Title: Repentance as a Paradigm for Christian Mission
Abstract: It has become something of a theological axiom to say that the church's identity is intrinsically missional. The church is the missional church, with its very nature rooted in the identity of the triune God as the sending God. (1) Theologically speaking, according to Jurgen Moltmann, mission is the identity-conferring essence of the church: does not come from the church; it is from mission and in the light of mission that the church has to be understood. (2) Andrew Walls has intensified this theological point with the almost pragmatic observation that cross-cultural mission has historically served as the life-blood of the church and its well-being--breathing fresh cultural life, thought-forms, and practices into the church at key junctures in its history) In short, the keynote of the church's existence, activity, and flourishing in the world is its ecclesial mission by which it participates in the missio Dei. It is thus unsurprising that significant attention has been given in recent ecumenical work to the mission of the church. The recent World Council of Churches' Faith and Order study document, The Nature and Mission of the Church, puts it as follows: thus belongs to the very being of the Church. This is a central implication of affirming the apostolicity of the Church, which is inseparable from the other three attributes of the Church--unity, holiness and catholicity. (4) More specifically, the ecumenical issue is a matter of discovering a more and more genuine convergence between the two crucial Nicene marks of apostolicity and unity. The common task of mission is seen as an occasion for the divided church to enter into a shared reflection that may produce deeper and more tangible unity. For example, the 2008-11 quadrennium of the Faith and Order Commission of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. includes a study group on the issue of Unity in Mission, of which I am a member. (5) As the group explores how different Christian traditions, communions, and denominations understand mission in distinctive ways, the expectation is that prospects for more concrete unity will begin to appear. Common goals and shared practices, as well as promising avenues for cooperation and collaboration, will emerge through ecumenical consideration of the church's identity in mission. At the same time, ecumenical discussion of the contours of mission also casts common challenges into starker relief. One of these concerns the fact that the church carries out its mission of proclamation, not in an idyllic haven of harmony and bliss, but in the real world--a world filled with innumerable forms of violence and conflict. (6) Whether at the broad sociopolitical level of political turmoil or cultural conflict, or the interpersonal level of domestic violence or racial prejudice, the world in which and to which the church is sent is a world laboring under great pain and discord. In recognition of this fact, it has become increasingly common for theologians of mission, as well as the broader ecumenical community, to advocate for reconciliation as an appropriate paradigm and goal for Christian mission in and to a fractured world. (7) This was a recurrent theme, for example, in the literature connected to the W.C.C.'s 2005 Athens mission conference. With reconciliation, we are offered a way of thinking about mission that captures the transformative dynamic of the gospel that is shared by the church universal, while bringing it to bear on the real needs of the world. But, the suitability of the reconciliation paradigm comes under question when one recognizes that the church is not only a neutral, bystanding, grace-offering party in the midst of the problems of the world. The actual and concrete situation of the churches, both historically and in the contemporary setting, also includes misdeeds and conflicts in which the church itself is in some way implicated or complicit. …
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-03-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 15
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