For the majority of Christians, church and missions operate in separate and distinct realms. The church nurtures and instructs the ’saved’, and missionaries cross cultures and evangelize the ‘heathen’. Church is here and familiar, missions is over there and foreign. The points at which church and missions usually connect are money and recruitment. Because the work of missions requires money and fresh recruits and since the church is where both can be found, mission organizations and agencies find it necessary to relate to the church. Likewise, since people within the church have full-time, secular jobs, they ‘do missions’ by providing finances for those who do the work of ‘fulltime’ missions.
The place where missions and the church have traditionally converged is mission education. The church’s role has been to educate its adults toward their obligation to give and its children and young adults toward the possibility of joining the ranks of the missionary professionals. In short, the promotion of offerings and the recruitment of individuals is the function of mission education.
However, a revolution in the church’s understanding of missions is underway. One of the seeds of this revolution is found in a theological re-framing of missions as missio Dei. God is a missionary God, who moves toward his creation to reconcile and restore. Thus, God is the one who initiates and sustains the mission – it is his mission. He sends the Son, and the Father and Son together with the Spirit sends the church. Because missions is part of the intent and activity of the Triune God, it should not be a side issue or auxiliary to the essence and purpose of the church. To participate in God is to be party to his mission. It is not that the church has missions as one of its activities; rather God has a church for his mission.
This new understanding of the church and mission calls for a similar revolution in mission education. If missions is central to the church’s purpose, then mission education must be about more than raising money for the mission of denominational or para-church organizations and their projects, and it must pertain to a wider audience than just potential mission personnel. Because mission is a whole church affair, mission education must be a critical component in the nurture, formation and life of the people God.
In order for the church to be faithful to the new understanding of missions, mission education must be renovated in several ways. Mission education must be …
Formative. Rather than just educating people in what they need to do, they must also be formed into who they are to be. Rather than training people for a missionary vocation or mission activity, they should be equipped with missionary character and lifestyle. Instead of just idealizing the missionary vocation or highlighting human need in far-away places, mission education must address one’s love of God and love of neighbor, the way one relates to family, friends, and enemies, truth-telling, consumerism – the habits of hands and heart.
Imaginative. Rather than teaching that the mission of God finds expression in only certain activities and a specific vocation, mission education should open a wide array of avenues in which God is at work. The emphasis should be on assisting people, especially young people, to think creatively about how their skills, interests, work and leisure activities are part of the mission of God – not in how these are means to an end, but how they are mission.
Integrative. Rather than isolating mission education into a corner of church life or to specific hours of the church week, it must be integrated into the whole. Thus, every aspect of church life and every dimension of the church calendar must be seen as missional. Discipleship, worship, Sunday School, Awanas, prayer meeting, choir – everything – must be viewed through a missional lens. We must ask questions like – ‘If the church exists for the mission of God, then how do we prepare, equip, position ourselves for God’s mission through our worship?’ Worship does not have to be overtly missionary, as much as it needs to be intrinsically missional. Worship should lead people to see God as the Creator of all peoples, as the one worthy of praise by the whole of creation. Worship must be seen as more than a private affair between me and God but a public event before the world. Similar questions must be asked about Sunday School, children programs, choir, etc.
Collaborative. Rather than the professional missionaries or ‘mission-minded’ people in the church being viewed as the sole mission educators, people across the spectrum of church life must see themselves as contributing to the education / formation of children, youth and adults for the mission of God. If mission education is the formation of the person and not just specialized training for the professional, then the skills, experiences, and gifts of the whole body must be employed. Collaboration around mission takes place when the mission of God is not the specialty of a few but the concern of the whole.
Prescriptive. Rather than just providing facts about mission activities elsewhere and images of exotic and far-away places and people, mission education must challenge people to faithfully participate in God’s mission in their homes, workplace, and relationships. Mission education must lead to obeying what we learn of God and his mission rather than just being amused and amazed by mission stories and missionary lives far away.
Expansive. Rather than leaving us in places of comfort and convenience, mission education should pull us toward the ends of the earth (literally), challenge us to live beyond our human capacities, and to ask ‘what could God do’! Mission education should lead to see God’s universal concern for all the peoples of the earth and humble us that he invites us to participate with him in his mission.
Transformative. Rather than the goal being missions as a cognitive understanding gained via classroom instruction (teacher, students, books), the goal should be life transformation that leads to missional lifestyle. Life transformation occurs for most people through involvement that is whole life – hands, feet, eyes, ears, nose, and mind. Therefore, a two-week trip to Brazil can be part of missional formation leading to life transformation. People see, smell, hear, touch, feel, and embrace what God is doing and thereby their view of God and the world is transformed.
Mission education has a place in the local church if it is retooled to be formative, imaginative, integrative, collaborative, prescriptive, expansive and transformative. This does not necessarily mean that existing programs or structures have to be discarded. Nor is it a matter of mission education becoming more relevant, or having better or more attractive literature. Mission education will serve its purpose if sharply focused on forming the whole church for its chief purpose – the mission of God.