The Christology of Mission

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John Stott

'Missiology' is a recognized discipline with increasingly, broad parameters. It includes the history of Christian missions; the comparative study of religions, the theology of religions and the uniqueness of Christ; the biblical basis for mission; mission strategies and church growth; missionary motives and methods; questions of culture, contextualization and church formation; the relations between evangelism and social responsibility; and the renewal of the church. Yet sometimes missing from this list is what might be called the 'Christology' of mission, which acknowledges Christ as the source and way, the heart and soul, the ground and goal, of all mission Nothing is more important for the recovery of the church's mission (where it has been lost), or its development (where it is weak), than a fresh, clear and comprehensive vision of Jesus Christ. When he is demeaned, and specially when he is denied, in the foulness of his unique person and work, the church lacks motivation and direction, our morale crumbles and our mission disintegrates. But when we see Jesus, it is enough. We have all the inspiration, incentive, authority and power we need.

I propose in this chapter, then, that we take a fresh look at our Lord and Saviour, that we rehearse the six major even in his saving career (his incarnation, cross, resurrection, exaltation, Spirit-gift and parousia), and that we note the inescapable (though often neglected) missionary dimension of each.

The incarnation of Christ The model for mission

According to the Willow bank Report on Gospel and Culture  (1978), already mentioned several times, the incarnation was 'the most spectacular instance of cultural identification in the history of mankind'. For the Son of God did not stay in the safe immunity of his heaven, remote from human sin and tragedy. He actually entered our world. He emptied himself of his glory and humbled himself to serve. He took our nature, lived our life, endured our temptations, experienced our sorrows, felt our hurts, bore our sins and died our death. He penetrated deeply into our humanness. He never stayed aloof from the people he might have been expected to avoid. He made friends with the dropouts of society. He even touched untouchables. He could not have become more one with us than he did. It was the total identification of love.

Reflecting on the meaning of mission, I have sometimes compared and contrasted in my mind Christ's mission to the earth with the Apollo mission to the moon. The analogy is shallow, no doubt, but it is also instructive, for there are both similarities and dissimilarities between them. They are similar, one might pay, in that each is described as a 'mission', and consisted of a sensational, cross-cultural journey, in the case of Christ from heaven to earth, and of the astronauts from earth to moon. They are different, however, in the degree and depth of the identification involved. The Apollo astronauts never identified with the moon; if they had attempted to do so, they would have been dead in a moment. Instead, they took with them' the accoutrements of the earth - earth's oxygen, equipment, clothing and food. But when Jesus came from heaven to earth, he left heaven behind him and brought nothing but himself. His was no superficial touchdown. He became a human being like us and so made himself vulnerable like us.

Yet, as we noted in chapter 15, when Christ identified with us, he did not surrender or in any way alter his own identity.  For in becoming one of us, he yet remained himself. He became human, but without ceasing to be God.

Now he sends us into the world, as the Father sent him into the world. In other words, our mission is to be modeled on him.  Indeed, all authentic mission is incarnational mission. It demands identification without loss of identity. It, means entering other people's worlds, as he entered ours, though without compromising our Christ Jan convictions, values or standards.

I take the apostle Paul as an example. You could argue, and some people have argued, that Paul did not enter personally into the lives of the people he sought to evangelize; that he was essentially a preacher to anonymous faces, in the synagogue or in the open air; and that he kept his distance from the people he addressed. But no, that is not how he himself saw his ministry, On the contrary, although he was free, he made himself everybody's slave. 'To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews ... To those not having the law I became like one not having the law ..., so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.' That is the principle of the incarnation. It is identification with people where they are.

In the history of missions there have been many dramatic examples of Christians trying to apply this principle. I mention three, taken from the last three centuries. In 1732 Count Zinzendorf, the Moravian leader, sent two of his missionaries to the West Indian sugar plantations. They found that the only way to reach the African slaves was to join their chain gangs and share their huts. In 1882 Major Frederick Tucker launched the Salvation Army in India. General Booth's last words to him were, 'Get into their skins, Tucker.' He did. Deeply concerned for the outcastes, he decided that he and his soldiers must live their life. So they donned saffron robes, adopted Indian names, walked barefoot, cleaned their teeth with charcoal, and ate their curry and water sitting cross-legged on the floor.

