Chris Wright’s The Mission of God’s People is methodologically one of the best books on a biblical theology of mission that I have come across. I will be recommending it in the workshops that Wes and I will be doing at the Communitas staff conference later this week. Wright argues that mission arises out of the whole story of the people of God told in scripture and that mission must engage the whole life of the people of God, and I agree with him. The book is a careful, thorough, scholarly, but very readable exposition of the thesis.

But I think that Wright misses an important dimension to the biblical story and as a result overlooks a crucial aspect of the missional task today. The point can be illustrated by considering this diagrammatic representation of the biblical story, which I have adapted from the book (40). It is fairly typical of evangelical narrative theologies. Creation, fall and new creation are the enclosing sections of the biblical story; the large space in the middle is filled with “Redemption in History”.

The central claim of the New Testament regarding the risen Jesus is this: because he was faithful unto death in fulfilment of his mission to Israel, the God of Israel raised him from the dead and gave him the authority, which formerly belonged to God alone, to judge and rule over the nations—meaning, at least in the historical purview of the New Testament, the nations of the Greek-Roman world.

In other words, the early church thought of Jesus principally as an exalted human being, enthroned in heaven alongside YHWH, exercising the supreme but delegated authority of YHWH over all beings which had the capacity to confess him as Lord, whether in heaven or on earth or under the earth. That, I think, is more or less how Philippians 2:9-11 should be read.

This is the third of three posts outlining the biblical narrative for the purpose of constructing a narrative theology for mission. The first part presented us with Israel as a new creation people called to worship and serve the living God, in the midst of hostile nations, over a long period of time. That traumatic story generated the belief that God would decisively save and restore his people and would eventually establish his own rule over the Israel’s neighbours. The New Testament gives its version of how that hope would be fulfilled through the faithfulness of Jesus and the testimony of the churches. This is explained in part two.

In this section I consider, in a very cursory fashion, how that story has played out over the last two thousand years and how I think it shapes the identity and purpose of the post-Christendom church.

The Old Testament story left us with a two-part eschatological expectation. During a period of great historical crisis the God of Abraham would demonstrate his righteousness or rightness, first, by saving and restoring his servant people, and secondly, by establishing his own rule over the nations in place of the old gods. This would be a political outcome—the climax to the centuries old story of Israel’s troubled relationship with the surrounding nations, which is the story of the kingdom of God. You should read part one if you haven’t already done so. There is no radical disjuncture between the sections of the Bible. They are telling the same story. You should also bear in mind that this is just my proposed reading, greatly simplified. You may want to disagree with it.

My friend Wes and I are running some workshops at the Communitas International staff conference this summer, aimed at helping leaders who do not necessarily have formal theological training instil in their communities a good grasp of how scripture informs church and mission. How do we do credible, practical grassroots theologising? We think that telling the biblical story with enthusiasm, understanding and imagination is an important part of this—perhaps all there really is to it—so I have been preparing some notes on how the story unfolds. Wes will have something to say on how the story and the “eschatology” that arises out of it shape the practice of developing missional communities.

Marc Cortez has written a book called ReSourcing Theological Anthropology: A Constructive Account of Humanity in the Light of Christ. I haven’t read the book, but I know a man who has, and I propose to take issue with the central thesis of Cortez’s book on the strength of Owen Strachan’s mostly enthusiastic review. The problem is that theology is so bent on imposing its totalising programme on scripture that it is unable to grasp the evangelical force—not to mention the exegetical integrity—of the narrative-historical reading.

Last month the Pew Research Centre published the results of a survey of the level of religious commitment of people in Western Europe who self-identify as Christians. The basic finding appears to be that people who call themselves “Christian” in Western Europe are less actively religious—less likely to go to church, pray, believe in God, etc.—than people who call themselves “nones” in America.