Mission and Missions

I believe Bosch's definition of mission is right. Mission encompasses every aspect of the Christian life from evangelizing to one's mother to contextualizing an African tribe's culture. The definition of mission is broad because the kingdom of God is broad and reaches out through every witness, service, healing, preaching, and etc. in light of his unfolding work of redemption in the world.
Missions is incorporated in mission. Like evangelism and discipleship it is a part of God's overall mission to inaugurate his kingdom. Missions is the act of witnessing to a culture other than one's own culture.

Evangelical Method: Acts and the Resurrection

Though the Apostolic gospel messages in Acts did not mention the cross it was still considered first importance to them (1 Cor. 15:3) just not in their evangelical technique. They found that the resurrection of Christ fit better as the display of glory to God, power of the Spirit, and grace for mankind than did the cross. Plus it gave hope in that like Jesus, Christians too would one day be raised up, which is where baptism come in to symbolize our death to the old self and the raising of the new self and the hope in us. The Apostles used a different technique of evangelism than we use today. It is not that our emphasis on the cross is of any less importance, but instead like their emphasis in the resurrection our evangelical method of the cross is also based on the glory, grace, and love of God. But we still must emphasize the resurrection because it is extremely important because of all of the things the cross doesn't fully point to such as the power of the Spirit, and baptism.

A Missional Church Reaches to the World

My church's goal of mission is represented by the old model of building a larger church by getting more and more members and expanding the building rather than expanding the missio dei, and the Church members are seen only as Church people rather than Kingdom people. My church sends money to help missionaries and a church in the Philippines, but there is no drive and no desire or passion to live missionally outside the church itself. There are minor events that try to reach the community, but it is predominately concerned with inviting people in rather than going out to the community and much less the world. The members of my church have not been taught or trained to be evangelical witnesses, and have no training in missions. They think missions is for a few while sitting in their pews believing that they are a church that is impacting the world. When I interned with the youth at my church I started with an emphasis on reaching the community and took any amount of youth that wanted to go out each Thursday afternoon during the summer to evangelize to the community, which is something the youth had never really experienced before unless they were on a mission trip. This is small but it is still a start in the right direction.

Leaning Culture

After watching “Reading an Image in the Other Context: A Visual Essay by Paul Jenkins" I have learned that I don't know much of anything about other cultures. Initially looking at the picture I would have thought of it as just an old picture of a black family, but after hearing and learning about the context of the picture I was stunned because I would have never known many of the things that the picture represented. I have learned that it is necessary to understand someones background and culture to be a better witness to them. For example, if a missionary didn't do his/her research and freely ate bacon in the town they went to and that town turned out to be predominately Muslim then their witness would more than likely be disregarded so knowing the context of where one lives or goes to do ministry is crucial to their witness and for building relationships.