The good shepherd and incarnational leadership

When speaking of himself as "the good shepherd" (John 10:1-10), Jesus may very well have had in mind a contrast between himself and "the shepherds of Israel" against whom Ezekiel prophesied (Ezekiel 34:1-6). These were worthless shepherds who fed themselves instead of the sheep. They neglected their duties to strengthen the weak, heal the sick, bind up the injured, bring back the strays, and seek out the lost. They ruled by lording it over the sheep forcefully and harshly, scattering them instead of gathering them.

Jesus, the good shepherd, came to do all those things "the shepherds of Israel" had neglected. He strengthened the weak, healed the sick, bound up the injured, brought back the strays, and sought out the lost in order to save them. He laid aside his authority and took the form of a servant, leading by example, incarnating the love of God for the last, the least, and the lost.

A church whose shepherd is in it for himself, and not for the sheep, will have terrible difficulty fulfilling its mission. The faithful shepherd cannot be authoritarian. He will lead incarnationally, identifying with the sheep, being among them as one who serves. He will look to Jesus as the perfect shepherd and seek to emulate him, however imperfectly.

Incarnational leadership is essential to empowering the church as a community in mission, incarnating the Gospel as it seeks to transform its surrounding community and culture.

Sheer necessity cries out for Him (E. Stanley Jones)

A very timely quote from E. Stanley Jones's classic devotional, In Christ (1961).

I stood in the Mosque of Saint Sophia in Constantinople, formerly a Christian cathedral. All the Christian symbols had been wiped out  and replaced by verses from the Koran. As I stood at the back and looked at the dome over what had been the Christian altar, I held my breath. There was the figure of the ascending Christ plainly seen coming back through the daubs of the centuries. They couldn't wipe Him out. That is true everyhwere. Sheer necessity cries out for Him.

Greater Works Than These

The New Testament closes on a note of anticipation. Jesus proclaims, “Surely I am coming soon.” The church responds, “Amen. Come Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22:20). There is a very good reason why the end of the biblical narrative leaves us with this sense of anticipation. The Old Testament was not complete until it was made incarnate in Jesus Christ. Likewise, the New Testament is not complete until it is made incarnate in the same Jesus Christ through the work of the church, which has been given the same Holy Spirit which empowered Christ during his earthly ministry. The mission of the church is to continue the work of the Incarnation until the kingdom of God is fully consummated. This is an urgent, and profoundly eschatological, task. If the New Testament ended on a note of consummation, then the church would have no sense of urgency but would, instead, basically become an apologist for the present age. Unfortunately, much of the church seems to have become precisely that.

But there is a much more pervasive threat to this sense of urgency and it is, in many ways, connected with the misunderstanding of biblical apocalyptic language. The result is a one-dimensional understanding of the second coming and, inevitably, the pessimistic, fatalistic, defeatist attitude so prevalent in our dispensationalist-saturated evangelical pop culture. “We can only do so much until Jesus comes,” is an all-too-common attitude.

Jesus said, "Truly, truly I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do because I am going to the Father" (John 14:12). If the church has been empowered by the Holy Spirit to do “greater works” because Jesus has returned to the Father, where did we come up with the idea that “we can only do so much until Jesus comes?” It is by no means far-fetched to suggest that many who have adopted such an attitude are victims of a clever and nefarious deception.

Even the fact that Jesus has returned to the Father does not mean he has left us to fend for ourselves. He promised, “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20b) and “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you” (John 14:18).

Leo the Great, in a discourse on Christ’s ascension, observed:

Even the blessed apostles, though they had been strengthened by so many miracles and instructed by so much teaching, took fright at the cruel suffering of the Lord's passion and could not accept his resurrection without hesitation. Yet they made such progress through his ascension that they now found joy in what had terrified them before. They were able to fix their minds on Christ's divinity as he sat at the right hand of the Father, since what was presented to their bodily eyes no longer hindered them from turning all their attention to the realization that he had not left his Father when he came down to earth, nor had he abandoned his disciples when he ascended into heaven.

So, if the church is empowered by the Holy Spirit to do “greater works” in continuing the Incarnation than even Christ did during his earthly ministry, and Christ himself, while having ascended to the right hand of the Father, is nevertheless still among us, how are we to appropriate a holistic understanding of the Church's eschatological hope? N.T. Wright, in his book The Millennium Myth (Westminster/John Knox Press, 1999, pp. 40-41), offers a well thought-out answer.

