Daniel Im

Pastor + Author

Church Multiplication

Book Review: The Mission of God – Christopher Wright

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This is an analytical book review of Christopher Wright’s The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative.

Rev. Dr. Christopher Wright’s passion is bringing life to the “relevance of the Old Testament to Christian mission and ethics.” In addition to his current role as the Director over Langham Partnership International after John Stott’s death, he has experience as a High School teacher, theological professor, and as an ordained minister with the Anglican Church of England.

The Mission of God is a magnum opus describing the mission of God. In other words, the thesis of this book is not only that Christian mission is firmly grounded in Scripture, but also that Scripture is most accurately read through a hermeneutical framework that is centered on the mission of God (26). In other words, “God’s mission is what fills the gap between the scattering of the nations in Genesis 11 and the healing of the nations in Revelation 22” (455).

Wright navigates readers through his comprehensive study of the mission of God by dividing his book into four parts: The Bible and Mission, The God of Mission, The People of Mission, and The Arena of Mission. In the first part, Wright describes what a missiological hermeneutic of the Bible entails. He argues that individuals need to understand the Bible’s grand metanarrative, and also that the proper way to read the Bible is messianically and missionally (31). In the second part, Wright unpacks the identity, uniqueness, and universality of the God of Israel and Jesus Christ and the ensuing implications for mission (27). He finishes the section by paying attention to the opposition of the mission of God – idols and gods. In the third part, one discovers that the primary agent of the mission of God is the people of God. This is noticeable by examining the biblical covenants and the narrative of Scripture. Wright finishes his magnum opus by concentrating on the Arena of Mission – the earth, humans, and all culture and nations.

There have only been a few books that I have read and come away with a sense of awe, humility, and a passion to reread it and act on what I have read – The Mission of God is the most recent.

What kind of me does God wants for his mission?

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Making Idols

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From Judy Baxter

We all tend to make idols. So to prevent ourselves from doing so, it’s important to understand from what we are manufacturing our idols from.

  • Things that entice us
  • Things we fear
  • Things that we trust
  • Things we need

Whenever we make idols from these things, we are basically rejecting God.

“The only antidote to such idolatries, and therefore the task of biblical mission, is to lead people back to acknowledge the only true and living God in all of these domains.”

– Christopher Wright, The Mission of God

 

What does success look like in ministry?

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Photo from (c) eye4deep

“When pastors don’t have rich spiritual lives with Christ, they become victimized by other models of success—models conveyed to them by their training, by their experience in the church, or just by our culture. They begin to think their job is managing a set of ministry activities and success is about getting more people to engage those activities. Pastors, and those they lead, need to be set free from that belief.”

– Dallas Willard

Click here for the Christianity Today article.

Book Review: A Community of Character – Stanley Hauerwas

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This is an analytical book review of Stanley Hauerwas’ A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic.

Stanley Hauerwas is the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School and he holds a joint appointment with Duke Law School. Hauerwas’ Methodist roots and diverse education and work experience contributes to an ecumenical theological stance that is not liberal (12). In addition to his ecumenicism, he is cross-disciplinary, as “he is in conversation with systematic theology, philosophical theology and ethics, political theory, as well as the philosophy of social science and medical ethics.”

The thesis of this book is that Christian morality and ethics can only make sense and be applied to one’s life when one is living within the continuing narrative of the Christian story. As a result, Hauerwas frames everything he writes about in this book around the concept of narrative because without narratives, there is a loss of community (18).

  1. This book is essentially divided up into three parts. The first part addresses how every community needs to be rooted in a narrative. For Christians, Jesus and the Kingdom of God is the narrative that forms the church (50). Furthermore, it is the Christian’s belief in the authority of Scripture and God that enables the church to be the contrast model/community to a society that does not value authority.
  2. The second part of the book continues to emphasize the importance of narrative in understanding the church since Christians are a “storied people” worshipping a “storied God” (91). Hauerwas claims that Christians need to cultivate hope and patience in their life in order to be a contrast narrative to this world (128). For the Christian to grow in character, it is crucial that he/she learn to participate in the story of the people of God, rather than just hear about it (152).
  3. Consequently, the first two parts set up the theoretical basis for the third part, where he applies the concepts addressed in the first two parts to discuss what kind of ethic the church should have toward the family, sex, and abortion. His discussion is framed around the fact that one cannot separate one’s views on the family, sex, and abortion from the greater narrative of the church.

I love the way Hauerwas decides to address the family, sex, and abortion in the last section, since these are the pressing ethical issues that the church needs to be firm on, in order to be a contrast society.

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