What Is “Missio Dei” and Does It Matter?

What is God doing in creation? What is He aiming to achieve? The answer shapes how we think about what the world needs, what the church’s purpose is, and what it means for Christians to live on mission. The answer also has to account for where we find ourselves in history, within the pattern of creation, fall, and redemption. It brings us to consider our goals as the church living this side of Christ’s return.

The concept of missio Dei – God’s mission – addresses these very issues. The question, properly speaking, focuses on what God is doing and what His purposes are. So, it also has great bearing on what His church is supposed to be doing. Missio Dei invites the question, “How does God’s mission relate to and shape the church’s mission?”

The stakes in the question concern whether the church pursues the right goals or not. We are the institution that Christ Himself left on earth to carry out His business. The traveler who leaves his home in the care of a housesitter expects it to be in good order when he returns. You would not be pleased to return to find all your furniture rearranged. We are left as stewards in Christ’s house as He is building it on earth. We cannot afford to chase the wrong objectives.

The History of Missio Dei

The Latin term missio has a basic meaning of “sending,” which means our concept is about who or what God is sending. In early Christian theology, the concept of divine missions related most prominently to how the Father sent the Son into the world as Savior (John 6:29, 38–39; Galatians 4:4–5; 1 John 4:9–14), and how the Father and Son have sent the Spirit to apply that salvation won by the Son (John 14:26; 15:26; 16:7; Galatians 4:6). This early emphasis focused on God’s trinitarian works as He providentially brought His saving power to bear throughout creation by the sending of the Son and Spirit.

In more recent centuries, the concept of mission has developed a more specific sense of what the church is doing in the world. In the nineteenth century, the modern missions movement burgeoned with a needed concern to take the gospel abroad. Although this notion of mission still had in view the need to bring God’s saving work to bear throughout the world it focused less upon how this task for the church to fulfill was directly connected to God’s mission. Good and necessary concerns drove this view of mission, even if it was not as robustly grounded in an all-encompassing view of God that characterized the earlier, more overtly trinitarian connotations of missio Dei.

A serious issue that explains the recovery of the missio Dei concept is the collapse of colonialism. Even with the real strengths of the modern missions movement, which saw its heyday in previous centuries, sometimes an assumption remained about carrying out missions within a colonial outlook. In some ways, missionaries had an easier time, with travel and geographical expansion, concerning unreached places before a certain colonial paradigm came into effect.

Still, colonialism often – though not always – shaped approaches to missions inasmuch as missionaries struggled to distinguish some of their own cultural assumptions from the gospel message itself. In many instances colonially-minded mission efforts imposed certain cultural trappings alongside the gospel as if they were inherently and necessarily related.

In the post-colonial era, missional thinkers are recovering missio Dei as a way to keep God at the center of missiology (premiere examples would include Christopher Wright or Justin Schell). This emphasis avoids grounding missiology in the concerns and preferences of particular cultures. The aim here is to recenter missions on God’s purposes rather than on the spread of certain societal ideals. Our contemporary scene includes a renewed appeal to the missio Dei concept to explain several paradigms for how God relates to the world and the church. General agreement exists that missio Dei concerns everything that God is doing in creation as he works within it. But that agreement quickly fractures into disagreement about how God is working in creation and what his fundamental goals are. This disagreement produces differing models of missio Dei.

Two Models of Missio Dei

The first of the two major competing models of missio Dei is what we might call the “wide perspective.” It argues that God’s mission concerns everything that He purposes for creation, which can result in sidelining the church and even the gospel itself. In this model, God’s mission is all encompassing, but the church and the gospel are only a subset (sometimes even a very small subset) within that mission. For this outlook, the church and the gospel is less important in God’s mission because His mission is much bigger than what the gospel accomplishes. The more concrete ends that usually take precedent in this model are political and social. Although Christians certainly should have a healthy concern for culture, the cultural goals furthered through this model of missio Dei are very often out of accord with the values that conservative evangelicals recognize as biblical.

