What is the Mission of the Church?
Let us imagine together in the kingdom of God.
Urban neighborhoods have long suffered under many forms of injustice, including racism and whiteness. In this series, I have explained how these injustices fall under the banner of White Supremacy. While this may not be ideal language for many, we need terminology to describe with specificity the “coalescing social, economic, and theological meta-narrative that promotes hierarchies, defines non-dominant groups as inferior, robs people of their God-given dignity, and shapes our institutional and societal practices.”
This narrative frames a world where everyone loses. It is a world of loss, domination, shame, and violence. While this narrative shapes much of Western society, it is especially pronounced in urban communities that are home to racial minorities, immigrants, and a diverse lower class, all of whom have been deemed inferior by our society.
White evangelicalism has failed to confront the “rulers and authorities” (Eph. 3:10, 6:12) that uphold White supremacy because it is explicitly not designed to. White evangelical mission takes up the charge of saving souls while leaving the rest of the world intact. The Reformed and neo-Calvinist missiologist Harvie Conn described it as a theology that does not deal with real life experienced by the poor and marginalized. As such, its over-spiritualized mission “conveys too much superiority, condescension, yes even pity, to be credible.”1
If the Church is to confront the forces of White Supremacy that govern our urban communities, we need a mission that is grounded in “the single purpose of God: the coming and extension of the kingdom of God.”2 Such a mission is powered by a gospel that gives where there has been loss; that brings justice where there has been domination; that restores dignity where it has been stripped away; that brings peace where there has only been violence. Such a mission shapes our imaginations as we live into Christ’s coming kingdom together.
In the final essay of this series, I summarize this kingdom mission from the perspective of Reformed neo-Calvinism. I also share ten instincts that flow from a kingdom imagination and how they confront the diseased world of White Supremacy.
A Kingdom Mission
The Reformed neo-Calvinist Michael Goheen has rightly described how many theologies of mission err in their attempt to ground the church’s mission in specific proof texts. As we saw with DeYoung and Gilbert, such an approach quickly becomes lopsided and disjointed. This methodology reflects our cultural biases and prejudices as we emphasize certain passages of Scripture over others. Instead, Goheen argues that we need a “missional reading of Scripture which recognizes the centrality of mission to the entire biblical story.”3
This unified reading of Scripture, sometimes called the redemptive-historical approach, is a key concept within Reformed neo-Calvinism. Neo-Calvinist missiologists like J.H. Bavinck and Harvie Conn have understood mission as deriving from an understanding of Scripture that places mission as its central interest and goal.
J.H. Bavinck thus derives his missiology from a survey of the Old and New Testaments.4 Harvie Conn and Manuel Ortiz develop their missiology by following the redemptive-historical narrative of cities in Scripture.5
Herman Bavinck, the uncle of J.H. Bavinck, beautifully demonstrated this redemptive-historical approach when he articulated the nature of the gospel in his address on Common Grace. While this lengthy paragraph will consume my word count, it is deeply moving and worth quoting at length:
The Christian religion does not, therefore, have the task of creating a new supernatural order of things. It does not intend to institute a totally new, heavenly kingdom… Christianity does not introduce a single substantial foreign element into the creation. It creates no new cosmos but rather makes the cosmos new. It restores what was corrupted by sin. It atones the guilty and cures what is sick; the wounded it heals. Jesus was anointed by the Father with the Holy Spirit to bring good tidings to the afflicted, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captive and the opening of prison to those who are bound, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor, and to comfort those who mourn (Isa. 61:1, 2). He makes the blind to see, the lame to walk; the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear; the dead are raised, and the gospel is preached to the poor (Matt. 11:5). Jesus was not a new lawgiver; he was not a statesman, poet, or philosopher. He was Jesus—that is, Savior. Christ did not come just to restore the religio-ethical life of man and to leave all the rest of life undisturbed, as if the rest of life had not been corrupted by sin and had no need of restoration. No, the love of the Father, the grace of the Son, and the communion of the Holy Spirit extend even as far as sin has corrupted. Everything that is sinful, guilty, unclean, and full of woe is, as such and for that very reason, the object of the evangel of grace that is to be preached to every creature.6
In Bavinck’s summary of the Christian faith and the “object” of our gospel, he approached Scripture as a unified whole. In this paragraph and the one that follows it, the reader can detect allusions to the cultural mandate (Genesis 1:28), the call of Abraham (Genesis 12:1-3), the Jubilee year in Leviticus 25, Jesus’ use of Isaiah 61:1-2 in Luke 4, the free offer of the gospel in John 3:16, and Paul’s law/gospel distinction in Romans and Galatians. Bavinck’s theology resisted a reductionism that sets any of these texts against the others. As a result, he could conclude that “everything that is sinful, guilty, unclean, and full of woe” is the object of the gospel we proclaim–including the powers of White Supremacy.