Then in 1950 a young Italian Roman Catholic priest, Mario Borelli, horrified by the loveless, homeless plight of the scugnizzi, Naples' street children, decided that the only way to reach them was to become one of them. He took on 'their dress, their speech, their habits'. He may well have gone too far. And missionaries are not always wise to 'go native', 'principally because a foreigner's attempt to do this may not be seen as authentic but as play-acting'. Nevertheless, one cannot but admire these daring attempts to follow the example of Christ's incarnation.

For most of us, however, the incarnational model will involve a more mundane struggle. First, there is the need to enter into other people's thought world. In this connection I have always liked the title of Jim Sire's book The Universe Next Door. He sub-titles it A Basic World View Catalogue and sketches the meaning of deism, naturalism, nihilism, existentialism, eastern pantheistic monism, etc. His point is that such people live in another universe of thought; it will therefore take a kind of incarnation to reach them.

Similarly, at the ecumenical missionary conference in Melbourne in May 1980, John V. Taylor, then Bishop of Winchester, emphasized that we will never be able to commend the gospel to modern sceptics 'so long as we remain inside our own cultural stockades. Genuine outsiders', he continues, 'can only be reached outside ... If we do not naturally belong to the world of the particular "outsiders" we want to reach, some of us must take the trouble to cross over and learn to be at home in that alien territory...'.

We should, I believe, be praying and working for a whole new generation of Christian thinkers and apologists who will dedicate their God-given minds to Christ, enter sympathetically into their contemporaries; dilemmas, unmask false ideologies and present the gospel of Jesus Christ in such a way that he is seen to offer what other religious systems cannot, because he and he alone can fulfill our deepest human aspirations. At least in the West, where the Enlightenment has run out of steam, the time is now ripe, urges Bishop Lesslie Newbigin, for 'a genuinely missionary encounter with post-Enlightenment culture.

Secondly, we need to enter other people's heart world, the world of their Angst and their alienation, and to weep with those who weep. In every non-Christian (and many Christian too), even in the jolliest extraverts, there are hidden depths of pain. We can reach them only if we are willing to enter into their suffering. It will also include entering into people's reality, as we saw in the last chapter, for it is impossible to share the gospel with people in a social vacuum, isolating them from their actual context and ignoring their suffering.

The cross of Christ. The cost of mission

One of the most neglected aspects of biblical mission today is the indispensable place in it of suffering, even of death. Yet it is plain in Scripture. Let me give you three examples.

First, we see it clearly in Isaiah's suffering servant. Before the servant can be a light to the nations and bring salvation to the ends of the earth, he offers his back to those who beat him, his cheeks to those who pull out his beard, and his face to mockery and spitting. Before he can 'sprinkle many nations', he is 'despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering'. More than that, he bears our sins and dies for us as a guilt offering. Douglas Webster laid a proper emphasis on this. He wrote:

Mission sooner or later leads into passion, In biblical categories ... the servant must suffer ...; it is that which makes mission effective ... Every form of mission leads to some form of cross. The very shape of mission is cruciform, We can understand mission only in time-of the Cross...'

Secondly, the Lord Jesus himself taught and exhibited this principle, and extended it to his for lowers. When those Greeks wanted to see him, he said: 'The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified (sc. on the cross). I tell you the truth, unless grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a ingle seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.' In other words, only through his death would the gospel be extended to ?? Gentile world. So death is more than the way to life; it is the condition of fruitfulness. Unless it dies, the seed remains alone. But if dies, it multiplies. It was so for the Messiah-, it is the same for the messianic community. For 'whoever serves me must follow me', Jesus said.

