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David W. Scott - Crossing Boundaries: Sharing Gods Good News Through Mission

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Book:
Crossing Boundaries: Sharing Gods Good News Through Mission
Author:
David W Scott
Publisher:
BookBaby
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Books / Religion
Year:
2019
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The goals of this book are practical: To help you and your

church think about mission in new and deeper ways so that you

can engage in mission with confidence and clarity, experience

the spiritual benefits of joining in Gods mission in the world,

and serve God and others more effectively. The book presents

a vision of mission that draws on both Wesleyan theology and

ecumenical thinking about mission. Yet the goal is to do more

than just present a theology of mission but rather to make suggestions about how to use this theology to shape or reshape your

and your congregations mission work. Thus, theology is mixed

with suggestions for practice, and additional aids at the end of

each chapter help readers apply the concepts discussed.

A series of discussion questions at the end of each chapter is

intended to serve as the basis for group study. My hope is that this

book could be used as a six-week study by your mission committee, Administrative Council, youth group, Sunday school class,

United Methodist Women or United Methodist Men gatherings,

or other church groups. The study questions are designed to help

you reflect on your current mission work.

Each chapter also includes a list of further readings and

resources for those interested in learning more about related topics. This list of readings is annotated, with brief descriptions of the

materials, to help you select which ones will be most helpful to

you in your further learning about and growth in mission.

David W. Scott: author's other books

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Acknowledgments

I would first like to thank Thomas Kemper for permitting me to use some of my work time at Global Ministries on this book project. This book would not have happened without his support. Id also like to thank Kathy Armistead of the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry for being an enthusiastic partner in publishing this book. Again, this book would not have happened without her support. In addition, Scott Parrish deserves credit for the genesis of this book, as the idea emerged out of a conversation I had with him.

Thanks also to those who read early versions of this book and provided feedback on them. Among them are colleagues from Global Ministries, including Jerome Sahabandhu, Nora Colmenares, Kathleen Masters, David Logeman, and Quest Hunter; my friend and colleague, Taylor Walters Denyer; and members of The Family Church, Neenah, Wisconsin, including Scott Challoner, Crystal Wheeler, Jen Olkowski, and Trina Haase. Thank you all for your suggestions, even when I have not taken them. Your feedback has certainly made this a better book.

I would like to thank the United Methodist Professors of Mission for nurturing me in my professional and intellectual development as a missiologist. Most of the ideas in this book originally come from conversations with members of the UMPM, especially Dana Robert, Henk Pieterse, and Robert Hunt. I stand on the shoulders of giants here.

Finally, thanks to my wife, Allie Scott, not just for being a generally fantastic and supportive spouse but also for helping in some very specific ways with this booktalking through ideas, providing reading suggestions, organizing feedback on the book. Im so grateful to be in mission together with you.

What Is Mission?

Jesus said to them again, Peace be with you. As the Father sent me, so I am sending you. (John 20:21 CEB)

Mission and Helping

My guess is that if you asked the average person in a pew on Sunday morning, they would not have a definition of mission that they could rattle off to you. While some Christians are deeply committed to mission and have thought extensively about it, many Christians have not thought about mission enough to have a pat definition ready-to-hand. But I would further guess that if you pushed that hypothetical average parishioner to come up with a definition of mission, it would be something along the lines of helping others. Mission as helping is a common basic understanding across many churches, and for good reason. The Bible is full of passages such as Matthew 25:31-46, which encourage the followers of Jesus to show compassion and care for others by feeding the hungry, giving water to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, and visiting those in prison.

To say that mission is primarily about helping others indicates that mission involves Christians providing some sort of assistance or something of value to other people, who are in need of that assistance or item of value. Thus, it presumes that we, the Christians in mission, are the haves, and others are the have-nots. Not all forms of helping, then, are recognized as mission. If we give a homeless person a blanket, that is seen as mission; if a homeless person helps us change a flat tire, that is not usually seen as mission, even if the homeless person does it as an expression of his or her Christian faith. If we share a spiritual insight with someone else, that is mission in the form of evangelism, but if we get a spiritual insight from someone else, that is a God moment. If we define mission as helping, it usually involves an unspoken sense of who is doing the helpingus!

Christians also often interpret mission as helping in programmatic ways. If you asked your average worshipper what they meant by mission is helping others, they would probably give you examples of programs that their church carries out to help othersa soup kitchen, a toy distribution drive, trips to other countries to paint schools, etc. Perhaps this definition would also include evangelism, in which we help others come to the Christian faith, often by following a particular script or program for presenting the faith. In all four vignettes in the introduction, mission is presented as a program activity that involves helping others.

To say that mission is a program indicates that it is something that happens at specified times and places in an organized fashion. Whether that takes the form of a mission trip, a service project, or a financial transaction, there is an identifiable and planned action or set of actions, often with formal responsibilities, budgets, a sponsoring organization, etc., that can be termed mission. Thinking of mission as a program also involves making distinctions between what types of helping count as mission and what do not. If we move furniture because a friend is changing apartments, that is not seen as mission; if we move furniture because our church is holding a rummage sale where the proceeds go to the food pantry, that is seen as mission. The action is the same, but one is an informal act of helping and one is an organized, formal program of helping. Its the organized, formal program that is counted as mission.

I do not want to suggest that helping or formal programs are necessarily and always bad, but I would like to point out that this understanding of mission is limited and potentially problematic as well. Thinking of mission as helping programs is limited, because it makes us miss the breadth of Gods mission in the world and the full spiritual significance of joining in that mission. Many Christians would say that we should help others because God calls us to love others. That is true: God does call us to love others. Yet to equate helping and love is to dramatically misunderstand love, both Gods and ours. Helping may be part of love, but it cannot be the entirety of love.

Take as an illustration love as expressed in a marriage. One of my love languages in my marriage is doing things for my wifein other words, helping.1 Sometimes she really appreciates my help. When she comes home from a work trip and the house is picked up, the laundry put away, the kids have both been bathed, and the lawn is mowed, that can be a big relief for her. Other times, I think I get more out of doing the helping than she does being helped. That experience also has mission parallelsoftentimes our mission is more about how we feel than the impact on our mission partners.

Yet even when my wife appreciates my help, if helping was the only way I ever showed my love to her, if I never said I loved her, never spent time with her, never gave her gifts, never touched her, I would be more like a handyman and maid than a husband to her. I know that she would not find that a satisfying expression of love and, ultimately, I know I would not either. While I enjoy doing acts of service for her, I know theres more to the relationship than that, and I want there to be more to the relationship than that.

While marriage is a special relationship, I think this insight applies to other forms of love as well. Others know that we love them not only because we serve them but because we spend time with them, share our treasures with them, and tell them how much they mean to us. Indeed, the ways we can show love to others go well beyond this list of love languages for romantic relationships. Love expressed through service is good, but it is not a complete love. To confine love to helping is a limited understanding of love. In the same way, seeing mission as helping gives a limited understanding of the love God has for us and the love God calls us to share with the world.

Our understanding of mission is especially limited if we think of helping only in programmatic terms. When we see mission as a program, then we limit it to only those times and those places where such programs occur. If mission is a program, then it cannot be a way of life. A way of life happens at all times and in any place. When we limit mission to specific programs, then it becomes easier to see mission as a small or optional component of the Christian faith and not a central aspect of how we live out our Christian calling. Yet, mission properly understood should be central to how we understand and practice our faith. The end of this chapter will expand on this point significantly.

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