What is mission today?

Stephen Spencer considers what the term ‘mission’ has come to mean.

What is distinctive about Christian mission in the twenty-first century? It’s a question I’ve been trying to answer for quite a while and the outline of an answer began to become clear in 2018 when I started working with colleagues in the Mission department at the Anglican Communion Office. It’s a question about how best to characterize an emerging ecumenical consensus on mission. The days of looking to mission agency offices in Europe and North America to provide that answer have long gone, and the notion that you must choose between evangelism, on the one hand, and social and economic transformation, on the other, has also been left behind. Most agree that mission encompasses both of these and much more. But what? David Bosch, when attempting to answer the question for the twentieth century, included a huge range of topics and perspectives in the final chapter of his comprehensive survey in 1991, Transforming Mission, but he did not distil a final characterization. How, then, are we to do this in this new century?

A penny dropped for me in 2018 when I started to talk and listen to John Kafwanka (now a bishop in Zambia) and Jolyon Tricky in the aforementioned Mission department, especially on the importance of intentional discipleship for the life of the Church. They showed me that churches could pursue any number of corporate projects but if the people in the pews were not having their discipleship deepened and enriched and so extending the reach of the mission of Christ in their homes, workplaces and neighbourhoods, then the impact of those projects would be minimal. Millions of people across the world might call themselves Christian but if their faith did not influence the way they lived then it would not amount to much. The Christian faith might be a mile wide but if it was only an inch deep, what difference would it make? John and Jolyon introduced me to the Season of Intentional Discipleship, a decade-long movement of deepening discipleship across the Anglican Communion, and to the ‘Jesus-Shaped Life’ network, led by Bishop Moon Hing of Malaysia, which had been developing accessible resources in several languages for churches, dioceses and provinces.

I began to see that this was not an isolated initiative but part of a broader movement, represented by Pope Francis’ encyclical Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel) published in 2013, especially when he affirmed that, ‘In virtue of their baptism, all the members of the People of God have become missionary disciples (cf. Mt 28:19).’^[i]  I found the way he explains this to be powerful and convincing:

All the baptized, whatever their position in the Church or their level of instruction in the faith, are agents of evangelization … This way of seeing mission calls for personal involvement on the part of each of the baptized … Every Christian is a missionary to the extent that he or she has encountered the love of God in Christ Jesus: we no longer say that we are ‘disciples’ and ‘missionaries’, but rather that we are always ‘missionary disciples’. (para 120)

This emphasis was affirmed for Anglicanism at a meeting of its Anglican Consultative Council in 2016 in Zambia. Those attending the meeting recognized that in many of their churches there was only a ‘nominal’ or shallow Christian commitment. They therefore agreed to launch the ‘Season of Intentional Discipleship’, which would be a ten-year movement of churches around the world promoting discipleship at local level and developing and distributing resources to encourage this. The decade would be all about churches rediscovering a holistic way of following Christ and being caught up in the life-giving energy of his mission. Becoming a disciple would be about more than learning a set of catechism answers, or learning to receive communion, but be a form of apprenticeship in an intentional community encompassing the whole of life.

Ecumenical support for this way of thinking became abundantly clear in 2018 at a World Council of Churches conference in Arusha, Tanzania, when more than a thousand Christians from every part of the world and from many different ecclesial traditions, including the Orthodox, met under the title ‘Moving in the Spirit: Called to Transforming Discipleship’. They affirmed that discipleship is central to mission: ‘We are called by our baptism to transforming discipleship: a Christ-connected way of life in a world where many face despair, rejection, loneliness, and worthlessness’ (WCC, 2018).

With the ducks beginning to line up in this way, it was clear that a distinctive approach to mission had been emerging in many parts of the globe in these early decades of the twenty-first century. Then, as I looked back for some theological patrons for this way of thinking, some familiar figures came to the fore, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the Protestant side and Vincent Donovan on the Roman Catholic. Stephan B. Bevans’ recent Community of Missionary Disciples was another important signpost.

I had already published a survey of Christian mission in 2007, my SCM Studyguide: Christian Mission. It had done well over the years and was needing to be updated and expanded, especially its final chapter on contemporary mission. With John and Jolyon’s help in identifying an emerging ecumenical consensus, centred on the importance of intentional discipleship to mission, I was able to enrich and more clearly focus on all of this in this new edition. As the Anglican Communion in 2026 looks to launch a new decade of ‘Growing discipleship with church planting’, to be known as Vision36, including a call to plant one million new churches or worshipping communities across the globe, it’s reassuring to know that my new book, Types of Christian Mission: An Introduction, with its final chapter on mission as discipleship, might be of some help to those responding to this call in the years ahead.

[i] Francis, 2013, Evangelii Gaudium, https://www.vatican.va/evangelii-gaudium/en/files/assets/basic-html/page97.html, §120

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Image credit: benwhitephotography on Unsplash

Stephen Spencer is Director of Theology and Implementation in the Anglican Communion Office in London, supporting theological education, mission and discipleship in Anglican Churches around the world.

His book Types of Christian Mission: An Introduction is out this month and available to order here, with 20% off all orders before the end of November.