am uneasy about this. He affirms, in a footnote, that God is sovereign in salvation. But he nevertheless is happy to sit in judgment on the fruitfulness of others in ministry. How can he have sufficient knowledge about the relationships these folk had developed in their short time? And even if he did have that sort of data, real spiritual fruit is often unseen. I hope he is not ashamed on the Last Day for having written that.

The main burden of the paper, though, is to argue that all missionaries should first of all be elders of the local church back home before they are appointed to their ministry overseas. I get the sentiment. After all, as the argument goes, why would we send out people for ministry in hard places overseas if we wouldn't have them be involved in ministry at home? Fair question. He has diagnosed a serious missionary malady.

But Remmers' remedy is unbiblical, naive, and worldly.

Unbiblical

In Acts 13 the Antioch church sent out two of their 'prophets and teachers' - Barnabas and Saul. There does seem to be something of a paradigmatic character to this story, situated as it is in the unfolding story of the expansion of the gospel to the ends of the earth. And yet Paul was happy to have all sorts on his apostolic team: Luke the doctor, for example; Timothy, who, we are told, was a 'disciple' when he was taken on by Paul as a travelling companion (Acts 16:1-3); Erastus, who along with Timothy is called Paul's 'helper' (Acts 19:22).

When Paul left Corinth he was accompanied by Priscilla and Aquila (Acts 18:18). Now I suspect (since this is on 9Marks) that Remmers would not be happy with female elders. So what does he do with Priscilla? Is she not a missionary?

Naive

This leads on to the training of missionaries. The best missionaries the author has encountered tended to have been trained at Master's Seminary, where the training is explicitly for elders. Now, as I have said, much that he says here is valuable. Better, he says, to have fewer, better trained, and proven missionaries, than the mess that he has seen.

But he overstates his case. And the reason he does that is this: he has not diagnosed the malady correctly. The disease is much more serious than he realises. It is not just the two- to three-year, untrained, unqualified missionaries who are caught up in the problem. It is a whole lot more, including, perhaps Remmers himself.

Worldly

Remmers is operating out of a paradigm for cross-cultural ministry that has been weighed in the balances and been found wanting.

It comes out in numerous ways and is exemplified in the uncritical use of the term 'missionary'. As I have explained here before, this term, and the notion it represents is seriously problematic. It is not a biblical word and continues to have much baggage that seriously compromises a healthy approach to cross-cultural ministry, including the financial aspect mentioned earlier.

Remmers observes that Master's Seminary has no missions professors but that their graduates are "both biblically qualified ​and​ are able to use their gifts in a foreign language and culture" - without any training in intercultural communication, or in understanding how other cultures operate, or in appreciating anything about how other workers have fared in previous generations, or in examining the state of churches in the nations to which they are sent. (This is an issue I have addressed frequently, such as here.)

Remmers' seems to have no appreciation of how culture-bound his view of cross-cultural ministry is. This lack of self-awareness is the chief weakness of the article and why I do not commend it.

The Southgate Fellowship: Fighting Old Battles

The third in a series of reflections. Part one is here and part two here.

Sometimes the Southgate Fellowship statement seems to belong to another era.

What exactly are is TSF arguing with here? 

79c) We deny that a younger church has no theological, financial or moral obligation to the sending church.

Can we really frame relationships between churches in terms of ‘sending’ and ‘younger’? That may have been the reality of church and mission in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when many churches in the traditional ‘fields’ began with some sort of relationship to a missionary or mission society. The agency brokered the relationship of the new churches with their supporting churches back home. Control of those new churches was assumed to belong to the missionaries, who were themselves accountable to the mission board back home.

It took a great deal of heart searching and argument to free many churches in the global South from foreign control. In fact, it was only with the end of the colonial era that many churches became autonomous. Sadly, this process was often slow, begrudging and acrimonious, so that indigenous alternatives were sought outside of all relationship with brothers and sisters in other countries. 