Thirdly, the apostle Paul applied the same principle to himself Consider these extraordinary texts:  I ask you, therefore, not to be discouraged because of my  sufferings for you, which are your glory.

Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they too may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with  eternal glory.

So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.' These three verses contain some truly startling statements. Paul dares to claim that through his sufferings others will enter into glory, that through his endurance others will be saved, and that through his death others will live. Is the apostle out of his mind? No! Does he really mean it? Yes! It is not, of course, that he attributes any atoning efficacy to his own sufferings and death, as he does to the sufferings and death of Jesus Christ. It is rather this. People can receive salvation, life and glory only when the gospel is preached to them, and those who preach the gospel with faithfulness invariably suffer for it. Paul knew what he was talking about. The reason why he became a prisoner, and was chained, is that he had been faithful to the 'heavenly vision' that Gentiles would be received into the Christian community on precisely the same terms as Jews. It was this aspect of the gospel which aroused almost fanatical opposition to him. And the Gentiles owed their salvation to his willingness to suffer for his proclamation of this good news.

There have been many examples since Paul of suffering for the gospel. It is not an accident that the Greek word for 'witness' is martyrs. The pages of church history are replete with stories of persecution. Sometimes it has been physical. In 1880, soon after the Salvation Army had been founded in Britain, 'publicans and brothel-keepers were launching a savage all-out counter-attack ... The Army learned the bleak truth of the Spanish proverb: "He who would be a Christian must expect crucifixion" ... In one year -- 1882 -- 669 Salvation Army officers were knocked down or brutally assaulted.' When Salvationists dedicated their children in the 1880s, they confessed their willingness that thief children should be 'despised, hated, cursed, beaten, kicked, imprisoned or killed for Christ's sake'.

At other rimes the suffering was more mental than physical. The Marcchale, for example, as the eldest daughter of General Booth was always known, wrote an article in 1883 for the War Cry from her prison cell in Neuchatel, Switzerland, in which she reflected on inward crucifixion. 

Jesus was crucified ... Ever since that day, men have tried to find an easier way, but the easier ways fail. If you would win thousands who are without God, you must be ready to be crucified: your plans, your ideas, your likes and your inclinations. Things have changed, you say, there is liberty now. Is there? Go and live Christ's life, speak as he spoke, teach what he taught, denounce sin wherever you find it, and see if the enemy will not turn on you with all the fury of hell... Christ wasn't crucified in the drawing-room. His was no easy-chair business... Do you shrink from being bated, misrepresented and spoken evil of? It is time you were crucified ... Yet a third kind of suffering is social. Vincent Donovan, an American Roman Catholic priest who labored for seventeen years among the Masai in Tanzania, once asked himself what the distinguishing mark of a missionary was. This is the answer he gave himself: A missionary is essentially a social martyr, cut off from his roots, his stock, his blood, his land, his background, his culture ... He must be stripped as naked as a human being can be, down to the very texture of his being ... (he must) divest himself of his very culture, so that he can be a naked instrument of the gospel to the cultures of the world.

This call to suffering and death, as the condition for mission fruitfulness, sounds very alien, however, in our contemporary western ears. The respectable middle-class captivity of the church is not exactly an arena for persecution. Where is the willingness to suffer for Christ today? In the evangelical tendency to triumphalism there seems little place for tribulation. And the false 'prosperity gospel', promising unlimited health and wealth, blinds people to the biblical warnings of adversity.

Yet the fact remains that if we compromised less we would assuredly suffer more.

There are three main reasons for opposition; they belong to the spheres of doctrine, ethics and discipline. As for doctrine, the gospel of Christ crucified remains folly to the intellectually proud and a stumbling-block to the self-righteous; both groups find it humiliating. As for ethics, Christ's call is to self-denial and self-control; the self-indulgent find its challenge unacceptable. As for discipline, both baptism and the Lord's Supper presuppose repentance and faith in those who wish to receive them; to deny these gospel sacraments to anybody, even to those who openly admit that they neither repent nor believe, nevertheless provokes them to outrage. Thus those who seek to be faithful in doctrine, ethics and discipline are sure to arouse persecution, in the church as well as in the world.

