In his outstanding work, The Mission of God’s People: A Bibical Theology of the Church’s Mission, Christopher Wright shatters modern conceptions of mission and builds in its place a rich biblical theology of missiology. He turns the attention from mission narrowly defined to mission broadly considered. And he does this with tremendous genius and biblical rationale as he navigates the beauty of the Old Covenant scriptures.
According to Wright, echoing closely the more well-known N.T. Wright, “Not everything is cross-cultural evangelistic mission, but everything a Christian and a Christian church is, says and does should be missional in its conscious participation in the mission of God in God’s world.”
Wright sees the whole world as the arena of our mission and calls the Christian church to engage this phenomenal story of creation, fall, redemption in history, and new creation.a As a child of evangelicalism, Wright has seen the concept of mission as a special calling to serve in a far country as the only definition of mission. Instead he calls Christians everywhere to see their calling amidst ignorance and outright rejection of Jesus as their mission field.
There is no intention here of trivializing foreign mission. Its necessity and its supreme importance need to be stressed continually, but the assertion that unless you are engaged in such a task you are not engaging in mission is the mentality Wright so carefully seeks to correct.
- Four-fold pattern developed by Wright. Unique to this is the more triumphal addition of the words “in history.” (back)
