Lecture 0: What Mission Is, and Why This Course Matters
Every church, whether it names the word or not, already holds a position on mission. A congregation that never speaks of anyone beyond its own membership has taken a position, just as surely as one that sends a family overseas every decade. Missiology is the discipline of examining that position on purpose - asking what the Bible actually claims about God's reach into the nations, testing it against two thousand years of the church's attempts to obey it, and building the theological and practical judgment a Christian needs to take part in it wisely.
This course treats mission as something God does, in which the church is invited to participate, rather than a program the church invents and then asks God to bless. That distinction - the Missio Dei, "the mission of God" - is not a slogan; it changes where a missiologist starts. God does not need a committee's authorization to be at work among a people group. The church's task is to discern where God is already moving and join it, not to originate motion where there was none. Genesis 12:3 sets the arc before Israel has a temple, a king, or a law code: Abraham is blessed "to be a blessing" (Genesis 12:3, World English Bible), and every later missionary sentence in Scripture - the prophets' vision of the nations streaming to Zion, Jesus sending as the Father sent him, Paul's travels, the vision of every tribe and tongue in Revelation - traces back to that one verse.
Fourteen chapters carry that starting point into the full scope of the field. Chapters 1 through 3 build the foundation: a biblical theology of mission, the history of how the church has tried to carry it out, and the theological questions - about other religions, about how far contextualization may go - that a missiologist cannot honestly avoid. Chapters 4 through 6 supply the working craft: reading a culture, choosing a strategy, and discerning and preparing for a call. Chapters 7 through 10 take that craft into specific fields: peoples with no access to the gospel, cities and diaspora communities, mission at home, and the church's holistic responsibility for justice and compassion. Chapters 11 through 13 turn to what sustains mission across decades rather than a single trip: the sending church, short-term mission done responsibly, and the missionary's own long-term survival.
This course does not assume every reader will agree on how mission relates to other religions, how far a missionary may adapt to a host culture before adaptation becomes compromise, or how evangelism and social justice should be weighted against each other. These are treated as live, contested questions throughout, because most of the church - Catholic, Orthodox, Pentecostal, and Protestant traditions of many kinds - answers them differently, and a course that quietly assumed one answer would be teaching that answer as if it were the only Christian one.
What this course does not cover. This is not a course in the anthropology or linguistics that undergird cross-cultural work, though both are drawn on where useful. It does not train a specific mission agency's field methods or evaluate any agency by name. It does not adjudicate a denomination's polity for ordaining or credentialing missionaries. And while chapter 3 treats the theology of religions as a live question, this is not a course in comparative religion for its own sake - other faiths appear here only where mission theology has to reckon with them.
이 12분으로 얻는 것
- State the Missio Dei in your own words and explain why it makes mission something the church joins rather than originates.
- Trace the arc from Genesis 12:3 to the Great Commission as one continuous missionary thread through Scripture.
- Describe in outline how the course's fourteen chapters move from biblical and historical foundation, through practical craft, into specific fields and long-term sustainability.
- Name at least two questions this course treats as genuinely contested among Christian traditions, and one thing this course deliberately does not cover.
"I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you. All the families of the earth will be blessed through you." (Genesis 12:3, World English Bible)
"Jesus therefore said to them again, 'Peace be to you. As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.'" (John 20:21, WEB)
Mission before the word "missionary"
The word "missionary" does not appear in the Old Testament, and Israel was never commanded to organize sending agencies. Yet the Old Testament is saturated with a missionary logic from its opening chapters onward: a God who is not a tribal deity but the maker of every nation, who chooses one family not to keep a blessing for itself but to carry it outward. Christopher Wright, in a widely used missiological reading of the whole Bible, argues that mission is not one theme among the Bible's many themes but the framework the biblical story is told inside - the question "what is God doing in the world, and how does the whole of Scripture answer it" is itself a missionary question. Not every biblical scholar frames the entire canon this christologically-and-missionally; some argue the term "mission" stretches to cover too much when applied to every book. That disagreement is worth naming here rather than papering over: this course follows Wright's broad framing as a organizing lens, while acknowledging it is a lens, not the only way the material could be organized.
The Missio Dei: whose mission is it
The phrase entered widespread missiological use in the twentieth century, associated especially with the 1952 Willingen conference of the International Missionary Council, and it reoriented a debate that had run for decades: is mission something the church does because Christ commanded it (an ecclesiocentric view, mission flowing from the church outward), or is mission something God does, in which the church participates as one instrument among others (a theocentric view)? The theocentric answer does not make the church optional - Scripture never pictures God accomplishing mission without human witnesses - but it changes the church's posture from initiator to participant. A missionary does not bring God to a place God was previously absent from; a missionary joins a work already under way, often visible in ways the missionary did not expect and cannot control.
This has a practical edge that reappears throughout the course. If mission belongs to God, then a church's fruitfulness is not proof of superior strategy, and a season with little visible fruit is not proof of God's absence or of a missionary's failure (a question chapter 13 returns to directly). It also means listening for what God may already be doing among a people - through general , through a longing the culture cannot name, through an unexpected convert who reached the gospel with no missionary present - is not naivete but a serious theological expectation.
From Abraham to the nations: one thread, not several proof texts
Genesis 12:3 is often cited alone, but its force is easiest to see against everything it interrupts. Genesis 1-11 narrates a widening estrangement - Eden's exile, Cain's violence, the flood, Babel's scattering into confused nations. Genesis 12 answers that scattering not by picking a favorite nation to reward, but by choosing one family through whom "all the families of the earth" - the very nations just scattered at Babel - will be blessed. The prophets pick the thread back up centuries later: Isaiah pictures nations streaming to Zion's light (Isaiah 60:3) and God's servant given "as a light to the nations" (Isaiah 49:6); the Psalms repeatedly call the nations to praise, not merely observe, Israel's God (Psalm 86:9, one text this course returns to in chapter 1). By the time John's Gospel records Jesus the disciples "as the Father has sent me, even so I send you" (John 20:21, WEB), the sending pattern is not a new idea introduced at the end of the story - it is the story's oldest promise finally handed to its bearers. Matthew's Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20) and Acts' geographic outline "to the ends of the earth" (Acts 1:8) complete the same thread rather than starting a different one. Chapter 1 works through each link in this chain in full.
Reading this course fairly
A course on mission risks two opposite failures. It can flatten the church's missionary history into an uncomplicated success story, ignoring the real damage some missionary efforts did alongside real good. Or it can flatten it into an uncomplicated story of colonial harm, ignoring costly faithfulness and genuine transformation that also happened. Chapter 2's history and chapter 3's theological questions both try to hold the harder, mixed picture: missionaries who learned languages no outsider had bothered to learn and translated Scripture for the first time into them, standing beside missionary efforts entangled with colonial power in ways their own participants sometimes recognized only in hindsight. Naming both is not equin; it is what the historical record actually shows.
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묵상 및 토론
- Before this lecture, would you have described mission as something the church does, or something God does that the church joins? Has that changed, and why?
- Trace the thread from Genesis 12:3 to Acts 1:8 in your own words. What would be lost if a missiologist treated the Great Commission as the *beginning* of the biblical mission story rather than its culmination?
- This course names contested questions rather than resolving them in advance. What is one advantage, and one risk, of studying mission this way rather than being taught a single tradition's settled answers?