Mission Drift

Have you noticed how words lose impact by their overuse?

Take the word journey. It has become a catch-all for personal experiences, like a “fitness journey,” or a “grief journey,” even a “skin care journey.” As a metaphor, it has become almost meaningless.

The same thing can happen to theological words. Years ago, the missiologist Stephen Neill said this: “If everything is mission, nothing is mission.” That is, if we use the term mission to describe all kinds of church activities, like fighting abortion, teaching Scripture, and alleviating poverty, we deplete the force of the word—and more seriously, we might neglect what God intended mission to be.

Neill’s observation kept echoing in the back of my mind as I read Christopher Wright’s recent book The Great Story & the Great Commission (Baker, 2023). In it, Wright wants us to see mission as something larger than gospel proclamation. To make his case, he turns to the classic text for mission, the Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-20.

What is Mission?

This isn’t the first book Wright has penned on the theme of mission. Neither is it the only book in which he argues for a broadened understanding of the church’s calling in the world. The present book is an abridgment and restatement of views that Wright has been promoting for decades.

In fact, this conversation has been ongoing for years already, prompted by people like David Bosch, Michael Goheen, Wright, and others. There have also been books written in response to their ideas, like What is the Mission of the Church? (by Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert). Wright is well aware of how his views have been critiqued, and in this book he responds to some of this critique. He even refers to how Neill’s well-known slogan has often been quoted (I’m not the first!) to warn against this expanded view of mission.

So is Wright persuasive? As a reader, I wanted him to succeed, to put forward an argument that would help the church see the urgency of her task in the present time. There can be little doubt that he loves the gospel, cares for the church, and wants to see restoration in this broken world. But I couldn’t escape the conclusion that his approach could actually weaken the cause of mission as it is presented in Scripture: the verbal proclamation of the gospel of salvation through faith in Christ.

The Big Story and the Big Job

Before getting there, I should back up and summarize Wright’s approach. In his book, he wants to help individual believers and churches integrate our life and witness around the centrality of the gospel and God’s mission. Early on, he explains his use of the term “mission.” He acknowledges that mission can have both a broader and narrower sense. The narrow (and traditional) sense is the church’s announcement of the gospel, while the broad sense refers to the church’s overarching objective—think of being on “a mission.” It’s this latter sense in which Wright uses the term.

The Bible is the declaration of the single, overall “mission” of God. His grand purpose from Genesis to Revelation is to rid his whole creation of evil and to create for himself a people who are redeemed from every tribe and nation.

It is now the church’s privilege to share in this cosmic mission of God.

In the first few chapters, Wright shows how all of Scripture tells the single story of God’s purpose in this world—this is the “Great Story” of his title. This material is delightful, as Wright argues compellingly for Scripture’s unity and demonstrates that it tells one coherent story. The story is this: God’s mission to bring healing, reconciliation, and unity to the whole creation in and through Christ.

From this “Great Story,” Wright turns to the “Great Commission.” For a long time, these words at the end of Matthew have been taken as fundamental to the church’s mission. In obedience to Christ, the church has gone out to make disciples of all nations, and she has done so by preaching and teaching his gospel. Wright says that while this is certainly an aspect of the Great Commission, Jesus was mandating us to do other things too. In fact, three interrelated dimensions of missions are implied here: building the church, serving society, and caring for creation.

Because all three—church, society, and creation—are broken and suffering because of sin, God includes all three in his redeeming mission (or purpose). Consequently, all three must be part of the comprehensive mission of God’s people.

Obedience to Christ’s three-fold mission will see his church busy with preaching the gospel, as well as promoting justice and compassion, in addition to living responsibly in God’s created world. In other words, the church’s mission is doing things like evangelism in our neighbourhoods, fighting human trafficking, and protecting endangered wetlands. Wright argues that all three dimensions of mission flow out of the Great Commission. Mission is everything that we do in Jesus’s name to address the needs of this fallen world. 

Clarifying Our Mission

So is Wright correct that each of these activities can be drawn from the Great Commission? Without being able to get into detail here, his exegesis of Matthew 28:18-20 is weak in some key respects. For instance, he draws his assertion that ecological action is part of our mission from Jesus’s words about “all authority in heaven and on earth” being given him—that’s a big stretch.

That Wright has strained the reading of this text might be confirmed by considering how his interpretation aligns with what he mentions as (his own denomination) the Anglican Communion’s “Five Marks of Mission.” Alongside proclaiming the gospel and nurturing new believers, they put loving service, fighting injustice, and safeguarding creation at the core of the church’s mission. Strikingly, these five marks correspond with Wright’s own (faulty) exegesis.

None of this is to say that Wright diminishes gospel preaching. He affirms that he is utterly committed to the importance of evangelism and church planting through bearing verbal witness to what God has done in Christ. But he insists that evangelism and church planting simply are not all that the Bible includes in the mission of the church. He prefers to speak of the centrality of the gospel rather than the primacy of evangelism. He insists that the gospel must be the nonnegotiable center of all, not in a way that makes the other activities peripheral, but in a way that holds everything together. He laments how the church has taken an overly narrow view of her role on this world: getting people into heaven.

Together with Paul, he insists that “a knowledge of the truth leads to godliness” (Titus 1:1). That is, a disciple of Christ will always be deeply engaged with the world by serving others, fighting injustice, and being a good steward of creation.

Such godliness, such “salty living,” is basic to following Christ. If only we as believers and churches together would grow more deliberate in our witness in this world! And Wright is correct that there are many worthwhile tasks in God’s kingdom, not just official preaching or personal evangelism.

Each of us should want to see the restoration of all things and the salvation of many sinners.

But how will this come about? This is the core weakness of Wright’s book. His generalized idea of the church’s mission threatens to sideline the real catalyst of life-change and world-change. Only people who have believed in Christ’s gospel by the power of his Spirit will live differently. Good things like compassion, justice, and stewardship are all fruits of a deeper root: the gospel’s transformation of the sinner’s heart.

For this reason, the church must maintain not just the “centrality of the gospel,” but the primacy of mission and evangelism. God has entrusted preaching to the church whose purpose it is to declare his praises. It remains the church’s unique mandate in this world to send out preachers and teachers of Christ’s gospel.

So Stephen Neill was right: to call everything mission reduces the urgency of mission as it has been traditionally—and Scripturally—understood. It would be the worst case of mission drift.

Let’s keep a definition of mission that is unique enough to maintain its unique message, and its unique way of being shared in this world.