The second of the two competing paradigms would then be the “narrower perspective.” It focuses focuses the missio Dei on the church. This version has seen different explanations, many of which are compatible. For example, one biblical-theological theme of missio Dei is that God has been building a temple to be His special dwelling place since creation. The Garden of Eden was originally His place to dwell with humanity, then He had a temple amidst Israel, now He dwells in His church, and one day Christ will bring the new creation. This biblical-theological theme of God’s mission is fully compatible with the argument that God’s mission is to establish communion between Himself and humanity. In fact, these two perspectives complement each other well, as that biblical theology of God’s dwelling place shows the various ways that He facilitated His intended communion with us. This second major model provides a foundation for evangelical reflection on God’s mission.

God’s Mission in the Church

One agreed point about missio Dei is that the mission is God’s. Biblically, we then look for what God says He is doing in order to discern His mission. The “wide perspective” model of missio Dei fails in part because it interprets every occurrence within providence to be an approved part of what God wants to achieve in creation. It often does not reckon with how sin figures into the picture. On the other hand, the “narrower perspective” of missio Dei accounts for how God always had the same goal of establishing communion with humanity, and for how He administers that mission differently before and after sin entered the world.

God gives the church a task in applying his mission, but He is the one who is the primary agent. The classic notion of missio Dei from the early church helps us to see this connection. After His resurrection, Christ commissioned His church:

Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.” (John 20:21–23)

The original concept of missio Dei was about how, in the plan of salvation, the Father sent the Son, and the Father and the Son sent the Spirit. Drawing upon that same reality of these divine missions, Christ sends His church in the same way. His sending the Spirit upon them in this case is for the sake of equipping them to take the gospel reality of the forgiveness of sin into the world.

This sending pattern applies only to God’s relationship to His church for the sake of the gospel. Certainly, in one sense, God reigns by sovereign providence over all the affairs of the world. In a more precise sense, God is working all those affairs for the sake of advancing His focused mission of using His church to send salvation throughout creation.

His church is His dwelling place in the new covenant, making it the place where we can access communion with God. Ephesians 2:19–22 explains this reality as “the members of the household of God” are being built together on Christ our cornerstone so that the church “grows into a holy temple in the Lord.” Thus, “In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.” As the Spirit works to build us upon Christ as our foundation to be God’s dwelling, we become God’s true temple. The church is the place where we find communion with God as He meets us through the proclamation of the gospel, sealing those promises to us in His sacraments.

Missio Dei From Beginning to End

When God created the world, He planted a garden for His first covenant people to have a place to commune with Him. By our sin, we fractured that perfect communion. Since The Fall, God’s mission has been to re-establish that communion with us through His plan of grace. His mission has focused on granting fellowship to his people by restoring us to a right relationship with Him through the forgiveness of sin and full acceptance on account of Christ and His work. His mission still focuses on bringing about that reality as the church carries forth the message that brings the reconciliation we need – the only way for us to have communion with God in grace.

When Christ returns, He will bring the new creation with Him and usher in our consummate experience of communion. God’s mission is not to make the world an outstanding place this side of the new creation. God’s mission is to make his chosen people into citizens of His kingdom through the work of Christ so that they will have blessed fellowship with Him in everlasting life. God’s mission began with His intent that we might know Him in blessing. It continues as He blesses us through the saving work of Christ as carried forth in the church’s work. He will complete that mission when Christ returns to grant resurrection life to us all so that we taste communion with God in glory.

Staying on Message

These considerations give the church focus, as we send missionaries abroad, in what are we asking them to achieve. John Piper famously said, “missions exists because worship doesn’t.” Indeed the missionary effort must focus on advancing the church’s one particular goal: the proper worship of the true God. As we send our missionaries, we must help them, as my pastor Harry Reeder would have said, to “stay on mission and in ministry by encouraging them to stay on message.” The disagreement between models of missio Dei revolves around how God is working out his purposes. As the church, we best serve the world by keeping missionaries focused on bringing people to know the triune God in His grace provided through Jesus Christ as we encounter him by Word, sacrament, and prayer in the church.