Missional Church: From Disengagement to Reengagement

The church must live out its missional identity as salt and light by being disengaged from the dominant culture first and then engaged in it with a fresh understanding of the gospel. It is through disengagement that the church keeps a distance from its surrounding culture and asks what it means to be out of the world and also in the world. To be disengaged from it is to be reengaged in it with new identity and mission. Douglas John Hall names this act as “disengagement as a work of theology.”[1] As Hall rightly says:

To put it quite clearly, for North American Christians who are serious about re-forming the church so that it may become a more faithful bearer of divine judgment and mercy in our social context, there is no alternative to engaging in a disciplined, prolonged, and, above all, critical work of theology.[2]

 

In order for the church to re-vision what the church is supposed to be and do, a critical, contextual theology must be redeveloped in disengagement. In his essay, “Metamorphosis: From Christendom to Diaspora,” Douglas John Hall says, “We need to learn a critical and constructive theology of the church that is based on the charter of Scripture and informed by the Holy Spirit, in contrast to one that is entrenched in the ecclesial conventions of Christendom.”[3] A new set of contextual theology needs to be redeveloped for the church to become a faithful witness in the world.

To be a missional church is to be disengaged from culture first and then being sent back to the world by the Sender, the Triune God. “Disengagement from our status of cultural establishment is primarily, then, a work of theology. But whoever thinks that theology is a remote, abstract undertaking has not yet been grasped by the Word of the cross!”[4] A sending church must first learn to be a sent community associated with the Sender. It is the Sender who defines the church as a sent community through which the Triune God accomplishes his redemptive purpose. The church is not the subject of this sending business. The church is always understood as a sent community, for mission belongs to God. As Georg F. Vicedom rightly noted, “The mission is work that belongs to God. This is the first implication of missio Dei.”[5]

Being disengaged from the world is a necessary step for the church to take because she has been long forgotten by the wider culture in the post-Christian era. It is God’s providence to allow the church to be in the place of marginality. As a result, the church is placed in a “solitary” place to question her own identity and mission once again in order for her to be on the move toward God’s mission. It is in “a position of redemptive self-doubt”[6] that the church can unlearn its missionary methods under the impact of Christendom and relearn the relations between gospel, culture, and church through the lens of missio Dei.

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[1] Douglas John Hall, “Ecclesia Crucis: The Theologic of Christian Awkwardness,” in The Church Between Gospel and Culture, edited by George R. Hunsberger and Craig Van Gelder (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), pp. 198-203.

[2] Ibid., p. 199.

[3] Douglas John Hall, “Metamorphosis: From Christendom to Diaspora,” in Confident Witness—Changing World: Rediscovering the Gospel in North America, edited by Graig Van Gelder (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), p. 73.

[4] Hall, “Ecclesia Crucis: The Theologic of Christian Awkwardness,” p. 203.

[5] Georg F. Vicedom, The Mission of God: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission (St. Louis: Concordia, 1965), p. 5.

[6] Hall, “Metamorphosis: From Christendom to Diaspora,” p. 76.