Weekend Reads: Outsized outreach

Introducing Christian Mission Today: Scripture, History and Issues

By Michael Goheen

Missiology professor Michael Goheen has taken on an enormous task in Introducing Christian Mission Today: Scripture, History and Issues (IVP Academic, 2014). The task: attempt to synthesize current Christian thinking on the place and direction of missions. “Christian Mission” is obviously a huge topic, and this work’s 394 pages are only an introduction.

So what is mission? “Mission ‘is a matter of presence—the presence of the people of God in the midst of mankind and of God in the midst of His people’” (emphasis by the author). Missions, by contrast, is the establishment of a new Christian witness where none previously existed. Goheen gives these definitions and then summarizes the biblical record, the theological foundations, past historical paradigms, and the current state of world outreach. This material is fascinating.

The prescriptions for future mission work are mostly questions, not answers. Goheen’s great fear is of a flesh-spirit dualism, as exemplified by a fundamentalism that wants to save souls and a social gospel that wants to save bodies, each neglecting the other side of the task. But his remedy seems to smack more of welfare-state politics than of the robust Neo-Calvinist Dutch theology he claims to espouse.

Goheen cannot seem to make up his mind about two crucial issues: Is the church’s primary task worship or witness? Logically, worship is the goal of witness and therefore witness is the secondary goal. But Goheen tends to make witness primary. And are evangelism and social action best done by ordinary Christians “according to each one’s place and calling,” as the Westminster Larger Catechism has it? Goheen hints that ordinary vocations may not quite allow for enough social activism.

Christian Mission Today won’t answer all your questions, but it will give you a good idea of where the church is and has been.

Wanted: A Spiritual Pursuit Through Jail, Among Outlaws, and Across Borders

By Chris Hoke

Wanted: A Spiritual Pursuit Through Jail, Among Outlaws, and Across Borders (HarperOne, 2015) is intense from the very first page. Chris Hoke has taken the reluctant prophet theme so prominent in Scripture (Jonah, Moses, Jeremiah, etc.), crossed it with true crime, and written the results down. He had to: If you can believe the pages of this nonfiction work (which I do implicitly), his life is crawling with reluctant prophets. Oh, it’s not that they necessarily get Pentecostal-style words from the Lord, though he records enough of that to make a cessationist’s blood run cold. Rather, they live on the edge—the edge of society, of morality, perhaps of hell itself—and there the spiritual phenomena are just a lot bigger and can be seen better.

Hoke literally sits at a table in Guatemala City, where bus drivers and bus hijackers, once mortal enemies, feast together in peace. He sees the Word of God come into isolation cells and transform lives. He sees his jail-bound friends as successors of the Hebrew prophets. He sees—well, you’ll have to read about it.

Oddly enough, Hoke didn’t want to be a jail chaplain per se. He just wanted to get to the gritty realities that the Bible talks about. So he went to the jail once. And then he started spending four, five, six nights per week there, talking to the inmates. Eventually one of them dubbed him their pastor—a title he rejected, never having been ordained by a church. Then he realized that these guys were his flock, and they wanted his pastoral oversight whether he liked it or not.

Wanted contains plenty of foul language and records some hair-raising events. But those aren’t the point. The point is that no matter how reluctant the prophet, the call of God is inescapable. He always gets His man.