The very first Christian writer known to us, the apostle Paul, wrestled with this question and came up with a clear solution. The hope arrives in two stages. Jesus' resurrection was the prototype, the beginning and the model of the new world that is yet to be. His coming out of the tomb into a new life was the personal, close-up equivalent of the Israelites emerging from their slavery in Egypt. The hope is that God will eventually do for the whole creation what he did for Jesus; God is at work in the present, by the Spirit of Jesus, to prepare the world for that great remaking, that great unveiling (that great apocalypse, in fact) of the future plan.

But that future, when it arrives, will not mean the abandonment of the present world, but rather its fulfillment. The whole creation, says Paul, will be liberated from its present enslavement to the forces of decay and death. You don't liberate something by destroying it. All the beauty, all the goodness, all the pulsating life of the present creation, is to be enhanced, lifted to a new level, in the world that is to be. There is no room here for the dualism that goes with so much apocalypticism. Rather there is a strong incentive to work, in the present, to anticipate the new world in every possible way. Those who are grasped by the vision of God's new world unveiled in Jesus' resurrection are already sharing in that newness, and are called to produce, in the present time, more and more signposts to point to this eventual and glorious future. (Emphasis added.)

The centerpiece of God's redemptive plan is, of course, Jesus himself. Thus, the ongoing fulfillment of God's plan is seen not in “events” such as the conflict between Arabs and Israelis in the Middle East, but in our growing relationship with Christ. Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for, behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you” (Luke 17:20-21).

The kingdom of God begins when Christ is enthroned as Lord of our lives, his Holy Spirit transforming our whole being into his image and likeness. The more we outwardly manifest this inward reality through “lives of holiness and godliness” (2 Peter 3:11), making our lives those “signposts” of God's glorious future, the more we begin to see the kingdom breaking forth into our midst, and the closer we come to its full consummation.

So, as we, the church, continue the redemptive work which Christ began, knowing that Christ has promised always to be with us and has given us his Holy Spirit to empower us for witness and ministry, we pray, “Come, Lord Jesus!” It is a prayer for vindication; for redemption; for sanctification. It is a prayer for full, complete and eternal salvation on the personal, corporate and cosmic levels.

Come, Lord Jesus and make me complete.

Come, Lord Jesus and make your Church complete.

Come, Lord Jesus and make your whole creation complete.

“Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!”

Developing a Missional Hermeneutic

The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative by Christopher J.H. Wright (IVP Academic) is a long read (535 pages). I have barely finished the first 100 pages, but his initial premise is quite intriguing. Wright argues for a missional hermeneutic, that is, a method of reading the Bible as the product of mission, as having emerged within the context of mission, and (as its title suggests) as the grand narrative of the mission of God. More important than the biblical basis for mission (something seminaries have embedded in the minds of students for over a century) is the missional basis for the Bible.

"A missional hermeneutic of the Bible," says Wright, "begins with the Bible's very existence. For those who affirm some relationship (however articulated) between these texts and the self-revelation of our Creator God, the whole canon of Scripture is a missional phenomenon in the sense that it witnesses to the self-giving movement of this God toward his creation and us, human beings in God's own image, but wayward and wanton. The writings that now comprise our Bible are themselves the product of and witness to the ultimate mission of God" (p. 48).

Quite often, the biblical "text in itself is a product of mission in action." Wright sees this coming through clearly in the writings of Paul and Luke (p. 49).

This is easily demonstrated in the case of the New Testament. Most of Paul's letters were written in the heat of his missionary efforts: wrestling with the theological basis of the inclusion of the Gentiles, affirming the need for Jew and Gentile to accept one another in Christ and in the church, tackling the baffling range of new problems that assailed young churches as the gospel took root in the world of Greek polytheism, confronting incipient heresies with clear affirmations of the supremacy and sufficiency of Jesus Christ, and so on.

And why were the Gospels so called? Because they were written to explain the significance of the evangel--the good news about Jesus of Nazareth, especially his death and resurrection. Confidence in these things was essential to the missionary task of the expanding church. And the person to whom we owe the largest quantity of the New Testament, Luke, shapes his two-volume work in such a way that the missionary mandate to the disciples to be Christ's witnesses to the nations comes as the climax to volume one and the introduction to volume two.

