Let’s (re)integrate the Mission of the Church!
God's mission: Not only to reconcile human beings to God, but to also reconcile all things back to God, bringing fullness to life.
The evangelical church, due to our sacred/secular false dualism, has made the mission of God just about getting people out of this lowly life on earth and into a future heaven of eternal bliss.
This is a dis-integrated gospel. It is based on truncated presumptions about what Jesus Christ’s blood on the cross accomplished… that all it was about was the forgiveness of sins through the propitiation of God’s wrath. While this is certainly biblical, it is a view that gives Paul’s Letter to the Romans exclusive position of defining what the cross is about.
But what if we look one of Paul’s other letters, the Letter to the Colossians, and give it just as much weight in determining the meaning of the blood of Christ, shed on the cross?
The Cross and All Things
Look at how Paul opens Colossians. It is an amazing and poetic proclamation of the supremacy of Christ, and how all things were created by Him, through Him, and for Him, and He sustains all things. What is included in “all things?” Everything. What is excluded from “all things?” Nothing.
15 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. 19 For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.
Christ’s mission was cosmic in scope. It includes the salvation of individual humans, but it doesn’t end there. It provides the place and purpose for humans to flourish.
Verses 19 and 20 need to be repeated:
19 For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.
Integral Mission
Rene Padilla has coined the term “Integral Mission.” In an influential paper presented at the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization in Pattaya, Thailand in 2004, Padilla said,
“The reduction of the Christian mission to the oral communication of a message of otherworldly salvation grows out of a misunderstanding of God’s purpose and of the nature of human beings.
It is assumed that God wants to ‘save souls’ rather than ‘to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven’ (Colossians 1:20) and that the human being only needs to be reconciled to God rather than to experience fullness of life. In the final analysis, this is a reduction related to ideas taken from Greek philosophy, not from scripture.
Mission is faithful to scripture only to the extent to which it is holistic. In other words, it is faithful when it crosses frontiers (not just geographic but also cultural, racial, economic, social, political, etc.) with the intention of transforming human life in all its dimensions, according to God’s purpose and of enabling human beings to enjoy the abundant life that God wants to give to them and that Jesus Christ came to share with them. The mission of the church is multifaceted because it depends on the mission of God, which includes the whole of creation and the totality of human life.”
4 Questions that Rene Padilla raises for us:
What would it look like if local church ministries, campus ministries, overseas missions, etc. ceased to “reduce the Christian mission to the oral communication of a message of otherworldly salvation?”
How can we move away from Greek philosophical categories of “Sacred vs Secular” and see that all of life is important?
What would Christian mission look like if it became more intentional in “transforming human life in all its dimensions, according to God’s purpose and of enabling human beings to enjoy the abundant life that God wants to give to them and that Jesus Christ came to share with them?”
What will it take for us to (re)integrate the mission of the church?
For those who take the Bible literally, do we really believe what Jesus said his mission was?
“I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).
This is the Hebrew concept of shalom. God’s intention in the mission of his Son is to bring flourishing to everyone, to bring redemption into this world, to reconcile all things back to God through the atoning death of Jesus on the cross.