In recent decades the vast majority of church planting in the global South has been carried out by local evangelists. Everything is about relationships. Formal transactional partnerships are alien. The idea that churches that have shared resources might have no obligations to one another would be considered bizarre.

So why the denial?

It comes over as naïve and anachronistic.

Furthermore, one wonders whether the implications of some sections of the statement have really been thought through.

There is a proper recognition that the primary locus for mission is the local church. Parachurch agencies have their place but must not usurp the authority of the local church. I have argued for this myself. 

So primary oversight of cross-cultural ministry must not be in the hands of denominational agencies or parachurch organizations:

75a) We affirm that visible churches bear the primary responsibility for the theological, moral, and ministry-method oversight of missionaries.
75b) We affirm that the visible church has the primary responsibility to recruit, mobilise, and send individual church members into mission.
75c) We deny that denominational agencies and parachurch organisations should have the primary theological, moral, and ministry-method oversight of missionaries.

Strangely, however, considering the majority of the council teach in theological colleges, no specific mention is made of them. Does the visible church have primary oversight over their work in these parachurch organizations or is that oversight exercised by others? How does primary oversight work out at Westminster or Oak Hill? Perhaps a measure of autonomy for parachurch agencies is allowable after all.

The lack of any acknowledgement that there might be an issue here causes one to pause and ask whether the ground reality is rather more messy than the formal statement. In the interest of candour, this should be more transparent.

A Taxonomy of Church & Ethnic Engagement

As there is a fair pit of dialogue on twitter at the moment on multiculturalism in churches I thought I would post some material on the issue.

Some years ago in teaching on urban contextualization I came up with a taxonomy of how churches engage with the existential issue of living in a multi-cultural or multi-ethnic society (I use the terms synonymously). This is not to make a judgment on one approach or another but simply as an analytical tool. The taxonomy is based on two axes: the horizontal (x) axis on multiculturality and the vertical (y) axis on philosophy of engagement. This is what it looks like:

The table below shows how churches of the four types differ from each other.

	Pragmatic Monocultural	Pragmatic Multicultural	Idealistic  Multicultural	Idealistic  Monocultural
Affirmation of communal identity	û	ü	ü	ü
Communities meet separately in one local church	û	ü	ü	û
Communities gather in one congregation	û	û	ü	û
Translation in services	û	û	ü	û

Advantages of each type:

Pragmatic Monocultural	Pragmatic Multicultural	Idealistic  Multicultural	Idealistic  Monocultural
clear expectations of what is expected of everyone easy for majority community to accept outsiders from minority communities	all groups are encouraged to express themselves according to their cultural norms single local church expresses multicultural reality of universal church in relationships between congregations of one church	all groups are encouraged to express themselves according to their cultural norms single local church expresses multicultural reality of universal church in vivid public form	all groups are encouraged to express themselves according to their cultural norms relations between local churches expresses multicultural reality of universal church outsiders readily feel at home

Disadvantages of each type:

Pragmatic Monocultural	Pragmatic Multicultural	Idealistic  Multicultural	Idealistic  Monocultural
not easy for minority communities to adjust to culture of majority church for those from minority communities, bridges to unbelieving relatives and friends are broken, passively by neglect or actively by insistence on leaving former lifestyle	sense of unity of local church is threatened communication between congregations is complicated outsiders may still feel the congregation is not for them because the ownership of the wider group is multicultural, especially if the senior leaders are from the majority community	no community feels entirely at home in the congregation communication is complicated outsiders may still feel the meeting is not for them because the identity of the minority group is subsumed under that of the majority	image of unity of universal church is threatened postponement of ethical awareness communication between churches is complicated

How to Prioritize Your Church's Mission Funding

I received an email from a pastor today: 

Reason for emailing: our church recently agreed to focus our missions support by reducing down from 13 organisations and individuals down to 6 (2 individuals and 4 organisations). We have for a long time given 10% of our income which is something we're intending to keep going.