The church’s mission cannot be proof-texted but must be discerned solely in reference to the kingdom of God. The gospel of the kingdom will direct the church’s life “towards God’s final purpose for the world, the eternal kingdom.”7 When she takes up her mission, the Church proclaims the reign of King Jesus, whom we are invited to follow through repentance and faith. Bound to him, the Church faithfully lives out her charge by imagining and participating in the full scope of the coming kingdom.
Imagining the Kingdom Together
Instead of confining the church's mission to a narrow, pre-defined to-do list that governs every church in every place, what if we described our mission as a kingdom imagination that shapes the life and ministry of faithful churches following Christ in his kingdom? Such a moral and theological imagination does not merely ask, “What should we do?” but asks, “What would it look like for the kingdom to grow here?”
Rather than lists of pre-packaged ideas, the kingdom imagination gives us instincts to develop in our churches that exist in every time and place. While these instincts are too numerous to develop fully in this essay, I will briefly give attention to ten instincts of a kingdom imagination that have special importance in urban communities affected by White Supremacy.
Hyper-localized Ministry
Our theology of the kingdom must touch grass in everyday life. Because the Kingdom takes root in real places among real people, our missiological imagination must effectively address a community's comprehensive spiritual, emotional, psychological, and physical needs. It is not enough to say we are “for the city” in general. How are you for the city? What community, specifically? Who lives there? How does the gospel of the kingdom bring life to the people you live with in your community?
Whenever cities develop plans for investment or redevelopment, the urban poor are frequently overlooked and often exploited. General ministry philosophies also tend to favor majority cultures while neglecting those on the margins.
The kingdom imagination resists this pull as it seeks the kingdom of God on specific streets among a particular people.
Organic Church Planting
Many evangelical church planting philosophies dictate that churches should be established by strong visionary leaders who will define the values and ministry of a new church prior to its launch. In these churches, there is a rush to begin corporate worship services, and the life of the church then evolves to support the pastor's ministry and Sunday worship.
A kingdom imagination fosters church plants that grow organically from kingdom life in a people and place. Instead of dictating values and programs, the leaders of these budding churches gather people while remaining theologically rooted and missiologically open-handed. This enables them to guide the growing body toward healthy expressions that fit the unique makeup of this new group.
Rather than being governed by a clerical hierarchy, the congregation will be empowered to take significant ownership of the church’s life. The church will be primarily led by leaders from the immediate community, rather than by outsiders or even neighborhood transplants.8 The worship service, instead of being viewed as the “launch” of a church, is one step among many demanded by the blossoming life of a new congregation.
Under the twisted power dynamics of White Supremacy, many institutions–whether civil, educational, or business–believe they can tell urban communities what is best for them. White evangelical churches have often gone along with this mindset, acting with “a certain feeling of superiority” where they “assume [they] have the right to exercise” power over urban churches.9
The kingdom imagination restores agency by building churches that empower urban communities to make their own decisions about their life together in the church.
Unity of Word and Deed
The white evangelical mission has pitted evangelism against mercy. I have participated in many conversations debating whether works of mercy performed by a church must be accompanied by evangelistic proclamation to be considered legitimate. This debate operates within the either/or binary of White evangelicalism. Those who possess gifts and sensitivities toward mercy and justice find themselves at odds with those who have evangelistic impulses.
While some evangelicals have attempted to respond to the either/or binary with a both/and framework, such responses remain within the two-dimensional limitations of the White evangelical binary.
The kingdom imagination intentionally resists this binary framing, opting instead for language that expands rather than limits our vision. This is why both Herman Bavinck and Abraham Kuyper would not rank evangelism and mercy on a list of priorities.
