Missio Dei – A Philosophy of Ministry
People ask me all the time, “What is Missio Dei?” The following is a primer meant to answer that question. It is in no way exhaustive on the subject and is meant to stimulate your thinking about how your church can begin to consider embracing a new way of doing ministry. © 2007 Jonathan Brink
For more information on a missional discipleship process, see Thrive Ministries.
A pdf copy is available here.
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Missio Dei – A Summary
Missio Dei, or the Mission of God, is the idea that God is actively working to restore his creation to wholeness. This wholeness looks like Jesus and is our intended expression as human beings designed in the image of God. Because of the fall, humanity is disconnected from God and begins a search for validation in anything other than God.
God has been actively building His Kingdom on earth and calling individuals throughout history into to participate in his ongoing mission. Jesus removed the barrier between humanity and God. Followers of Jesus seek to engage and fulfill this mission by creating an authentic community where each person’s dignity can be restored, actively participate in God’s Kingdom activities on earth and learn to live missionally by practicing the restoration of the world around them through the act of love. This process of restoration is called missional discipleship and moves individuals from immaturity to maturity.
Missio Dei works by restoring four different types of relationships through love and reconciliation. It always takes place in a community actively listening to God’s story. The Holy Spirit leads us into our specific role and response in this mission. It allows us to destroy the work of the enemy and lead people out of oppression and into the live we were designed to live.
Understanding Our Original Design
The origin of humanity is revealed in Scripture in the first two chapters of Genesis. God’s very first expression of himself is the word “Elohim”, which is a plural term. His very first impression is revealing himself in community. His second expression reveals an artistic creator. He creates something out of nothing, things of purpose, and wonder and beauty. And along the way he validates his creation, over and over, with the expression, “It is good.” This expression reveals one of the central roles and character traits of God, as the one who validates creation. This can also be called love.
But as God begins his final work, the creation of humanity, he uses himself as the blueprint. He says, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” The relationship of humanity is not just one of creator to canvas but of Father to child. We are created with our Father’s likeness: to live in community, to be creative with purpose, and to love. And once humanity has arrived, his expression changes to one of deep love, satisfaction and validation. He declares “It is very good,” much the way a parents expresses love for a newborn.
This validation establishes our dignity, or God’s declared worth, as human beings. It also creates the fundamental reason for Missio Dei; God’s nature is to be in relationship with, love and delight in His creation. He longs to see us restored and to become the fullest expression of what He created us to be.
The Nature Of The Fall
The fall is a specific event in our history as human beings and the tragedy in the story. The serpent, an enemy of God, dupes Adam and Eve into choosing to disobey God’s command not to eat of the tree of knowledge. This event creates a separation between God and humanity. Without this connection to the Father, humanity would search for other ways to validate itself. This search is often called the “curses” or “observations”. They are specific patterns God observes in both men and women after the fall. Women will predominantly search for validation in relationships. Men will predominantly search for validation in work. These are patterns and not exclusive but are easily recognizable in humanity.
In this unfulfilled need and desire for validation, humanity begins an endless search in things other than God. This unfortunately reveals our brokenness even further invalidating us as human beings. The allure is the “almost” but “not quite”. In fact so much so that our actions lead to unspeakable acts of treachery and terror. Instead of living in our fullest expression as made in the image of God, (living in community, creative with a purpose, and loving) humanity is bent toward destroying itself. Humanity spends centuries producing an unending story of brokenness, which always leads to oppression.
God Creates A Kingdom
What is interesting about God’s mission of restoration is that it always included his creation’s participation in the process. He calls out individuals who simply “walk with God”. These individuals include Abel, Noah and Abraham. Their choice to trust God is what makes them stand out, even when it makes no sense. Although his process is often painstakingly slow, he chooses to create a covenant with Abraham (aka: Abram) on which to establish His kingdom on earth.
As God chooses to interact with His creation, we begin to see a story emerge of the God’s interaction with His creation. This story is very similar to the journey of faith we will encounter in our lives. Humanity cries out for God’s rescue from oppression. God removes His people from Egypt, which is also our metaphor for what oppresses us in our lives. The story is always about bringing His creation out of oppression to restoration. But the story then details the constant return to oppression, return to God, return to oppression, and return back to God.