My question is what principles you use to decide how you divide that 10% up, particularly with the individuals we're supporting? Have you got any advice you'd be able to offer?

This was my answer: 

I think that your prioritizing should be along the following lines:

1. Biblical theological factors: your priorities should reflect the centrality of gospel ministry that is in line with the Great Commission – pioneer evangelistic ministry especially among peoples who otherwise would have little or no witness plus those who support that and ministries that complete that (‘teaching them to obey’).
2. Historical factors: you will have relationships with people perhaps going back a long time. These should be honoured, though if people you have been supporting are simply giving out teddy bears in children’s homes I think you should look for ways to redeploy them in more suitable ministry rather than feel under compulsion to continue their support simply on the basis of relationship. Relationships are very important. But they are not absolute.
3. Global realities: mission is now from everywhere to everywhere. Are there folk from other places, including from previously ‘receiving’ countries, who are not connected with you, share your vision and priorities but don’t have sufficient support?
4. Missions mobilization: some money should go into growing the mission vision and wisdom of the church. That may include sending people for short trips to visit situations for that purpose.
5. Training: God willing, the result of missions mobilization will be people coming forward to be assessed for their personal long-term involvement. That should include training, which can be costly.

I trust you will be seeking to grow the vision and commitment of the church so that you can increase your giving in the future. At least one church in Wales I know gives 50% to mission. 

Trouble at Gospel for Asia

This week news broke that the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability has terminated the membership of Gospel for Asia. The EFCA is a very important body in the USA that scrutinises the finances of member organizations to ensure they meet their strict code of practice, It is rare that an organization loses its membership. Gospel for Asia is an organization that raises very substantial amounts of funds, in the States especially, to support 'native missionaries' in Asia. The organization was founded by K. P. Yohannan from India and that is where most of the finances seem to be channelled. I have previously commented on Yohannan's philosophy here and here. Read more on the story here. I want to add a few more comments on the organization and its approach.

GFA is not all bad. There are organizations that are quite simply rotten to the core. Their leaders are charlatans, they lie through their teeth and cheat many generous donors out of their hard-earned cash. One such is K. A. Paul, also of India, who visited Nepal when I was there. He styled himself as Dr. K. A. Paul (USA) - he was based in America and clearly thought that was somehow relevant to his 'ministry' in the subcontinent; I have yet to discover from where he received his doctorate. I will spare you the details but it is a public fact that he made a wretched nuisance of himself in Kathmandu. Privately, members of the organizing committee confided some truly jaw-dropping allegations against him after he was literally chased out of the country by self-respecting Nepalis who wanted his blood.

GFA is not like that. But there is nevertheless an integrity issue. Some questions might help to focus the issue: 

1. How is it that it 'only takes $30 a month to help enable a national missionary to serve full-time to reach an unreached village' when they work in different countries, under different regimes, in different economies, and have variously sized families and needs? Do they each get $30 or is it adjusted? If so, why is this not stated on the web site? Perhaps it does take £30 a month but it would be good to see how this figure is arrived at.
2. Why is there nothing about 'Believers' Church' on the web site? I was told by the UK director six years back that all the churches that are planted constitute this denomination and that the metropolitan (archbishop if you like) is K. P. Yohannan. Should this not be public - something like 'your donations go to building up the Believers' Church denomination'? I think a lot of donors would like to know that.
3. How independent are those churches allowed to be? I was told that if the church wanted to dismiss its pastor they would not be free to do that but that it could only happen on the order of the bishop. I am not saying an episcopalian form of church government is wrong (though I don't favour it myself) but rather that donors might like to know about that.
4. Since the metropolitan lives in Dallas isn't this denomination under foreign control - something that the indigenous church movement (especially in India of all places) fought so hard against in colonial times?
5. Doesn't this event worsen the scandal of the evangelical dollar in Asia? It is hardly surprising, is it, that several states in India have enacted anti-conversion laws if money is coming from the US with the intention, it is thought, of 'converting people to a foreign religion'? Now this is a nuanced debate and sadly most people involved in it don't realize that. But there was a time when most Indian mission organizations eschewed foreign funds for this reason. It is a fact that many Asian people would rather die than give up what they consider their heritage. They regard the use of outside funds to pursue what they see as wholesale cultural and religious transmogrification in the image of the donor as reprehensible. And that means that for every person presented with the gospel a dozen may be inoculated against it. It is not the scandal of the cross.

