Category: Bible and Mission

For an number of years Brian Russell has been an excellent advocate of a missional hermeneutic and how it relates to Church, the Bible and mission.

In the latest issue of the online journal Catalyst Brian contributes an article on Exploring New Language for Proclaiming the Gospel. He opens it up by saying:

The key to developing new language for proclaiming the gospel is learning to listen to the surrounding culture for its prevailing metaphors and stories. It’s not about our creativity as communicators but our capacity to listen and study attentively. Our assumption is that our missional God in the person of the Risen Christ is leading his people into the world on mission. Jesus goes before us. It’s our task to be attentive to the Spirit’s leading so that we may build on what God is already doing. In other words, the new language already exists. It’s up to us to find it, refit it with gospel content, and deploy it. Think of Paul on Mars Hill in Acts 17. It’s about committing to using the language of the street and the marketplace rather than only the language of the church. When we read the Scriptures within their ancient contexts, we discover that biblical authors drew deeply from the prevailing culture in deploying the metaphors and symbols of the day as vehicles for telling God’s story.

He then illustrates this with some examples from the books of Genesis, Exodus and Philippians before finishing with three questions for the reader to consider:

What are the dominant ideals and stories of the people whom God has sent you to serve?

How does the gospel engage these ideas?

What language is already present that can serve as a vehicle for clearly communicating the gospel in your context?

I’m really pleased to see Brian writing on these issues. Knowing the historical and cultural background to biblical texts can provide wonderful insights which fuel our understanding of the Bible and how it relates to mission. As Brian illustrates, it can also fuel how we do mission as well.

Here’s a link to a video where Brian explains his passion for what he does.

He has also contributed to issues of Redcliffe’s Encounters Mission Journal:

Reading the Bible with the Global Church – A Response from the United States – March 2013

Psalms 1-2 as an introduction to Reading the Psalms Missionally – June 2010

Breaking Open the Text: A reflection on Chris Wright’s Missional Reading of Jeremiah – June 2009

You can also read Brian’s blog articles on missional hermeneutics here

NT Wright’s new 1700 page book on Paul and the Faithfulness of God is out in a few weeks and there is a video of an interesting interview with him by Michael Bird here.

What struck me was the importance Wright gives to the missional nature of the identity and activity of both Paul himself and also the churches he was planting. Here’s the key part of the interview, which begins at around 4 mins 15 seconds:

Paul was doing [his theology] in the service of the mission that he had. He wasn’t an armchair thinker. He was doing this because he believed it was his job. It was his vocation to plant churches (i.e., little communities of Jesus followers) in Caesar’s world, in such a way that they would be communities shaped by this message, by this gospel, by this theology, so that they would be united, so that they would be holy, so that they would be able to take forward the mission of God.

Here’s the blurb from SPCK’s website on the book itself:

We are proud to announce that the highly anticipated fourth volume of the Christian Origins and the Question of God series is currently in production and due for publication in October 2013!

Paul and the Faithfulness of God pays rich tribute to the breadth and depth of the apostle’s vision, and offers an unparalleled wealth of insights into his life, times and lasting impact.

Rowan Williams says:

‘Tom Wright’s long-awaited full-length study of St Paul will not in any way disappoint the high expectations that surround it.  From the very first sentence, it holds the attention, arguing a strong, persuasive, coherent and fresh case, supported by immense scholarship and comprehensive theological intelligence. ’

Paul and the Faithfulness of God will be bound as a 2-volume set and available in both paperback and hardback at £65 and £125 respectively.

Professor Wright has said of the work:

St Paul was highly controversial in his own day, and he remains so, not only for Christians and Jews but in western culture as a whole. In this new two-volume treatment I argue for a particular historical and theological understanding of him. He remains a deeply Jewish thinker, but his vision of the three central Jewish beliefs – one God, one people of God, one future for the world – was reworked around Jesus as the Messiah and around the holy spirit.

David G. Horrell, Professor of New Testament Studies, University of Exeter writes:

Tom Wright’s big book on Paul has long been eagerly awaited. And here it is! Massive in every sense of the word, this is a synthetic, scholarly, and comprehensive analysis of Paul, worked out using the key categories outlined in The New Testament and the People of God, showing how Paul, as a Jew in the Roman Empire, reworked the framework of monotheism, election, and eschatology around Jesus and the Spirit. Written with elegance and humour, full of detailed exegesis and engaging with a very wide range of contemporary scholarship, this major achievement will be a landmark in the field of Pauline studies for many years to come.