Are we ready, then, to bear the pain of being ridiculed, the loneliness of being ostracized, the hurt of being spoken against and slandered? Indeed, are we willing if necessary to die with Christ to popularity and promotion, to comfort and success, to our ingrained sense of personal and cultural superiority, to our selfish ambition to be rich, famous or powerful? It is the seed that dies, which multiplies.

A brother from Orissa, India, once told me that, when he was eight years old, his evangelist father had been martyred, killed by hired assassins. At the time of his father's death, he added, there were only twelve churches in the region; when he spoke to me, there were one hundred and fifty.

The resurrection of Christ The mandate for mission

It is of the greatest importance to remember that the resurrection preceded the Great Commission. It was the risen Lord who issued his commission to his followers to go and make disciples of all nations. He could not have issued it earlier, before he had  been raised from death and invested with authority. 'All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,' he could now say. 'Therefore go and make disciples...'

 This is a major theme of a book by Johannes Blauw, a former secretary of the Netherlands Missionary Council. It was called The Missionary Nature of the Church, and sub-titled A Survey of the Biblical Theology of Mission. His thesis is that the Old Testament perspective was one of 'universalism' (God promising that all the nations he had made would come and worship him), but not of 'mission' (Israel going out to win the nations). The prophetic vision of the last days was of a 'pilgrimage of the nations' to Jerusalem. Mount Zion would be exalted as chief among the mountains, and 'all nations will stream to it'. In the New Testament, however, this 'centripetal missionary consciousness' is replaced by a 'centrifugal missionary activity'. That is, instead of the nations streaming to the church, the church now goes out to the nations. And what was the moment of change? 'The Great Turning-Point', argues Johannes Blauw, was the resurrection. It preceded the Great Commission to go, all authority having now been given to Christ in fulfilment of Daniel 7:13—14. 'With Easter a new age has begun, the  enthronement of a new ruler of the world, and the proclamation of this new ruler among the nations. Mission is the summons of the Lordship of Christ.'

 'If the mission of the New Testament', Johannes Blauw elaborates later, "seems at first glance centrifugal, it is to enable it to be centripetal. We go out into the world to gather it together; we cast the net to draw it in; we sow to reap.' Moreover, 'in Paul's own person the centripetal and centrifugal aspects of the preaching are brought together'. That is, while going out to preach the gospel, he is gathering both Gentiles and Israel, and bringing them home.

The resurrection, however, is the key to both movements. It is the risen Lord who sends us out into the world, and it is the same risen Lord who gathers people in to his church. The universal mission of the church derives its legitimacy from the universal lordship of Christ. In this way the resurrection supplies the mandate for mission.

The exaltation of Christ  The incentive for mission

Motivation is a very important aspect of every human enterprise. We need to know not only what we should be doing, but why we should be doing it. When our motives are sound and strong, we can persist in any task almost indefinitely. But when our motivation is faulty, we immediately begin to flag. This is undoubtedly true of the Christian mission. To seek to win people for Christ is hard work, widely unappreciated and unpopular, and, as we have just-seen, it often provokes active opposition. The church will need powerful incentives, therefore, if it is to persevere. My argument in this section is that the exaltation of Jesus Christ to the Father's right hand, that is, to the position of supreme honour, provides the strongest of all missionary incentives.

It is better in this context to refer to Christ's 'exaltation' than to his 'ascension', for, although it is true that 'he ascended into heaven', yet to say that 'he was exalted' indicates that it was God the Father who thus vindicated, promoted, enthroned and invested his Son. Moreover, the apostolic statements of Jesus' exaltation are at pains to emphasize that he was elevated above all possible rivals, indeed far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the one to come'. This is 'the highest place' to which God has exalted Jesus and the 'supremacy' which he wants him to enjoy.