My prayer for GFA, like other similar organizations, is that they put their house in order, come clean about their shortcomings and pursue the ministry of the gospel in Asia in ways that will not put any stumbling block in anyone's path except that of the crucified lord of history.

Modern-Day Slavery and Mission from Below

Let me introduce you to my friend Kumar. Kumar is not his real name. Posting his real name online might put him in jeopardy. I have known Kumar since he was a young man about to marry our househelper, Sita. He had moved into the Kathmandu Valley in search of a job and picked up construction skills working on building sites. It was a difficult life, getting up early every day to stand on street corners waiting to be hired by builders for a day's work, never knowing that he would have any income from one day to the next. Then the building industry collapsed and we helped Kumar learn to drive with the hope that he could become a taxi driver. That didn't work out so Kumar was back to square one and now with a wife and two sons to support things were not looking rosy.

One day he came to me with his 'contract' to work in the Gulf. It was a poorly photocopied sheet of paper with a dozen potential reasons why he might be sent home at any time at his own expense. He was to work on construction sites in the Gulf for two years in 50C (120F) heat, stay in a labour camp with scores of other workers. His passport would be taken away on arrival and returned only on completion of his commitment. His total pay for two years bonded labour: $3000, half of which would go to pay the manpower office that arranged his contract. I was incensed and tried to dissuade him from going but there was no other work to be had.

We heard bits and pieces of his life there during those years. Mainly we heard that he was still alive. When he returned, he came to visit us. "I survived," he told us. That was the main thing. Others didn't. One worker fainted at height, fell to the ground, broke his back, and was put on a flight back to Kathmandu, with no compensation. Nepal has no provision for paraplegics or disability benefits or free health care. Others died. There is a continual stream of coffins arriving on the tarmac of Tribhuvan International Airport to grieving relatives who have lost their only wage earner, or to no-one as no next of kin has been informed.

That is what modern day slavery looks like.

But there is a silver lining on this noxious cloud of gross injustice - mission from below. (I think it was Samuel Escobar who coined this expression.) Kumar loves the Lord Jesus. He also loves his fellow workers and so with others he started a church among them. Spiritual life welled up in the sands of that arid place. Now a whole lot of Nepalis arrive back in their home country new men. God does indeed move "in mysterious ways his wonders to perform" (William Cowper).

Hunger for the Word

During my travels over the last few months I preached at a church of maybe 200 people who really appreciated my ministry. I was happy of course. It is always heartening when people come up to you afterwards and share how much they learned from the message. But what I learned afterwards shocked me. I had a hint of it beforehand when I was told that the people would appreciate a message from the Bible. Afterwards I was informed that the pastor hardly uses the Bible at all! He gets his material from the internet. Things had got so bad that the church committee (in effect, the deacons) had even approached the pastor to ask him to ‘refer to the Bible more’. Now if the regular church members are having to ask the pastor to refer to the Bible more things have got pretty bad. Of course, it would be worse, wouldn’t it, if no one noticed how bad things had got, if nobody cared about the weekly ministry from the pulpit? But this is a church of committed believers who desire to meet together for worship and edification. So how does it get like this?

