Missional Already in Our Work
A growing number of pastors are instilling into their congregations a robust theology of vocation, equipping and empowering church congregants to live missionally within the contexts which God has placed them. As one of my doctoral mentors, Steven Garber, famously says,
“Vocation is integral, not incidental, to the missio Dei.”
This vocation-as-mission movement intentionally equips God’s people, in the words of John Yates,
“to get out into the difficult and dark places of the community and the city, and simply do the best they can to love their neighbors and work for the common good… to dignify all Christian calling to serve God in all sorts of ways.” (“Is Our View of Ministry Too Narrow? Is It Too Church-Focused?” - presented at the Commencement, Covenant Theological Seminary, May 16, 2008)
The great missiologist Lesslie Newbigin stated,
“God’s saving power known and experienced in the life of a redeemed community has to issue in all kinds of witness and service to the world… (The) enormous preponderance of the Church’s witness is the witness of the thousands of its members who work in field, home, office, mill, or law court.”
On Mission Right Where They Are
We have seen a sea change in how church leaders see vocation as mission. Some have called it Faith-and-Work; some have called it whole-life discipleship. And that is what it is — discipleship for every aspect of life must include all the work, all the tasks, that we do on a daily basis. Discipleship should not be limited to Bible study, church attendance, etc.
When Christians fully engage in their callings, they are already being missional. Darrell Cosden writes,
“Believers desperately need to grasp why and how mission is what they, the whole people of God, are engaged in already as they work. More specifically, they need to grasp why and how the work itself that we do is missionary activity rather than just an occasion for it…It is largely (though not exclusively) through our work that we reflect God’s image and co-operate with him in bringing people and the whole of creation to humanity’s and nature’s ultimate maturity and future.” (The Heavenly Good of Earthly Work pp129–130)
In order for churches to be missional, Amy Sherman contends that Christians must be equipped in what she calls “vocational stewardship.”
“By vocational stewardship, I mean the intentional and strategic deployment of our vocational power—knowledge, platform, networks, position, influence, skills, and reputation—to advance foretastes of God’s kingdom. For missional congregations that desire to rejoice their cities, vocational stewardship is an essential strategy.” (Amy L. Sherman, Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good, p20.
Many Pastors Still Don’t Get It
But there is a major problem. A majority of those who attend North American evangelical churches do not understand such a high view of vocation.
David Miller, Director of the Faith and Work Initiative at Princeton, puts into words what our congregants are experiencing:
“Many people report feeling that they live increasingly bifurcated lives, where faith and work seldom connect. Many who are Christians complain of a ‘Sunday-Monday gap’ where their Sunday worship hour bears little or no relevance to the issues they face in their Monday workplace hours.” (God at Work: The History and Promise of the Faith at Work Movement, p10.
The problem, it seems, does not lie just with those in the pews but with those in the pulpit.
Theologian Miroslav Volf, in making the case that the church needs to transition toward developing and applying a robust theology of work, states,
“Amazingly little theological reflection has taken place in the past about an activity which takes up so much or our time.” (Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work, p69.
Pastor Tom Nelson concurs. In his book that every pastor should read, he writes,
“For way too long, I did not see work as an essential component of a broader, robust theology of calling. I failed to grasp that a primary stewardship of my pastoral work was to assist and equip others to better connect the professions of their Sunday faith with the practices of their Monday work.” (Work Matters: Connecting Sunday Worship to Monday Work p15.
So what does it actually mean to be “missional?”
In order to determine that, we must first understand the mission that God has for his people.
It will not do to just spout the latest faddish missional rhetoric. We’ve got to get to the Bible. We’ve got to understand what our mission really is. I will be exploring this in over the next month here at my substack.
It will culminate in a podcast episode with Christopher J.H. Wright, author of three books that I’ve found so insightful and have influenced me greatly: The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative (IVP Academic), The Mission of God's People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission (Zondervan Academic), and The Great Story and the Great Commission: Participating in the Biblical Drama of Mission (Baker Academic).
