Where does the story of mission begin?

If we agree that God's intentions are to be known in all the earth, and if we agree that God has always had that one plan, where is that plan first revealed?

Almost everything in the Bible begins in the beginning...obviously...

[Little plug here for The Bible Project...]

But how far back in the beginning?

Chris Wright goes to Abraham, and while he has a huge role in the Biblical theology of mission, what happens to our picture if we start with Adam? And what about Noah? I just want to make one point from each character, and then I have to try and keep those points in mind as I read on because [spoiler alert] I have been increasingly convinced over the past few years that our ecclesiology plays an enormous role in how we think about global mission, and it is the place of the church that I think is one of the big gaps in much talk about mission.

I'll just keep it to headlines:
If you begin with Adam, then God's mission takes on the character of filling and ordering God's first creation - I write without having done detailed study just now, but just drawing on the big picture of what Adam is charged with. He is a sort of global gardener.

If you begin with Noah, then God's mission has more of a flavour of divinely-provided rescue from a divinely ordained judgement. Noah is the one in the only place of safety - the ark.

If you being with Abraham, then we're looking at the idea of blessing to all nations coming through the one man.

It doesn't take much knowledge or insight to see all these themes in the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus.

I'm writing this for two reasons:
1. If Chris Wright leans as heavily as he does on Abraham, how does that affect the overall view of God's mission?

2. If anyone reading this has any wisdom on all this, I invite your feedback!

I'll come back to the implications of Abraham's place in Wright's book when I've come to the end of part three.

Mission of God - Part Two

In this post I'm going to briefly review the three chapters that make up Part Two - The God of Mission: 

The Living God Makes Himself Known in Israel
The Living God Makes Himself Known in Jesus Christ
The Living God Confronts Idolatry. 

I don't need to go into any detail on these three excellent chapters. I just want to think aloud about a few broad issues that I think are significant for the book, for Wright's project, and for thinking about mission full stop.

The first is to say that what is made very clear is that YHWH is unique, and his mission is unique. There is an exclusivity to the whole thing, for which we should not be apologetic. He writes on page 91, of Moses talking to Israel: 'So this unique knowledge of this unique God is now your unique stewardship.' 

This uniqueness is of course not diluted as you go through Scripture from Deuteronomy onwards - it remains just as unique ('one cannot have gradations of uniqueness', as Alan Partridge was once taught) and becomes, in some senses at least, clearer and more explicit with the incarnation.

This leads on to the second point, which is a question of continuity and discontinuity. If the mission of God, as Moses understood and taught the people in the desert, was that he, YHWH, the only God, be known, how has that mission changed since the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus?

Spoiler alert: unless I've got this quite wrong, the impression I've got is that the definition of mission that Wright's framework leaves the reader with by the end is significantly broader - or at least sounds broader - than simply making God known. I don't want to be reductionistic about that phrase - making God known - as if evangelism is all there is to mission, or to the Christian life, or the only real application of any Bible passage. Of course it isn't. But I do think that if it Moses was right, and if Wright is right about Moses, then the uniqueness of God in his being and in his mission inevitably has a controlling function on everything else. In other words, there is a central issue at stake, and all non-central issues have to find their correct place around that one central issue.

These chapters actually make that point very, very clearly. God is made known in through Israel, and of course ultimately in Jesus, and all other pretensions to divinity, or all other objects of worship, are idolatrous and will be judged and destroyed. That being so, his exclusivity does not change, and neither does his mission. 

The question therefore about how much continuity there is from the Old Testament to the New is a significant question. I can't jump ahead any more than this, but as I read these three chapters, I regularly jotted down in my notes a question mark about continuity. Chris Wright is most well known for his work on the ethical implications of the Old Testament for the people of God, and I've long wondered whether some of the issues around the way in which continuity and discontinuity is worked out is glossed over or in some cases given too much weight.

We'll see.