These stories of God interacting with His people allow us to see God’s character. God is relentlessly pursuing relationship with His people and chooses not to abandon them. These stories also create a myriad of examples that we as human beings can relate to.
God also chooses to introduce the law for the specific purpose of testing his people. The law has many good purposes of helping them live effectively in community but it also serves to reveals the extent of their brokenness and that they can’t pass the test.
It is in this story that God reveals His vision for the people. He says, “‘although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words you are to speak to the Israelites.” (Exodus 19:5-6) His intention for His people is to be people who minister to the world around them. They are the ones who will bring love and restoration to the world.
Jesus
The ultimate purpose of creating a specific group of people is to set the stage for introducing the person of Jesus, who is God’s Son. When Jesus chose to announce his ministry at the age of thirty, he selected a passage from Isaiah that confirmed what God was doing throughout history.
“The Spirit of the lord God is upon me. For he has anointed me to bring the good news to the afflicted. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives, sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim a year of favor from the Lord.” (Luke 4:18-19)
His declaration assumes that humanity is broken and in need of restoration but it also focuses the mission as one of restoration and freedom.
Jesus helped usher in an “incarnational” approach to ministry. He was simply love to people. He created THE example for us to follow, even inviting twelve average individuals to follow him for three years. And what is unique about his ministry is that it focused on the restoration of people’s dignity. He was calling out God’s original statement of value that no matter who they were, (poor, ugly, deformed, sinful) they were valuable to God. He called out the worst in society and declared them worthy. He singled out the lost and helped them find the way. He invited them to trust and celebrated it when they did.
The most important work of Jesus was his choice to offer himself as a sacrifice to remove the obstacle between God and His creation. This one act ushered in a new age for humanity. We now had full and complete access to the Father. Nothing stood in the way. And by restoring this relationship, humanity was also given access to the very Spirit of God who transforms the individual from the inside out, a freedom to live. This freedom is not freedom to do anything and everything. It is the freedom to do what we are designed to do, which includes living in community, expressing our creativity towards effective purposeful action and love.
A New Process Called Missional Discipleship
In this new era, God’s design for restoration includes an active, intentional relearning process called discipleship, and often referred to as, “the journey”. It is an ongoing, lifelong engagement of restoration through relationship with the Father. It was a developmental process that moved people from immaturity, or a focus on the self, to maturity, or the ability to think and act outside the self by engaging His mission of restoration. This process required them to face their own obstacles, wounds and junk that arrested their own development. For those who are engaged in this restoration, it ultimately shows up as an expression of the fruit of the Spirit, which are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. These fruits become the fullest expression of our intended humanity as designed in the image of God.
Jesus modeled this process in a small community of common people constantly inviting them to practice love because it was the fullest expression of their design. The central practice of Jesus was love through the recognition and restoration of dignity. He constantly invited people to see themselves as God saw them, his beloved children and to help others see the same. He also modeled a process of trust with the Father, inviting them to see that God was always acting in their best interest and could see the best life possible. This didn’t mean a life of luxury but of wholeness, integrity and love. He also focused on reconciliation through forgiveness, which brought people back into community.
God’s mission of restoration also affected all of creation. It is inclusive of the four different relationships we engage in: God, self, our neighbor and the world or all of creation. These relationships show up as concentric circles.
God
The first circle is our relationship to God. In this circle, we work to restoring our understanding of that access to God and our image of God. Jesus opened up the possibility for complete access to God. Nothing could be added or taken away from what He did. It was simply our responsibility and opportunity to accept it and engage full and complete access to the Father, which was lost at the fall. Access provides us relationship with the Father. As we engage this relationship, we begin the slow process of restoring our image of God, which is intimately tied to our own humanity. We learn to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit into His mission. It is this love that ultimately transforms our life and becomes the impetus to love others. We give the fruit we have been given.
Self
The second circle is our relationship with the self. Jesus modeled a three-year journey of active engagement in restoring individuals. This was primarily through the engagement of trust and embracing of our identity as children of God, recognizing our own dignity and embracing God’s love. Being created the doing. It was first an inward process of restoration but it always led to an outward response. Throughout the journey we work to remove the obstacles (primarily lies and the wounds that hinder us from our fullest expression as children of God).