How can we stop this sort of thing from happening? Firstly, churches, you need to make your expectations clear from the outset. A prospective pastor may be a wonderful chap, a great people person and a wise counsellor, but what is his preaching like when he visits? If he really wants to be the man who is called to your church he will do his best to preach well on his visits. He will use his well-worn illustrations that are guaranteed to get a laugh or a tear. The message may be carefully crafted according to some trusted homiletic method. But how much are you fed by the ministry? Is the Bible being explained and applied to your conscience? Is it the Bible that moves your affections or an anecdote of the Chicken Soup for the Soul variety? Do you feel that you are better equipped to read the Bible for yourself? If not, think again. He may be a really nice guy, but he shouldn’t be called to your church. Hang in there and don’t settle for second best.

Secondly, Bible colleges, seminaries, and schools of theology, you need to check your curriculum. Are your students getting equipped for a lifetime of ministry? Does what they learn at the seminary merely give them the ability to teach the same books of the Bible that they learn in class? Or, even worse, does it equip them merely to be great communicators with nothing to communicate? In some countries the turnover of pastors is ridiculous. But it is no wonder is it if they rely on a stock of sermons for their pulpit ministry? They have not been equipped for lifetime of learning and teaching.

Thirdly, preachers, you must read, read, read. Listening to a dynamic preacher on the internet may be a real blessing. But how much will that enable you to mine the Scriptures yourself? Isn’t it just a little too easy to copy down the points he makes and the illustrations he uses and refashion them for your people? I once heard a shocking statistic that suggested that a large percentage of preachers never read a book once they leave seminary. If that is you, then repent. You need to be feeding your own soul. That means that you must be a voracious reader. Only then can you feed others. And it is not enough to read the easy books, the best sellers that everyone is reading. You need to be stretching yourself, reading the challenging books that will broaden your mind, open up new vistas onto the Word and enable you to dig out of that Word the truth that your people desperately want.

I have been heartened on my travels to experience a real hunger for the Word, especially among young people. Let’s not let them down with the spiritual equivalent of Happy Meals. 

What Is the Mission of the Church?

Review of Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert, What is the Mission of the Church? MakingSense of Social Justice, Shalom, and the Great Commission (Wheaton: Crossway, 2011).

American pastors, Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert have joined forces to deliver an excellent book on the task of mission. The burden of the book is to seek to define the mission of the church more tightly than it often has been lately. The word ‘mission’ is ambiguous and that has recently become more so with the addition of words and phrases like ‘missional’ and ‘missio Dei’ to our vocabulary. When the local betting shop has a mission statement (I don’t know that it does but I’d be prepared to...no, forget it) then mission can mean anything at all. And these days it usually does. So this book is a welcome contribution to the discussion.

David Bosch’s hugely influential Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission reaches its climax with a chapter in which he discusses 13 ‘elements of an emerging ecumenical missionary paradigm’. In the end, mission is all these things (quest for justice, common witness, inculturation and liberation, as well as evangelism, contextualization and theology, for instance). He cannot tie his understanding of mission down any more than that. You may think I am childish to desire something tidier but I do think it is possible and that is what DeYoung and Gilbert do so well.

They do this by the careful exegesis of a number of key biblical passages, critiquing as they do so the position of Chris Wright in The Mission of God. Wright asserts that Genesis 12:1-3 should be taken as ‘the Great Commission’ with its two imperatives to ‘go’ and ‘be a blessing’. DeYoung and Gilbert call that into question by quoting Wright himself that “‘when two imperatives occur together the second may sometimes express either the expected result or the intended purpose of carrying out the first imperative’ (ibid.: 201)” (31). So the command to Abram is to ‘go’ so that he may be a blessing.

The authors argue against an incarnational reading of Israel’s role, i.e. that the role of Israel as a kingdom of priests (Exod 19:5-6) is not to be a blessing to the nations: “The image of a royal priesthood in the Old Testament and in the New Testament suggests holiness and privilege, not incarnational presence” (35). Wright doesn’t actually use the language of incarnation but the notion is there so the point stands I think.

