"Undefining" God's Mission - The Emerging Church "On a Mission from God"

The following essay is chapter two from Bob DeWaay's book The Emergent Church – Undefining Christianity. We publish it here because the terminology and concept of missional has spread throughout evangelicalism. Christians need to be warned that being "missional" has nothing to do with the fulfillment of the Great Commission.

Almost universally, people involved with the Emergent "conversation" espouse one theme: they consider themselves to be missional. Being "missional" is not what traditional Christians have known as "missions." We have believed that the Christian mission was to send people with the message of the gospel to places where the gospel had not been heard—to preach it and establish churches. As Christianity became established in various cultures, other Christian workers usually came to establish schools, hospitals, and perform other practical expressions of Christian love and mercy. This is not what Emergent thinkers have in mind when they describe themselves as "missional."

For one thing, the description above started with the idea of the gospel as defined in the Bible. The Emergent mission does not begin with any theological idea. It is not gleaned from Biblical texts such as this one: "and that repentance for forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in His name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem" (Luke 24:47). In fact the Emergent mission does not even start from a set of theological beliefs. I say this because their use of "missional" describes the idea that any works that make the world a better place bring us toward the ideal future.

As we saw in the previous chapter, the Hegelian synthesis is ever lurking in the background of Emergent thinking; and this is the case with the idea of "missional." For example, Brian McLaren writes concerning his idea of "missional:" "The term, as I understand it, attempts to find a generous third way beyond the conservative and liberal versions of Christianity so dominant in the Western world."1 McLaren's idea is that one does not begin with a set of theological beliefs that determine one's mission, but rather begins with a mission and some sort of theology emerges in the process: "Theology is the church on a mission reflecting on its message, its identity, its meaning."2 So in his thinking we can know our mission before we know theological truth.

When I first read that I thought it irrational on the grounds that one would need some theological belief in order to justify going on any mission in God's name. Our a priori beliefs tell us what an appropriate mission would be. That was before I discovered their eschatological beliefs. Now I know why they are missional. They believe God to be bringing everything along toward an ideal future without judgment. Therefore any practice deemed to make the world better is a suitable mission. In their view the only thing that doesn't make sense is preaching repentance for the forgiveness of sins so people can avoid a literal, future judgment (because they do not believe in future judgment). Ironically, the one approach to missions that Emergent leaders reject routinely is the one based on Jesus' own words to His church.

Not surprisingly, Jürgen Moltmann, 40 years ago, proposed that in light of his eschatology, what we have now is a mission—the knowledge of truth is something that lies in the future.3 For example, Motlmann writes, "The horizon within which the resurrection of Christ becomes knowable as ‘resurrection', is the horizon of promise and mission, beckoning us on to his future and the future of his lordship."4 Moltmann claims that we cannot even know what "resurrection" means or even what the resurrection of Christ means until the future:




‘Raising of the dead' is an expression which looks expectantly towards the future proof of God's creative power over the non-existent. What ‘resurrection of the dead' really is, and what ‘actually happened' in the raising of Jesus, is thus a thing which not even the New Testament Easter narratives profess to know. From the two mutually radically contradictory experiences of the cross and the appearances of Jesus, they argue to the event in between as an eschatological event for which the verifying analogy is as yet only in prospect and is still to come.5



So in this thinking we really do not know what the cross or the resurrection of Christ mean since they are deemed "contradictory," but we will find out in the future. Yet we continue to have a mission. The only reason by which a Christian mission is deemed valid is a dialectic process that leads somewhere universally good. Moltmann states, "Cross and resurrection are then not merely modi in the person of Christ. Rather, their dialectic is an open dialectic, which will find its resolving synthesis only in the eschaton of all things.6

Knowing that Moltmann's theology (and that of others similar to his) lies at the heart of the many Emergent leaders' thinking, let us think again about McLaren's previously cited statement: "Theology is the church on a mission reflecting on its message, its identity, its meaning." The reason he thinks we do not know these things now, is that according to the Emergent eschatology they are by nature unknowable (now, that is). So the only recourse is to discover one's mission in the world through observation, with the belief that the many contradictions that one encounters are being synthesized into a new, better reality that lies in the future. This is very much what Moltmann himself stated: "The Christian consciousness of history is not a consciousness in the knowledge of a divine commission, and is therefore a consciousness of the contradiction inherent in this unredeemed world, and the sign of the cross under which the Christian mission and the Christian hope stand."7 In other words we have no knowledge of a divine commission, and, as I cited him earlier, we have no knowledge of what the cross and resurrection mean, either (at least not now). So we have an undefined mission that must be discovered.

McLaren and others are quite sure of the one thing the mission is not: the salvation of souls so that people go to heaven when they die. He and other Emergent writers regularly mock that idea as a consumer good being sold to the unsuspecting for the benefit of badly motivated religious leaders. For example, McLaren writes, "Is it any surprise that it's stinking hard to convince churches that they have a mission to the world when most Christians equate ‘personal salvation' of individual ‘souls' with the ultimate aim of Jesus? Is it any wonder that people feel like victims of a bait and switch when they're lured with personal salvation and then hooked with church commitment and world mission?"8 The only reason McLaren thinks ideas such as salvation from God's future judgment are unworthy of defining the church's mission is because he does not believe in a literal future judgment. And as we saw in the previous chapter he and his co-authors of another book think we are headed toward a universal paradise. Rescuing perishing souls when no one's soul is actually going to perish is certainly a fool's mission—unless, of course, the Bible is true, and there is a literal hell and many people will end up there!


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