Let me give one example. On page 92 Wright says:
'It is not necessary to read a missionary mandate into this role [of Israel bearing witness to the nations] within the Old Testament itself, in the sense of the Israelites being physically sent out to travel to the nations to bear witness to this knowledge. But the concept is clearly there: this knowledge  is to be proclaimed to the nations, just as much as the good news of its liberation was to be proclaimed to Jerusalem. Or to be more precise, the good news of what God had done for Jerusalem would constitute part of the good news that would go also to the nations, when "all the ends of the earth will see the salvation of our God" (Is 52:10; cf. Jer. 31:10). How this would happen is never clearly articulated in the Old Testament, but that it would happen is unequivocal.'

I think it is arguable that the 'how' is not clearly articulated. However, an entire chapter is then devoted to the issue of idolatry, with part of the conclusion being the following:

'Since God's mission is to restore creation to its full original purpose of bringing all glory to God himself and thereby to enable all creation to enjoy the fullness of blessing that he desires for it, God battles against all forms of idolatry and calls us to join him in that conflict.'

I have questions about all this. Is this God's mission, or is his mission to be known? (I know, these aren't mutually exclusive issues, but still, it makes a difference, I think, how we express the central issue). Is there really so little explicit articulation of the how question in the Old Testament? And is the battle against idolatry that is such a big issue in the Old Testament handled in this way by the writers of the New? It took me slightly by surprise to find anti-idolatry taking such a central place in Wright's definition of mission.

As I said, we'll see.

Mission of God - Part One

I'm about a quarter of the way through the book and I'm enjoying it. It's really well written. I've heard Chris Wright speak a couple of times so I can hear his voice in the print - friendly, engaging, fair, serious, but with a twinkle! This is just a few thoughts on part one of the book, 'The Bible and Mission'.

Wright's stated aim for the book is on page 17:
'My major concern has to been to develop an approach to Biblical hermeneutics that sees the mission of God (and the participation in it of God's people) as a framework within which we can read the whole Bible.'

This might not sound very exciting but it's very useful! Any framework that helps one to read the whole Bible well, or even (trigger warning!) correctly, can't be a bad thing! Further, as people involved in full-time, cross-cultural mission (whatever one assumes that to mean) the central purpose of the book is right up our street.

Why read this book now?

Well, over the past few years I've had enough contact with various streams of thought about and approaches to mission (however defined) that make me wonder what people really mean by mission. There seem to be lots and lots of different activities that people sacrifice lots of time and money and emotion for, all described as mission, but really lots of them are at best tenuously linked to (what I assume to be - and maybe I'm wrong) the mission of God.

If Chris Wright can help me think better about this whole enterprise, I'll be glad.

But there's something else as well. I think - and this is what I'm waiting to discover as I read on - that some elements of the framework this book is constructing are themselves linked to the proliferation of 'mission' activities, for better or for worse.

I'm not sure it's possible for me to write this without sounding a bit...judgemental? Narrow? But I can't ignore what I've come across in speech and print that seems to me to be veering off the Bible's consistent teaching about God's plans for his world as revealed in his Word. If we agree that Scripture is authoritative, and that we are constrained to live and think and act and do and plan in line with it, then it's no small thing to be clear on what God wants of his people in his world. None of us want to be wasting time and money and prayer and resources on something that isn't important. Also, if there are important things being neglected because we've been too narrow and blinkered, that needs correcting.

So, I'm going to read, try and be clear on what the framework is, and then be clear on what the implications of that framework are. It will certainly have a bearing on what we do here in Athens, but I suspect on what churches do full stop.

The Mission of God

For part of my sabbatical I'm reading (with a view to reviewing) this excellent book:

The reason for this is that while excellent (so far at least - I'm about a quarter through) I've been wondering in recent years whether some of the issues we observe in mission work broadly, and student ministry specifically, is quite directly influenced by some of the conclusions that Chris Wright points to, implicitly if not explicitly. We'll see. It's at least for my own thinking and learning, but I'm gently hoping it might prove useful in our wider organisation.

I've decided to post the occasional bit of the review here rather than only putting it all down in one larger article. This is partly for my benefit but some people might be curious.