This throws light on the use of the word 'superiority', which is viewed with distaste by those who are forsaking the old exclusivism and inclusivism in favour of the new pluralism see 1. Eph. 1:21.

Certainly, to adopt an 'air of superiority' towards the adherents of other faiths is a horrid form of discourtesy and arrogance. Certainly too, as Professor Hick points out, 'in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the conviction of the decisive superiority of Christianity' gave a powerful impetus to the imperial expansion of the West. But it is not 'Christianity' as an empirical institution or system for which Christians should claim superiority. It is Christ, and only Christ. We should affirm without any sense of embarrassment or shame that he is 'superior' to all other religious leaders, precisely because he alone humbled himself in love even to the cross and therefore God has raised him 'above' every other person, rank or title. Consequent upon his elevation or exaltation to the highest place, God desires 'every knee' to bow to him and 'every tongue' to confess his lordship. The repeated 'every' is absolute; it admits of no exceptions. If God has given this supreme honour to Jesus, and desires everybody else to honour him, then the people of God should share his desire. This is sometimes spoken of in Scripture in terms of 'zeal', and even jealousy'. The prophet Elijah, for example, deeply distressed by the apostasy of Israel, in particular their worship of the Canaanite Baals, said: 'I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts.' The apostle Paul spoke of himself as 'jealous ... with a godly jealousy' for the Corinthians, because he had betrothed them to Christ as their one husband, but was afraid that they might now be led astray from their 'sincere and pure devotion to Christ' Similarly, Henry Martyn, that, brilliant and faithful Christian missionary in Muslim Iran towards the beginning of the nineteenth century, once said: 'I could not endure existence if Jesus were not glorified; it would be hell to me if he were to be always thus dishonoured.'

This same sense of pain whenever Jesus Christ is dishonoured, and this same sense of jealousy that he should be given the honour due to him, should stir within us at the end of the twentieth century, in whatever particular culture we live. The primary motive for mission is neither obedience to the Great Commission, nor even love for those who are oppressed, lonely, lost and perishing, important as both those incentives are, but rather zeal or 'jealousy' for the glory of Christ. It was 'for his name's sake', in order that it might receive the honour which it deserved, that the first missionaries went out. The same passionate longing should motivate us.

This, surely, is our answer to those who tell us that we should no longer evangelize or seek conversions. Professor Gregory Baum of the University of Toronto, for example, has said that 'after Auschwitz the Christian churches no longer wish to convert the Jews', for 'the churches have come to recognize Judaism as an authentic religion before God, with independent value and meaning, not as a stage on the way to Christianity'. Similarly a Greek Catholic bishop, on his resignation, wrote to his friends:

'As a bishop, a preacher of the gospel, I never tried to convert a Jew or Arab Moslem to Christianity; rather to convert them to be a better Jew, a better Moslem.' Have these men, then, no jealousy for the honour of Jesus Christ? Do they not care when he is despised and rejected? Do they not long, as God does, that all human beings, whatever their culture or religion, will bow their knee to Jesus, and submit to him as their Lord?

It is this zeal for Christ which integrates the worship and witness of the church. How can we worship Christ and not mind that others do not? It is our worship of Christ which impels us to witness to Christ, in order that others may come and worship him too.

The Spirit-gift of Christ The power for mission

The World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh in 1910 was described by John R. Mott, its leading figure, as 'the most significant gathering ever held in the interest of the world's evangelization.  After surveying the opportunities, the problems and the encouragements, in relation to world evangelization, John Mott listed four "requirements of the present situation'. He began with (1) an adequate plan, (2) an adequate home base, and (3) an efficient church on the mission field. Then the fourth requirement he called 'the super-human factor'. He went on to say that, although missionaries, nationals and mission leaders differ substantially regarding plans, means and methods, they are absolutely united in the conviction that the world's evangelization is a divine enterprise, that the Spirit of God is the great Missioner, and that only as he dominates the work and workers can we hope for success in the undertaking to carry the knowledge of Christ to all people. They believe that he gave the missionary impulse to the early church, and that today all true mission work must be inaugurated, directed and sustained by him.