At times, they used terms like foreground to describe the place of spiritual and salvific matters in our social vision.10 Yet Kuyper would sometimes state that human misery and physical need lie in the foreground of Christ’s ministry.11 Ministry in the kingdom is not a two-dimensional binary but a multi-dimensional journey that encompasses every aspect of human experience. Thus, we must “venerate [Christ] for saving us from both sin and physical misery. The one may not be disparaged in favor of the other.”12
To borrow a common metaphor, if the kingdom of God is a mountain range, salvific matters may be the first mountain to explore, but it is far from the last. A kingdom imagination ensures that you will explore the heights and depths of the mountain in the foreground while not losing your vision for what lies behind.
Beautiful evangelism…
Just as a kingdom imagination will not allow a church to reduce its mission to lists and programs, it will also inspire beautiful evangelism that cannot be simplified to mere propositions one must assent to.
My friend Nicholas has articulated this well in his description of what makes a good evangelist. Because the gospel is about “Jesus renewing everything,” evangelists who have a kingdom imagination will: 1) believe that everything in life is about Jesus, 2) have enough intimacy with non-Christians to see where Jesus is at work in their lives, and 3) have enough courage to name the ways Jesus is at work.
White Supremacy treats the poor and marginalized as numbers and objects. Christians do the same when entering an urban community with a pre-defined, propositional gospel. We must love people enough to treat them as people, identifying ways Jesus is and could be at work in their life if they would turn to him.
…accompanied by mercy.
I write this on Maundy Thursday, when we remember how Christ the King got on his knees and washed the feet of his disciples. There, at the end of his life, Jesus demonstrated how he came to serve (diakoneo—where we get the word deacon) rather than be served (Mark 10:45).
How do citizens of God’s kingdom fight against White supremacy, which has robbed people of their human dignity? They come in service, as their King did. In their defense of an over-spiritualized mission, White evangelicals say it is “misleading to summarize Jesus’ mission as one of service.”13
A kingdom imagination believes otherwise, for, like the Twelve, we know evangelism is incomplete until people have come into contact with Christos diakonos, Christ the true deacon.14
Vision for the Arts
Creating beauty is a powerful way to instill hope, dignity, and unity. The visual arts not only bring pride to community spaces, but investing in local artists shows that their talents are just as significant as anyone else’s. Supporting musicians or teaching community members to write their own songs can lend beauty and dignity to their stories while offering a healthy outlet for emotions.
Under the neglect of White Supremacy, urban streets, alleys, and parks become dumping grounds for other people’s trash. A kingdom imagination longs to see our communities made beautiful as they will one day be when the King returns. Investing in neighborhood beauty is not simply a nice-to-do option to build neighborhood trust but a key component of a theological and missiological vision. As Abraham Kuyper stated, following Calvin, art has the “noble vocation of disclosing to man a higher reality than was offered to us by this sinful and corrupted world.”15
Just Formation
A Christian should have little doubt that “Christ opposes the social dominance of money, that he seeks to temper sinful inequality, and that he aligns himself not with the great but with the little folk of the earth–yet never otherwise in connection with the kingdom of Heaven.”16 Christians who join this struggle with Christ in his Kingdom will ordinarily find themselves at odds with any ideology or civic program that promises an earthly kingdom or neglects social justice for “the little folk.”
How will Christians learn to join this struggle unless it is modeled and taught to them? White Evangelicalism upholds White Supremacy because it remains “caught up in the spiritual.” Its pastors “neglect to preach the full Christ, whose gospel shows so clearly that he also wanted to affect social life.”
When church leaders grow in their kingdom imagination, they will “remain silent no longer about the Word of their Lord concerning the needy but [will] put the trumpet to their lips and proclaim his holy gospel with a view to our earthly circumstances.”17 A kingdom imagination develops concrete opportunities for congregations to be shaped toward the Lord’s justice for the sake of their community.
A Commitment to the Poor
The Church, as an image of the coming kingdom, will align its resources and priorities with the interests of its King. John Calvin spoke with clarity on what is required in this matter: “Look! Paul says, what all Christians ought to do if they want Jesus Christ to reign and there to be order in the church: it is necessary that the poor be cared for, and for this there must be deacons.”18
That Christ sought his followers “in the first place” from the “lower classes of society” is “the hallmark of the Messiah.”19 The urban poor are accustomed to being neglected and overlooked by just about everyone; this should not be so in our churches! In our commitment to the poor, our churches should be led by pastors who will “spare nothing” in their commitment to the suffering poor,20 and filled with congregants willing to go to the end of their resources in doing the same.21
The Reconciled Community
White supremacy enforces separation, animosity, and hierarchy. It teaches those who have been deemed less than to have shame over their ethnic or social identity. As Allan Boesak observed, White supremacy “has brought dehumanization, has undermined black personhood… It has caused those who are the image of the living God to despise themselves.” White supremacy denies the reconciling work of Christ, who has reaffirmed the worth of all of humanity in the sight of God. White supremacy resists the work of Christ, who has “reconciled people to God and to themselves, he has broken down the wall of partition and enmity, and so has become our peace (Eph. 2:14). He has brought us together in the one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God who is the Father of us all (Eph. 4:5-6).”