The restoration of the self is the lifelong journey process. We are always moving towards trust, and restoring the self though the embracing our true identity as children of the living God. From this identity, we discover how we work as human beings designed in the image of God, which is first to be loved by our Father and to love those around us. The restoration of the self almost always requires an authentic community or mentor who can show us the way and give us permission to wrestle with our own brokenness as we move towards maturity.
There is a tendency to fall back on the easy parts of this stage in the process. Restoration of the self is messy and requires patiently working through our junk. It requires finding our courage and getting through the painful elements that hinder our maturity. And because of this, it is easier to just introduce people to Jesus and immediately move to them to the role of “usher”. And in the process the person misses the real purpose of the church, which is to restore the individual.
One interesting element of this stage is that we can’t give what we don’t have. Restoration must be experienced to be effective. Otherwise, what people eventually hear or see is a plastic resemblance to the real thing. Therefore it becomes impossible to sustain long-term engagement in the restoration of our neighbor without also restoring the self. Missio Dei becomes an inward AND an outward mission.
Our Neighbor
The third circle is our relationship with our neighbor. As we begin to restore the self, embracing His love for us, love begins to emanate as fruit in our lives towards our family, neighbors and friends. We can now begin to be love and grace, engaging the restoration of those around us because we have experienced it. It moves beyond something we hear and accept intellectually to something we know from experience. It becomes the story we know, the good news that is available to anyone. Love sees the value of the individual from God’s perspective and seeks to bring people out of suffering and oppression by restoring their dignity and identity.
All Of Creation
The fourth circle is all of creation. These are the people we come in contact with at various moments in our lives but don’t normally engage in relationship. But it is important to step outside of our little world and into a bigger world of love. It also includes one of our original responsibilities, the stewardship of God’s earth.
These four relationships create the focus of the mission. They are intertwined with each other, always inviting us towards maturity in love. The more we accept that our relationship with God is taken care of the more we can accept His love, which transforms the self. The more we allow the self to be transformed by His love the more we are released to love our neighbor. The more we engage our neighbor, the more we fulfill His mission and transform the world the more the world can see God for who He really is. Sometimes the transformation of the self comes from loving our neighbor. Sometimes the transformation of the world around us comes by accepting His love for us. Each works in harmony with the other.
The nature of the mission is most likely, but not always, local. God typically leads us to restoring the relationships we are already in. These include our family, our neighbors, and our coworkers. Opportunities to restore all of creation come as God brings them to us through a “calling” or an invitation to be part of something else outside of our local world.
Learning To Follow
The question then becomes, how do we successfully engage His mission of restoration? We accomplish his mission by learning to follow the lead of the Holy Spirit in the moment, which is always grounded in Scripture and looks like Jesus. The Holy Spirit is the Father’s leading us into His Kingdom plan, and our specific role. This voice is commonly referred to as “an inkling” or “a still small voice” we hear in our conscience. Only those who are wiling to listen will typically hear this leading, but this voice is open to anyone who is willing to trust. The Holy Spirit will always invite us into the Father’s will, which are opportunities to transform the world around us. These callings will always be consistent Scripture, with love and with His mission of restoration.
The interesting thing about learning to follow is that it will often not make sense. As human beings we are born into cultures that reinforce the protection of the self. To learn to think outside of the self, even at great cost takes time. And even learning to discern the Holy Spirit’s leading will often takes time. This is a process of developing faith, which is only learned by stepping into trust in the moments we are invited.
Scripture always supports the work of the Holy Spirit by providing us with an understanding of the character of God, His promise of restoration, our calling into His mission of restoration through love. The more we engage Scripture, the more we become aware of His story how we can participate in Missio Dei.
Missional Communities
God desire for us is always to be in positive, loving relationship with the world around us. For this reason, Missional Discipleship is always engaged in some type of community (small group and/or mentor). Jesus provided a very specific model of a small mission community working together over a three-year period practicing missional discipleship; learning to be loved and to love. It was a gathering of twelve individuals (typically gender related) for the sake of engaging His mission of restoration. This was first an inward process of restoring the heart through the restoration of relationship with the Father, which led to the restoration of the participant’s dignity through His love. This inward process became a journey of actively engaging a relationship with the Father, where we discover our own dignity. The central value of the community is to help us “work” towards maturity, by helping us see reality, removing the obstacles (wounds, lies, fears) that hindered our own growth towards maturity, and helping us step into trust with the Father. This community with a purpose is called “communitas”.