Already during his public ministry Jesus had drawn attention  to the missionary nature and purpose of the Holy Spirit. He had likened him to 'streams of living water' irrigating the desert, and had promised that they would flow out from within every believer. 'No one can ... be indwelt by the Spirit of God', comments William Temple, 'and keep that Spirit to himself. Where the Spirit is, he flows forth; if there is no flowing forth,  he is not there.' And so it proved to be in the early church from the Day of Pentecost onwards, as we saw in chapter 19.

There are, of course, differences between and within the churches regarding the charismatic or neo-pentecostal movement, the so-called 'baptism of the Spirit', the diversity of spiritual gifts, and. the place of 'signs and wonders' in evangelism and church growth. But all of us should be able to affirm together that evangelism is! impossible without the Holy Spirit, without God the Evangelist, as Professor David Wells calls him in a book of that title.  To summarize the Spirit's indispensable ministry, I do not think I could do better than quote from the Manila Manifesto (1989):

The Scriptures declare that God himself is the chief evangelist. For the Spirit of God is the Spirit of truth, love, holiness and power, and evangelism is impossible without him. It is he who anoints the messenger, confirms the word, prepares the hearer, convicts the sinful, enlightens the blind, gives life to the dead, enables us to repent and believe, unite us to the Body of Christ, assures us that we are God's children, leads us into Christlike character and service, and sends us out in our turn to be Christ's witnesses. In all this the Holy Spirit's main preoccupation is to glorify Jesus Christ by showing him to us and forming him in us.

All evangelism involves spiritual warfare with the principalities and powers of evil, in which Qnfy spiritual weapons can prevail, especially the Word and the Spirit, with prayer We therefore call on all Christian people to be diligent in their prayers both for the renewal of the church and for the evangelization of the world.

Every true conversion involves a power encounter, in which the superior authority of Jesus Christ is demonstrated. There is no greater miracle than this, in which the believer is set free from the bondage of Satan and sin, fear and futility, darkness and death.

Although the miracles of Jesus were special, being signs of his Messiahship and anticipations of his perfect kingdom when all nature will be subject to him, we have no liberty to place limits on the power of the living Creator today. We reject both the skepticism which denies miracles and the presumption which demands them, both the timidity which shrinks from the fullness of the Spirit and the triumphalism which shrinks from the weakness in which Christ's power is made perfect.

We repent of all self-confident attempts either to evangelize in our own strength or to dictate to the Holy Spirit. We determine in future not to 'grieve' or 'quench' the Spirit, but rather to seek to spread the good news 'with power, with the Holy Spirit and with deep conviction'.

There is an urgent need for us to humble ourselves before the sovereign Holy Spirit today. Sociological knowledge and communications expertise are important. Indeed, they are gifts of God to be used in evangelism. But we have to beware lest they diminish our reliance on the power of the Holy Spirit. Only the Holy Spirit of God can take words spoken in human weakness and carry them home with power to the mind, conscience and 'will of the hearers. Only he can open the eyes of the blind to see the truth as it is in Jesus, unstop the ears of the deaf to hear his voice, and loosen the tongues of the dumb to confess that he is Lord. The Holy Spirit is the chief witness; 'without his witness, ours is futile'.

 The parousia of Christ The urgency of mission

There was something fundamentally anomalous about the attitude of the Twelve immediately after the ascension. They  had been commissioned to go 'to the ends of the earth', but they were standing on the Mount of Olives 'looking into the sky' They were then promised that the Jesus who had just disappeared would in due time reappear. For this event they music wait; no amount of sky-watching would hasten it. Meanwhile once they had been clothed with the Spirit's power, they mush get on with their task. Earth, not sky, was to be their preoccupation. Thus the four stages of the divine programme were plain First, Jesus returned to the Father (ascension). Secondly, the Spirit came (Pentecost). Thirdly, the church goes 6ut to make disciples (mission). Fourthly, Jesus will return (parousia) Between the first and the fourth events, the ascension and the parousia, the disappearance and the reappearance of Jesus, there was to be an unspecified 'inter-adventual' period. During it no further saving event would take place. The gap was to be filled with the world-wide witness of the church. So the implied message of the angels after the ascension was this: 'You have seen him go. You will see him come. But between that going and coming there must be another. The Spirit must come, and you must go — into the world for Christ.'