But the Old Testament, also, should be seen as the product of mission, as "many of these texts emerged out of the engagement of Israel the surrounding world, in the light of the God they knew in their history and in covenental relationship. People produced texts in relation to what they believed God had done, was doing, or would do in their world" (p. 50)

Read in such a way, as the grand narrative of the mission of God, Scripture becomes not merely a mandate for mission, but a witness to mission. Mission is thus understood not as a human, but as a divine, initiative. "In short," says Wright, "a missional hermeneutic proceeds from the assumption that the whole Bible renders to us the story of God's mission through God's people in their engagement with God's world for the sake of the whole of God's creation" (p. 51).

What I find interesting about this definition of a missional hermeneutic is how closely it resonates with M. Robert Mulholland's definition of spiritual formation: the process of being conformed to the image of Christ for the sake of others. As a means of spiritual formation, the Bible is not only inspired of God, but also inspiring to the people of God, equipping and empowering them for participation in the mission of God for the redemption of the whole creation.

God's Mission and the New Creation

Here is another observation from Emmanuel Katongole which gets to the heart of what "mission" is really about.

Being an immigrant can be a blessing. God's mission, as I read it in 2 Corinthians 5:17, is new creation. God is reconciling the world to himself. And there is a sense of journey that is connected with that. When, later on, Paul says that "we are ambassadors of God's reconciliation, God is appealing through us," he is inviting us into a journey toward a new kind of community. People looking at Christians should be confused. Who are these people? Are they black? Are they white? Are they Americans? Are they Ugandans? In Revelation, John sees people drawn from all languages and tribes and nations: an unprecedented congregation. Living on three continents has deepened my understanding of the church as such a congregation; at the same time, it has heightened my sense of Christian life as a journey and of what it means to live as a pilgrim, a resident alien.

In evangelical churches, mission has long been understood as somewhat synonymous with evangelism. Evangelism, in those same circles, has long been understood in terms of "getting people saved," often in a context wholly isolated from a believing community. The era of mass evangelism seems to be waning in America, although there are signs that it is still alive and well in the two thirds world. But the question of whether it is alive or dying is secondary to the question of its effectiveness in fulfilling the true mission of the church. If God's mission, as Fr. Katongole says, "is new creation," then how effective is mass evangelism, as currently practiced, in carrying out that mission?

One could make the case that Pentecost was the first example of "mass evangelism." But the three thousand new disciples added that day "devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers" (Acts 2.42). In other words, they were incorporated into the community of believers and the practices which defined that community. They were not simply led in "the sinner's prayer" and then told they could go home, confident that if they died that night, they'd go to heaven. Granted, that is something of a caricature of what happens at present-day "mass evangelism" events. But it does reflect a major shortcoming of this approach to evangelism.

Modern evangelicalism has unquestioningly accepted an Enlightenment presupposition which is diametrically opposed to orthodox Christian faith, namely, belief in the autonomous individual. Salvation, under this paradigm, is a strictly individual choice with responsibility for following up on the experience falling entirely to the person having made such a choice. Converts at mass evangelism events are encouraged to connect with a local congregation, but there is no guarantee that they will. Even if they do, there is the likelihood that the "church of their choice" will be one in which the expectations for spiritual growth are minimal.

The early church was no stranger to "mass evangelism." Indeed, from Pentecost onward, the Gospel was spread from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth by means of proclamation to large numbers of people. The one-on-one evangelism episode involving Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8.26-40) seems to be the exception, rather than the rule. But this was "mass evangelism" of another kind entirely than what passes for "evangelism," mass or otherwise, in the contemporary American church. Salvation was a corporate or communal, as opposed to merely individual or private, experience. Entire households, where deep-rooted relationships already existed, heard and received the Gospel. Entire towns, such as Samaria, were said to have "received the word of God" (Acts 8.14). When one individual convert, such as Simon the magician, tried to take matters into his own hands, he was soundly rebuked by the apostles (Acts 8.20).

Clearly, "mass evangelism" has its place. But, within the wider context of the mission of God (Missio Dei), it can only be effective so long as it remains true to its biblical foundations. The new creation has nothing to do with turning up a bunch of autonomous individuals whose "salvation" is all about getting themselves into heaven. The new creation is the final glorious work of God bringing restoration to the whole of the created order. This work begins with Christ, continues through the church, and climaxes with the great heavenly banquet, consummating the union of Christ and his Bride in the presence of God the Father forever and ever.