How the Emerging Missional Consensus Gets it Wrong

In Wright On Mission I wrote about the emerging consensus on the nature of the church’s mission in the world. That consensus has been building for over a century and it’s wrong. Like a plastic pot plant, it won’t grow and it won’t multiply. We’ve seen it all before.

The nineteenth century gave birth to a student missionary movement on both sides of the Atlantic that resulted in thousands taking the gospel to the ends of the earth. Their motto was, “The evangelisation of the world in this generation.”

These pioneers paved the way for Christianity to become a truly world faith in the twentieth century.

To take stock of the advances and plan the way forward, a World Missionary Conference was held in Edinburgh In 1910. This conference became a series of conferences which gave birth to the World Council of Churches. A student missionary movement morphed into an ecclesiastical bureauracy.

At the same time liberal Protestantism was on the rise in the West seeking to make the Christian faith relevant to modern man. Human reason and experience was elevated above the Scriptures so that every new generation and every individual could interpret the Christian faith for themselves. God was on a mission to transform the world through political and social movements. Mission became the pursuit of heaven on earth rather than Jesus’ command to make disciples of the nations.

Theological liberalism reached its zenith in the 1970s with the World Council of Church’s funding of revolutionary movements in Southern Africa. It has been in free-fall ever since.

While all this was going on there was a monumental shift in world Christianity from the Western, prosperous global North to the developing Global South. Christianity was no longer a dominant European and North American religion, it was increasingly the faith of Africans, Asians and Latin Americans.

When the world’s poor turned to Christianity the form they embraced had two key foundations: Biblical orthodoxy and a supernatural worldview. Indigenous Pentecostal, charismatic and evangelical movements where captured the hearts and minds of ordinary people in developing nations.

Despite the failure of liberal Protestantism, a new generation of Western evangelicals are drifting down the same path convinced that the church’s mission is to transform this world now. It appears this drift is cyclical.

The drift comes in both progressive and conservative varieties. Yesterday’s liberals have become today’s green-left progressives. There’s even a charismatic version in which the church’s mission is to rule in each of the seven mountains of social influence— family, religion, commerce, politics, education, media and the arts.

The progressive and conservative versions of transformational mission are mirror-images of one another. They have the same essential flaw—that our mission must prioritise the transformation of this world according to their understanding of the Kingdom of God.

Water that idea all you like, but like a plastic plant, it won’t grow and it certainly can’t reproduce.

*Adapted from The Rise and Fall of Movements: A Roadmap for Leaders.