What Is the Mission of the Church?

Review of Joe Boot's The Mission of God: A Manifesto of Hope for Society (part 10 of 10)

Why did the Church lose sight of its kingdom mission? Have evangelical churches fallen prey to “Churchianity”? Why did evangelicalism give up the public square? Is “multiculturalism” really a form of polytheism? What are the effects of religious idolatry in the Church? How can the Church reclaim its dominion mandate to bring the hope of the Gospel of life to a culture of death?

We now come to the final chapter, which builds upon the previous apologetics and evangelism theme to crystallise the book’s overarching focus on mission with respect to the Church. This is perhaps the most important chapter in the book as it offers the gateway into how the principles and proposals explored throughout the rest of the thesis may be put into practice. This is not because the chapter offers specific practical proposals but because it recalibrates our understanding of the meaning and purpose of the Church within the wider remit of the kingdom of God.

Church and Kingdom

Boot has elsewhere written of how modern evangelicals, by largely withdrawing from socio-political concerns (unlike the Puritans), lean not only towards personal pietism but ecclesial pietism. This is what he calls ‘Churchianity’, as though the only true purpose of earthly life is to serve and build up the institution of the universal and/or local Church.

In one sense, this is not an inappropriate goal, but it entirely depends upon how ‘the Church’ is defined. For example, does the building up of the Church extend to how individual members of the Church are equipped to help advance the kingdom in the world irrespective of the programmes and auspices of the institutional Church? The problem with ‘Churchianity’ is that it quickly becomes a means of the Church becoming conflated with the kingdom. In such a scenario, any Christian seeking to take dominion in the world, for example, would only be able to do so in and through church structures and under direct church authorities. Whilst few evangelical churches would ever put it like that, this is the functional reality.

In effect, this stymied focus does not stop Christians acting in the world apart from the Church; it simply fails to equip them with the appropriate kingdom purpose and ethic with which to do so. Most Christians have careers or jobs or hobbies which may or may not affect the culture. But it is this apathy (or even antipathy) towards cultural dominion that paralyses any kind of consistent vision for putting the Word of God into practice in the life of the Christian beyond faithfully contributing to the ‘ordained’ mission programmes of the local church.

None of this is to limit the value of the church. Rather, it ought to elevate the Church to even greater significance within a wider kingdom vision. In such a vision as Boot portrays, each local church can be seen as ‘embassies’ (521) of the kingdom, with all Christians as ‘ambassadors of [Christ’s] cosmic dominion’ (522).