It is in this way that the parousia of Jesus is linked with the mission of the church. The parousia will terminate the mission- period which began with Pentecost. We have only a limited time in which to complete our God-given responsibility. We need, then, to recover the eager eschatological expectation of the first Christians, together with the sense of urgency which it gave them. Jesus had promised that the end would not come until the gospel of the kingdom had been preached throughout the world to all nations.  But we have no liberty to presume that we have| plenty of time, and so drag our feet or slacken our pace in mission. On the contrary, the church is 'on the move -- hastening to the ends of the earth to beseech all men to be reconciled to God, and hastening to the end of time to meet its Lord who will gather all into one'. The two ends will coincide. Another important link between the church's mission and the Lord's return has to do with judgment. 'We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ,' Paul wrote, 'that each one may receive what is due to him ...' This is evidently not the universal judgment relating to our eternal destinies, but a particular judgment of God's people relating to our Christian life and ministry. It concerns the promise of recognition and recompense of some kind, or their opposite. The next verse reads: 'Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade men.'  That is, the reason why we seek to persuade people of the truth of the gospel is that we stand in awe of the Lord Jesus and his tribunal, before which we will one day have to give an account. I am reminded of those solemn passages in the prophecy of Ezekiel, in which God appoints him 'a watchman for the house of Israel' and makes him responsible to warn them of the coming judgment. If he fails to give a wicked person adequate warning, and does not speak out to dissuade  him from his evil ways, God says, 'I will hold you accountable for his blood.'

In a similar way the apostle grounded his charge to Timothy to 'preach the Word' with urgency not only on 'the presence of God and of Christ Jesus', but also 'in view of his appearing and his kingdom', who 'will judge the living and the dead'. To live, work and witness in conscious anticipation of Christ's parousia and judgment is a wholesome stimulus to faithfulness. Scripture bids us remember that, from God's perspective, the time is short, the need is great, and the task is urgent.

Let me recapitulate what Christ's saving career says to us about mission. The model for mission is his incarnation (identification without loss of identity), its cost is his cross (the seed which dies multiplies), its mandate is his resurrection (all authority is now his), its motivation is his exaltation (the honour of his name), its power is his gift of the Spirit (who is the paramount witness), and its urgency is his parousia (we will have to give him an account when he comes).

It seems to me that the church needs to keep returning, for its inspiration and direction, to this Christological basis of mission. The challenge before us is to see Jesus Christ as adequate for our task. We have to repent of our pessimism (especially in the West), our low expectations, our cynical unbelief that, although the church may grow elsewhere, it cannot grow among us. Fiddlesticks! If only we could gain a fresh and compelling vision of Jesus Christ, incarnate and crucified, risen and reigning, bestowing the Spirit and coming again! Then we would have the clarity of purpose and strength of motive, the courage, the authority, the power and the passion for world evangelization in our time.

In an early anniversary sermon of the Church Missionary-Society (I believe in 1805), John Venn, the Rector of Clapham, described a missionary in the following terms. His eloquent portrait is equally applicable to every kind of Christian witness:

With the world under his feet, with heaven in his eye, with the gospel in his hand and Christ in his heart, he pleads as an ambassador for God, knowing nothing but Jesus Christ, enjoying nothing but the conversion of sinners, hoping for nothing but the promotion of the kingdom of Christ, and glorying in nothing but in the cross of Christ Jesus, by which he is crucified to the world, and the world to him.