As we approach the start of a new academic year it’s good to ask some fundamental questions about what we mean by the term ‘mission’ and why it matters.

It seems that there has been a trend in recent years for fewer people to go into long-term work overseas. While there may be lots of reasons for this, one that is sometimes suggested is the growing conviction that we already have a mission field here in the UK. There is so much to do here so why go elsewhere?

Obviously it is utterly fantastic that we as a Church realise our already-sentness: that God has placed us to be bearers of his good news right where we are. And, of course, ‘where we are’ may be just as intercultural (if not more so) that many places around the world.

But where does that leave the need to send and support people to go overseas?

In an article for Christianity Today (Missions vs. Missional? Why We Really Need Both), US missiologist Ed Stetzer makes a helpful contribution to the discussion, arguing that we need both. Indeed,

The two issues are distinct and yet integrated. They are not mutually exclusive, but thrive best when they are both embraced and implemented in a local church body. Living on mission is not a missions issue, per se. It’s a Christian issue. Part of living on mission, however, must lead to missions…

Mission and missions need to live together. Missional churches—those focused on living on mission where we are—must remember that Jesus called us to reach people where the gospel is not. I want us to be missional, living as agents of God’s mission in context, but you can’t take John 20:21 in isolation without also remembering Matthew 28:18-20 and Acts 1:8.

In other words, a passion to reach the lost globally should impact how we live out our faith locally. Similarly, a missional mindset in our local community should shape us in such a way as to invest ourselves in the less-local. They fuel each other.

And as I prepare to teach my classes this semester (A Missional Intro to the OT; Missional Texts: Psalms and Genesis 1-11; Missional Texts: Isaiah; Reading the Bible Missionally) Stetzer’s article is a helpful reminder that a whole-Bible approach is essential. Just because I feel I can justify one course of action as biblical, this doesn’t mean it is the only biblical course of action. It is not that we are being unbiblical; rather we are not being biblical enough.

Roll on the new term!

I get a lot of hits on old posts notifying people that they can access different Bible versions on their phones. Often this happens for a limited amount of time, but YouVersion has just announced a more permanent opportunity to access the NIV, as well as some other versions. Here’s the blurb with links:

By Popular Demand: Offline Access to NIV & More

The New International Version (NIV) and 30 other versions from Biblica are now available for free download through the Bible App™. Biblica has been a valuable partner since YouVersion’s early days, and we’re thrilled with their bold move to make this diverse collection of versions available to the global YouVersion community.

These versions represent some of your favorites in 25 languages, including NVI in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, KLB in Korean, NIV-UK in British English, HFA in German, HTB in Dutch, and BDS in French. It’s a huge step forward in increasing worldwide Scripture engagement and availability.

If you download any of these versions to your device, you’ll be able to read it anytime, anywhere—even when you can’t connect to your service provider or to the Internet. And this is not a limited-time special offer.Beginning today, Biblica is making these versions available offline on an ongoing basis.

(If you’re not sure how to download a Bible version to your device, visit our support website to learn how easy it is!)

We are deeply grateful for Biblica’s partnership and all that it has already meant to YouVersion and to our community worldwide. Biblica continues to demonstrate increasing passion about the mission of helping this generation become the most Bible-engaged generation in history.

Today we had a faculty retreat day in preparation for the year ahead at Redcliffe. We were led in the morning by Antony Billington and Tracy Cotterell from LICC (London Institute of Contemporary Christianity) who helped us to reflect in really valuable ways on God’s Word and the nature of whole-life missional discipleship.

You can see a video here of Antony describing LICC’s approach to Bible Engagement. The website also has loads of resources on the Bible and mission. For example, their Bible & Culture section explains,

The Word of God, illuminated by the Holy Spirit, is the primary means for knowing God and being shaped into the image of his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.  From beginning to end, Scripture tells of God’s redemptive purposes not only for the church but for all creation, including our own role in that great plan.

LICC remains committed to seeking wisdom for the big questions of our time and the minutiae of our daily lives by listening to God’s word.  But if we are to really equip Christians to show and share the transforming power of the Gospel in word and action, then we need to listen carefully, both to the attitudes and beliefs, concerns and fears of people in contemporary society and also to Christians’ own experiences and concerns.