The kingdom imagination envisions the restoration of everything that sin has destroyed, including our relationships. As the kingdom of God takes shape on earth, we develop as individuals only when we are bound together in a complete, perfect, and pure new kingdom community. In Christ’s kingdom, our differences and uniqueness are magnified rather than shamed. We become even more beautiful as the multitude of our differences increases. Only as a new redeemed humanity can we together fully image God.22
Mobilized Disciples
The White evangelical mission heavily prioritizes teaching and preaching, thus favoring those with preaching gifts, i.e., pastors. Because most White evangelical pastors are men, White evangelical mission tends to create a hierarchy both of gifts and of genders, not unlike White supremacy.
In his work on public theology, neo-Calvinist Matthew Kaemingk has described how neo-Calvinism “can often be found advocating that power should be pushed both down and out throughout society.”23 A kingdom missiology produces similar effects in the Church, as it recognizes the needed gifts of every member of the congregation and seeks to empower them uniquely for service inside and outside the church. Without abolishing the role of church leaders, a kingdom imagination channels power down and out into the whole body like blood. When power stagnates, it will clot and kill the body.
White Supremacy enforces hierarchies that strip agency and power from those who are deemed inferior. What White supremacy has taken away, the kingdom-oriented church will give in abundance.
My hope for our growing church, this platform, and my future ministry is that we will see a new generation of urban Christian communities motivated by this kingdom imagination. Such communities would draw neighborhoods into their fellowship through evangelism that points to the source of their power in their just and merciful deeds. These churches preach Jesus, the King and Savior, whose resurrection changes everything. When a church follows their King, it embarks on a great journey, showing advance previews of a world to come.24
Harvie M. Conn, Evangelism: Doing Justice and Preaching Grace, 47.
J.H Bavinck, An Introduction to the Science of Missions, 155.
Goheen, “Missiology,” in T&T Clark Handbook of Neo-Calvinism, 406.
J.H. Bavinck, “The Foundation of Missions” in Introduction.
Harvie Conn and Manuel Ortiz, Urban Ministry, 83-155.
Herman Bavinck, “Common Grace,” trans. Raymond C. Van Leeuwen, Calvin Theological Journal 24, no. 1 (1989): 61-62.
J.H. Bavinck, Introduction, 158.
Harvie Conn and Manuel Ortiz have a great discussion on this in Urban Ministry, 412-469.
J.H. Bavinck, Introduction, 198.
Herman Bavinck, “General Biblical Principles and the Relevance of Concrete Mosaic for the Social Question (1891),” ed. John Bolt, Journal of Markets & Morality 13, no. 2 (2010): 443. Abraham Kuyper, “Christ and the Needy (1895),” in On Charity and Justice, 36.
Abraham Kuyper, “Philanthropy,” Pro Rege 2:282.
Ibid.
Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert, What Is the Mission of the Church, 54-55.
Johannes Verkuyl, “Role of the Diaconate” in Discipling the City, 219.
Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 5.2
Kuyper, Christ and the Needy, 35.
Kuyper, Christ and the Needy, 42.
John Calvin, Sermon on Acts 6:1-3.
Kuyper, Christ and the Needy, 24.
John Calvin, Geneva Catechism.
John Calvin, Instiutes 3.7.6-7
See Herman Bavinck, The Kingdom of God, The Highest Good.
Matthew Kaemingk, “Public Theology” in T&T Clark Handbook of Neo-Calvinism, 400.
Conn and Ortiz, Urban Ministry, 154.
What blows my mind is that the people you cite are within the evangelical side of things. If only people listened! No whether reformed or neo-calvinist this is evangelical theology in the sense that you are inviting us to truly bring the good news to the most vulnerable.
Deeply challenging series, thank you. It’s a great encouragement that you frame your exhortation in terms of an expanded vision of the kingdom. This isn’t about fruitless guilt, but about moving forward into fruitful ministry.