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What is mission?
It's a question that has produced endless definitions, much research and many books. Here Dr Cathy Ross gets to the heart of what mission is all about.
Over the centuries mission has been understood in a variety of ways:
- individual – saving people from eternal damnation
- cultural – making other people like us
- ecclesiastical – bringing people into the church
However, more recently there has been an awareness that mission is God’s mission (often called by the Latin translation of this: missio Dei). Mission is derived from the very nature of God.
Is mission God’s job or ours?
If we see mission as an attribute of God’s character rather than an activity of the church, it changes our view of the church. The missionary initiative comes from God alone. Mission is a movement from God to the world and there is church as a result of mission. Mission does not come from the church – the church is a partner with God in God’s mission.
In fact, there is a growing awareness that God’s mission is more than just the activities of the church. God is active everywhere in the world and God calls us to be partners in that activity.
How does it work in practice?
CMS holds to the five marks of mission, as expressed by the Anglican Communion. They are a useful framework for understanding our engagement in mission. These five marks are:
- proclamation of the good news
- teaching and nurturing of new believers
- responding to human need by loving service
- seeking to transform unjust structures in society
- caring for creation
This does not cover everything (worship, for example) but gives helpful parameters for our daily engagement in mission in God’s world. Perhaps the more important focus is to have an understanding of the nature or character of mission rather than spell out particular methods or models. We are bound to respond in a variety of ways depending on our context.
The essence of mission
Essentially, mission is about relationships:
- our primary relationship with God
- our relationship with our neighbour
We partner with God, the source of all love, to bring people into relationship with God, through Christ. Or as the theologian David Bosch puts it, mission is “the good news of God’s love incarnated in the witness of a community, for the sake of the world.”*
Dr Cathy Ross is manager of the Crowther Centre for Mission Education at CMS in Oxford and JV Taylor Fellow in Missiology at Regent's Park College and Wycliffe Hall, Oxford.
*D Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, (Maryknoll:Orbis, 1992), p519.
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