i.What is mission?

I grew up in Dorset, only a few miles from Poole Harbour whose expansive circumference became a common destination for cycling trips. From various vantage points one could watch the ferries make their escape through the narrow, natural harbour entrance that separates Sandbanks from Shell Bay. What caught my attention most was the wake created by these vessels. It was not huge in absolute terms, but it made an unrelenting and steady progress from the bow of the ship to the shore. As it migrated to land, everything in its path responded, rising and falling until the wave finally broke.

It is a commonplace to state that it is not the church which has a mission. Rather it is the Trinitarian mission of God that creates the church. The church is then that part of creation which explicitly accepts its place in the consequences of the Father’s sending of the Son and the Spirit. Although it might be slightly blasphemous to equate the Trinitarian God with a ferry, it is the image of that wake that comes to mind when I think on this matter. The church is moved by the wake of the mission of God as is a seabird floating on the water; we have no choice. In mission we point away from ourselves and to the movement of God that is at work in the world. We do not create that movement, we do not own it, but, by our movement in response to it, we make it known.

Allow me to change the image for another. Mission is something like the instinct we have to share with a friend a favourite holiday destination or piece of music. Something about the location, something about the music, has affected us and moved us; it has refreshed us, opened up new perspectives, or perhaps somehow put the world back together again for us. But neither the landscape nor the music is our creation. We do not own them, and more, we cannot legislate for how they will be received. We can only point to their power on us and invite exploration. It is just this way, though at a rather different scale of significance, that we are called to witness to the Christ who has found us and called us to himself. And though the church might offer one location in which Christ can be experienced, it is not the church we are pointing to, at least not in any primary sense.

Scripture is the record and the result of the wake of God’s movement, in Christ and the Spirit, as it shifted the ground and refashioned the landscape of life and belief. If the Bible accompanies us in mission – as it did that extraordinary collection of Celtic missionaries that were at work in the latter half of the first millennium – it does so not as proof text, not as sales brochure, but as primary witness to the eternal movement of God’s loving outreach which is but the temporal expression of the waves of God’s uninterrupted life of love flowing to and fro.