Click here to view the table of contents

In The Mission of the Church: A Biblical Theology of Mission and Ministry, Glenn Rogers identifies the underlying metatheme of Scripture and traces it through the Old and New Testaments to reveal the mission of the church, which he concludes is participation with God in his mission in the world… the reconciliation of all people. In this thorough but readable missiological text, Rogers discuses: the creation narrative, the covenants, the symbolic language of Scripture, the incarnation, and the ministries of Jesus and Paul.

From Mission of the Church… …a biblical theology of mission cannot be discovered and articulated by simply referencing a few verses in the New Testament. A biblical theology of mission must ultimately be rooted in the creative actions of God and his intentions for human beings, beings created in his image and likeness. To discover a biblical theology of mission requires careful exegesis that begins at the beginning, identifying and following the metatheme that underlies and unifies the text, providing both a foundation and a connective tissue for the biblical story from beginning to end.

Is there something that unites scripture beyond its association with a specific people and their theological heirs in the church? Rogers rightly insists that a proper reading of the Bible can only take place when one recognizes an underlying theme: that God has, throughout history, sought a relationship with humankind. All of scripture presupposes God’s mission of reconciliation, and a truly biblical theology must recognize that mission as foundational. From the story of creation through the pages of the New Testament, making use of such topics as covenant, biblical metaphor, and incarnation, Rogers directs our eyes to catch glimpses of this “metatheme” as it repeatedly surfaces in the text.

Dr. Rogers has given an excellent summary of a major theme of the Bible, if not the major theme of the Bible, that God desires relationship with man. His insights into God’s activities both in the Old Testament and New Testament highlight what must continue to be the mission of the church: the reconciliation of man back to God through Jesus Christ. If reconciliation is God’s primary theme in scripture, it must be the work of God’s people today, the true mission of the church.

What is the mission of the church? The question would be easier to answer if the biblical authors had been Western theologians writing a systematic theology. There would be a sub-subsection entitled Mission of the Church. That sub-section would have been under a subsection that would have been under a section that would have been under a major heading, probably entitled Ecclesiology. None of the biblical writers, however, were Western thinkers organizing their material in systematic ways.

The task, then, of discovering what the mission of the church is, or discovering a biblical theology of mission is not as simple as we might prefer. The church traces its roots not only to ancient Israel and to Abraham, the father of that nation. But the roots run deeper than that, burrowing their way through the soil of the ages to the very beginning of time. Thus, a biblical theology of mission cannot be discovered and articulated by simply referencing a few verses in the New Testament. A biblical theology of mission must ultimately be rooted in the creative actions of God and his intentions for human beings, beings created in his image and likeness. To discover a biblical theology of mission requires careful exegesis that begins at the beginning, identifying and following the metatheme that underlies and unifies the text, providing both a foundation and a connective tissue for the biblical story from beginning to end.

To accomplish this careful exegesis of Scripture, we will begin with the creation narrative, looking for the divine purpose in the divine action. In doing so, we will discover one end of a thread, a thematic thread that binds together the entire biblical story—the tree of life in Genesis two with the tree of life in Revelation twenty-two. This metatheme emerges, submerges, and emerges again over and over as it weaves its way through the stories of the biblical text.

From the creation narrative we will move to the various accounts of the covenants God established as he interacted with individuals and with the nation of Israel. The metatheme emerges there just as it does in the creation narrative.

We will then proceed to an examination of the symbolic language used in the Old Testament. The metatheme emerges also in the incarnation and ministry of Jesus. It emerges as one considers the establishment of the New Covenant, and the ministry of Paul. And it is there when one looks closely at the symbolic language of the New Testament.

The metatheme of Scripture emerges often and in dynamic ways to inform us of God’s intentions and his mission. And it is from God’s mission that the church derives its mission. What is the metatheme of the Scriptures? What is God’s mission? And what is the church’s mission? Those are the questions I propose to answer in this brief study.