Athens Polytechnic

Zografou, the suburb in which we live, is hemmed in to the east and south by Athens University (where we took our Greek lessons in the early years of being here) and to the north by Athens Polytechnic. To the west lies the city centre, a 10 minute bike ride downhill.

Athens - city centre, Zografou, University and Polytechnic

It's always been a puzzle to me why we have never, ever had contact with students and events at the Polytechnic. We have a small group at the University, we've done a couple of evangelistic outreaches there, we run Coffee & Cookies there periodically. But at the Poly - nothing. 

Ever.

Until yesterday.

Panorama of the Engineering Faculty at Athens Polytechnic

At our October conference I met a 2nd year engineering student and we've kept in touch, trying to find time to meet, encouraging him to come along to stuff. Yesterday after all these months of trying we met for a 1-2-1, starting in our new series in John's gospel. Good little Bible study, relaxed connection. 

I've also been trying for a couple of weeks to make contact with a Christian professor, and he messaged before my 1-2-1 saying we could meet at 5. So, from 4-5 I sat in a classroom with the student and then he waited with me to meet the professor - who it turns out teaches him! He didn't know he was a Christian, but told me that he'd noticed there was something different about this professor - happier, kinder, better.

It was a useful conversation (to do with a big project for the autumn - you'll hear about it soon) but it explained a little why perhaps we've never previously had contacts at the Poly. He said that the atmosphere and the mood there is deeply hostile to anything not leftwing politically, and anything religious is excluded and opposed. He also said that the levels of corruption are alarming. The same people who are dishonestly connected to industry for personal gain are the ones who are shouting about speaking against corruption in government and the banks.

It is a godless, perverse place it would seem - as is the whole world, but here perhaps more acutely than in other institutions.

At any rate, it's another institution where we're trying to plant gospel seeds. Three big questions on my mind:
1. What are realistic expectations that we can have for gospel progress when I'm in contact with one student with appetite and one with very little?
2. How do we help our small numbers of believing students to have any confidence that God can save people with no gospel background?
3. With the autumn evangelistic opportunities in mind, is it right to think about trying to do something big and public in such a hostile place?

Pray for Athens Polytechnic!

Στην υγειά μας! (To our health)

For most of the last few months I've forgotten we even have a blog. I read some blogs regularly and find them useful, and have never ever thought that ours could ever be 'useful' in that sense, but as I went to bed last night I thought I'd pop this brief thought down. Our family have all been poorly (sick, for non-Brits) for much of the last three weeks, on and off. There's a virus going round - lots of people have had it - and all of us have missed days of school and work. Dawn went to Berlin feeling ropey and came back worse. Joel and Hannah are currently in bed while I've just taken the two healthiest, Esther and (miraculously) Ruth to school. I'm mostly now better.

Anyway, being laid low (in a very minor way) is a frustration. When we're ill (Dawn and I) it makes taking care of the family harder. We feel our isolation more keenly (no relatives, friends live mostly far away across the city). We don't cook as well, shopping is more subsistence level, we miss work, miss church etc etc. When the kids are ill it throws them out of routine. But it's all minor.

And I was just reminded that (a) we can never take our health for granted - it's a gift of God, and a temporary one at that (b) we know people who have genuinely awful health situations at the moment (c) I'm rather proud and self-sufficient when it comes to keeping going physically.

One obvious application from a few weeks of niggling illness is some more humility and dependence on God. Another is more empathy with people who are actually suffering. Another is daily gratitude for the good things we have when we have them. And finally, persistent prayer to ask for the things we need.

Anyone who wants to live a godly life...

I have no idea what Mr Eich (http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26868536) thinks about Jesus, but it's a vivid illustration of what John Stevens writes so clearly about in this post: http://www.john-stevens.com/2014/03/the-implications-of-gay-marriage.html

"Mozilla's new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid."

It is a free country, and people are free to use that freedom to target people with whom they disagree. That means that we must expect to be opposed if we hold to godly convictions, but it also gives us food for thought as to how we treat those with whom we disagree.

Like I said, who knows what Mr Eich thinks about Jesus but if I was the CEO of a high-profile company, I should expect to receive similar flak if my views were known.