Book Review: Why Mission? by Dean Flemming

Dean Flemming writes that Christians commonly make two mistakes when it comes to mission and the scriptures: 1) they over-emphasize the Bible’s message for its original audiences, thus ignoring its power to inspire present-day mission efforts, and 2) they repeatedly rely on a few proof-texts (e.g., Matthew 28:19) to justify the need for sending out cross-cultural missionaries. Flemming suggests that both of these perspectives are too narrow, so he wrote Why Mission?, a part of the Reframing New Testament Theology series, to encourage a more holistic reading of the Bible. Specifically, he wants Christians to read the entire canon in order to see the present relevance of God’s overall mission in the world, also know as the missio Dei. Flemming’s book is thus a “missional reading” of seven New Testament books for what they both say and do -- that is, for their witness to the nature of God’s mission as revealed in the past, as well as the texts' ability to inspire mission efforts today.

Chapter 1 begins with Matthew, which Flemming calls us to “read from the back.” In other words, God’s saving work in the Old Testament only makes sense through the lens of Jesus’s life and mission. The Jesus of Matthew urges his apostles to live out Moses’s call to be the people of God, in which the tasks of evangelism and disciple-making happen within a community. Chapter 2 on Luke and Acts shows how mission is rooted in God’s nature -- the missio Dei has an especially Trinitarian -- and thus communal -- shape, with all three persons in the Godhead taking on important roles. In Luke 4:18 the Spirit-empowered Jesus, who is the recently-baptized Son of the Father, declares that God's mission is inclusive, boundary-breaking, and holistic. There are no parts of society (according to ethnic or economic divisions) or of the human being (body, mind, or soul) outside the range of God’s saving work. John’s gospel, the subject of chapter 3, delves further into the Trinitarian cooperation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the sending out and the drawing in of God’s people. If Matthew had prescriptive commands to “go” and “baptize,” then the fourth gospel calls Jesus’s followers to participate in a shared life that matches God’s dynamic and interactive nature. For instance, John 15 makes clear that our missional activities are first of all a call to be in God; doing mission properly flows out of a rooted and embedded life in God and in God’s community.

Philippians is the only Pauline book in Why Mission?, and the bulk of chapter 4 covers the kenosis passage of 2:6-11. Flemming calls this a “V-shaped” drama -- Jesus empties himself of power, later to be raised up and exalted by the Father. This self-emptying model calls today’s church to live from the same sacrificial posture. Chapter 5 discusses the realities involved in doing mission as an outsider -- specifically, as exiles and aliens as described in 1 Peter. Flemming sees that this epistle has important things to say to Christian minority groups today for whom Christian community is necessary for survival. For such groups, living in a community of faith is not exactly a mission strategy, although their life together becomes missional as others witness the love and commitment that are shared in the bonds of a common baptism. Chapter 6 argues that eschatology is bound up with the church’s mission, so Flemming wants to treat Revelation as more than a source for “all nations” proof-texts (for example, 7:9). The entire sweep of salvation is found in John’s Apocalypse -- creation, redemption, judgment, new creation -- and it describes the persecuted church’s challenge in staying pure while that mission is accomplished. As Flemming's Epilogue affirms, this comprehensive sweep of God’s redemptive work makes mission about more than what “missionaries” do, and even about more than what the church does. Christians are invited to participate in the missio Dei, but they do not drive it through their own cleverness, fund-raising, or strategizing.

Why Mission? provides an accessible introduction to the practice of missional reading, complementing what Christopher J.H. Wright has done (especially for the Old Testament) in The Mission of God. As an introductory-level book of 136 pages, Flemming cannot say everything that might be said, but there are a couple of missed opportunities here. For one, I would have appreciated a discussion about mission and Christendom, especially given the church's declining role in Western Europe and the US. Flemming certainly affirms that Christians are set apart in the sense of being holy (p.98), but in the chapter on 1 Peter he fails to talk about how the church's modern-day decline is leaving Christian communities less aligned with formal power structures. While the church in the US is certainly not there (yet), it may be approaching a first-century posture in relation to the government, wherein churches will become minority communities within the wider society. This is certainly already the case in many places around the world, and Peter wrote his first letter to a community in that situation. Disappointingly, Flemming avoids this opportunity, even downplaying the power differential between Christians and their first-century leaders. He states that 1 Peter’s concept of “foreignness” was “not primarily a reference to their political or social status” (p.96). Fair enough if he is countering John Elliot's strained argument that the original recipients of 1 Peter were actually a group of foreign refugees. But even without that interpretation, Peter certainly indicates that there were social and class markers that set Christians apart from the wider culture. That epistle has much to say about how to live faithfully -- that is, missionally -- as a church whose social distance varies greatly with those in power. It seems impossible to explore modern-day implications of a missional reading of the New Testament while ignoring the rise and fall of Christendom. There has never been mission without some interference from or support by government -- a fact that should have also been acknowledged in the chapter on Luke and Acts.

My second criticism stems from a personal concern about most mission-based commentaries on Philippians 2. This is a cornerstone mission text, and missionary recruiters have long called the faithful to give up their own wealth, to empty themselves of their home-country comforts, and to enter into life with the “least of these.” I’m not at all opposed to this way of framing Christian discipleship -- Paul himself uses it: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus...” (2:5). I just do not like comparing missionaries who apply for a passport and get on a plane to Jesus, who emptied himself of heavenly privileges so that he could be born a human being. “Incarnational ministry” embraces commendable aspects of working with people who are different -- living in neighborhoods with the poor, learning local languages on the speakers’ terms, and listening to people’s expressed concerns before imposing solutions. But I do not think that living among other human beings -- no matter how great the cultural or economic chasms between missionary and host -- is at all like the divide between the heavenly realms and our own earthly reality. While I appreciate that Flemming does not necessarily invoke the “incarnational ministry” label, I wish he would have used part of chapter 4 to renounce this long-standing “missionary descent” narrative. This misreading of Philippians 2 has sustained a long-running martyr complex among cross-cultural workers for many generations.