Missional communities also engage an outward focus of restoring the world around them, typically local relationship they are already engaged in. This outward focus will always include the poor and the oppressed. It can include simple acts of love or long-term projects of justice. In all cases, the community is speaking into the dignity of the world around them.
The Story
Scripture is a collection of stories centered on God’s desire and intent to restore His creation. But as humans we are predominantly born into broken, dysfunctional families that have little to no connection to a true picture of God. Our stories are what we have experienced and now throughout our lives.
For this reason Missio Dei is about engaging a story of restoration. The story invites us into experiences what God’s character is like and how God chooses to act. It invites us to see if God is trustworthy by engaging Him in relationship through trust. In this process we create a new story about God’s capacity and desire to act in our lives.
The Enemy
Throughout God’s story, there is the presence of an enemy. The intent of the enemy is to oppress God’s creation using three primary tactics, lies, fear, and division so that we will compromise the self. God is always actively working to bring us out of that oppression and towards restoration.
The first primary tactic of the enemy is to use lies to distort the truth and bring us into systematic oppression. The primary attack is typically directed at our dignity or identity. These lies distort our perception of reality and stunt our growth as humans. Oppression is any action that gets us to question, distort or destroy someone’s dignity or identity, which can only be established and validated by God. Oppression lures us into alternative forms of validation based upon performance, circumstance, or through the opinions of close relationships, and not God’s declarations. To protect ourselves from harm, we create plastic protective selves that are pale reflections of who we are designed to be.
The second tactic of the enemy is to use fear to keep people in an oppressive situation. Fear is the judgment of harm and lures us into a fight or flight response. It closes us down and keeps us from learning and relationships. It also keeps us from taking a stand for our own dignity.
The third tactic of the enemy is “divide and conquer”. This is accomplished by creating some disagreement that breaks the relationship of two people who are a threat to the oppression. Historically this has been accomplished by focusing on those things that require a judgment about something. The enemy often invites us into believing that our way of seeing things is the “right answer”. To be wrong will appear to invalidate the self. And so we hold onto our judgments as a means of validation.
The work of Jesus established His and our authority over the enemy. We can only enjoy this authority when we step into our place as children of the Father. The primary way we counter the work of the enemy is through removing the lies and restoring the person’s dignity through love. Again, the primary work is the restoration of the dignity of the individual. A second element of the mission is reconciliation through forgiveness that restores relationship.
Conclusion
Missio Dei is not a nebulous theological abstract. It is a very real mission we actually take part in. It is engaging in God’s very clear mission of restoration so that we can discover our own dignity in His amazing love as a Father. It allows us to be His children, love redeemed, restored and in relationship. And in the process, we discover a life worth living as we take part in the restoration of the world around us. We now have love to give.
For more information on missional discipleship, see Thrive Ministries.
Jonathan,
I appreciate your introduction to Missio Dei here. I am studying this for some work I am doing for my church denomination’s upcoming national (Canada) conference. My focus is on First Nations ministry, and the Missio Dei philosophy provides some wonderful avenues for ministry that the church has not used – at least not for a long time.
There is more to our message than evangelism and invitations to become like “US”. We need to demonstrate the fruit of the Spirit and share the joy of knowing Jesus without the denominational hooks.
thanks, I downloaded the article for closer study.
Dave
David, Glad I could help. Hope it supports what you are doing.
Interesting stuff – can you recommend any books of a theological nature that I can use to research this? or any major thinkers within the field?
Rob, I would suggest Scripture instead, especially the Gospels.
Jonathon,
I might suggest a clearer definition of the word Scripture as you use it. A non-churched person from another background (ie, Muslim or Buddhist) have a “scripture” more familiar to them than what you are referring to or is this a document just for “insiders” already?
You don’t talk about the specifics of our “full and complete access to the Father”. What does the individual have to do to experience this, or does everybody already have it?
I think you have outlined a great narrative of what God has done and is doing through the history of humanity. You have done well to stay away from an “Us-Them” attitude – I think this is the biggest mistake the church has done in the last 2,000 yeears of the narrative. It is an “Us”… there are no other distinctions. We are all part of humanity.
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