Luke 4:16-21, argue DeYoung and Gilbert, is not primarily about material poverty – this is demonstrated by an exegesis of Isaiah 61:1-2 and throughout Luke. Rather, they agree with Andreas Köstenberger and Peter O’Brien in their Salvation to the Ends of the Earth: ABiblical Theology of Mission, that “‘the poor to whom the good news is announced are ... “the dispossessed, the excluded” who were forced to depend upon God’” (39), a position that, interestingly, Bosch also argues (1991:104).

In a nutshell, DeYoung and Gilbert are arguing, against Wright (2010: 26), that the mission of God is not the mission of the church: “One of the biggest missteps in much of the newer mission literature is an assumption that whatever God is doing in the world, this too is our task” (41). The mission of the church, they argue, is summarized in the Great Commission passages (Matt 28:16-20; Mark 13:10; 14:9; Luke 24:44-49; Acts 1:8).

The authors survey the synoptic Great Commission passages and that of Acts and then tackle the most controversial Gospel text, that of John 20:21 and the significance of Jesus’ mission as a model for our own. They conclude, against Stott, that “the mission of Jesus is not service broadly conceived, but the proclamation of the gospel through teaching, the corroboration of the gospel through signs and wonders, and the accomplishment of the gospel in death and resurrection” (57, emphasis in the original).

The authors conclude this lengthy and well argued chapter with their definition of the mission of the church: The mission of the church is to go into the world and make disciples by declaring the gospel of Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit and gathering these disciples into churches, that they might worship the Lord and obey his commands now and in eternity to the glory of God the Father (62, emphasis in the original).

After a helpful survey of the biblical narrative in four acts—creation, fall, redemption and consummation—the authors seek to handle hot issues in mission theology and practice by examining the meaning of key terms in missiological writing: the kingdom of God, social justice and shalom.

In discussing the significance of the kingdom of God they distinguish between two ways the word gospel is used in the Bible, a ‘zoom-lens’ way (they mean telephoto-lens), and a ‘wide-angle lens’ way. The former is the gospel of the cross; the latter is the gospel of the kingdom. They are one and the second necessarily includes the first.

On ‘social justice’ they distinguish between a ‘constrained’ view and an ‘unconstrained’ view of justice and opt for the former (181). In arguing for an acceptance of the concept of ‘moral proximity’, they accept that this is difficult with modern communications bring the world’s disaster areas into our living rooms (184-85). I am a bit uneasy by the authors’ uncritical acceptance of free-market capitalism: “No enlightened ruler or board or administration can possibly manage millions of people with as much knowledge as the market can” (191). I ask whether we should talk at all about the market ‘managing’ anything. The market, after all, is a network of institutions, a phenomenon of global culture that has been created by people. It is people who manage, make decisions, trade, cheat, defraud and resist all the above. No inanimate cultural phenomenon can do that. So the market is a human construction that allows the exchange of goods and services; it doesn’t manage anything.

DeYoung and Gilbert then tackle the great biblical word, shalom, looking at Jeremiah 29 and then at the cultural mandate. In the latter they draw heavily and profitably on Greg Beale’s work on the Garden of Eden as a temple (The Temple and the Church's Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God). The cultural mandate cannot be the same today as it was for Adam because of the fall. Adam’s failed mandate is picked up not by us but by the second Adam, who succeeds where the first Adam failed. There is both continuity and discontinuity between the old earth and the new one. But shalom is not the mission of the church as that is the mission of the Lord Jesus to whom our mission bears witness.

For the most part I think this is a very well written book that tackles the subject in a biblically informed and carefully argued manner. The book is spoiled a bit, however, by an apparent naivety with regard to global economics and a seeming reluctance to suggest that followers of Christ should examine their lifestyle in the light of global realities. That is a minor weakness, though, and shouldn’t put people off from reading it and working out how it should affect the way we are involved in mission today. I will be using it as a set text in one of my modules. Kevin DeYoung has just followed it up with a blog post taking their argument further - http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevindeyoung/2013/08/27/goal-missions-work-missionaries/?comments#comments.