For many Christians, the word ‘mission’ immediately brings to mind images of missionaries travelling to distant lands to preach the gospel. While this is certainly part of mission, it barely scratches the surface of what the Bible teaches.

Mission is far bigger. It is the very heart of God’s purposes for the world: reaching every nation, transforming communities, caring for creation, and restoring broken relationships. It’s not just for a few; it’s a calling for every believer, every church, everywhere.

Gospel-centred integral mission is now my own preferred phrase for what I believe to be the biblical mission mandate, in theology and practice.

Mission must be gospel-centred

…provided we are using that word ‘gospel’ in its full biblical sense, as the good news of the specific historical events that God both promised and accomplished through Jesus of Nazareth, along with their implications as regards his status (as Messiah and Lord), the kingdom of God, the destiny of all creation, and our own destinies in response to who Jesus is and what he accomplished in his life, death, resurrection and ascension. It is, as Paul says quite often, ‘the gospel of God’, ie primarily good news from God and about God and about what God has done, not just a formula or prayer for individual salvation.

To put it another way, the centrality of the gospel is not quite the same thing as the primacy of evangelism, for the simple reason that the gospel is what God has done (perfectly, finally and forever), whereas evangelism is what we do (well or poorly or not at all). It is the gospel (not evangelism) that is the power of God for salvation (Romans 1:16). And it is the gospel of God—the sheer fact that there is good news because God has acted for good—that validates all that we do in mission, including evangelism, since good news must, of course, be ‘good-news-ed’— proclaimed in words that bear witness to what God has done.

Mission must be ‘integral’

…in the sense that the central truth of the gospel (as defined above) integrates, ie holds together, authorises and motivates, all that we do in word and deed, as God’s people called to participate with God in his redemptive mission within history. And as the Lausanne Movement has affirmed for half a century now, integral (or holistic) mission holds together both the proclamation of the gospel in evangelism and the demonstration of the gospel in works of compassion and justice.

In addition to this, since Cape Town 2010, is our creational responsibility for the earth that, according to Paul’s gospel in Colossians 1:15-23, belongs to Christ by right of creation, redemption and inheritance. It is the truth and centrality of the whole biblical gospel of God that governs and drives every aspect of our missional thinking and acting in God’s world for God’s glory.

As regards the first two—evangelism and social engagement—the relationship is still portrayed by some speakers and writers as a matter of ‘tension’, or ‘priorities’. This is in spite of the immense quantity of theological reflection that the global evangelical community has done, including especially in the decade following Lausanne I (1974), demonstrating biblically that, although of course they are not the same thing, they are inseparably and integrally related within and around the centrality of the gospel itself.

Any tension between them is not in the Bible but generated by ourselves, in the way churches may emphasise or engage in either while ignoring or failing in the other. But that is a fault in the church, not a reason to argue the priority of one over another.

Gospel-Centred Integral Mission Today

In the church today, then, gospel-centred integral/holistic mission should mean that any local church community ought to be thinking strategically and comprehensively about the variety of ways in which the gospel can be proclaimed and embodied, in their own neighbourhood, in their nation, and in their commitment to God’s mission to the ends of the earth. They should ask, ‘Are we ensuring that the gospel of God is central both to our verbal witness in the preaching and evangelism of the church, and also to our outreach in acts of love, compassion, service and justice in the community?’

While every member has their specific calling and place of diakonia, let those who know God has called and gifted them to particular forms of diakonia— whether word-based or other forms of ministry—concentrate on that as their own priority, without insisting that it be the only priority for the church as a whole, in a way that relegates other ministries as secondary or ‘not real mission’. That kind of dichotomizing and taxonomizing is where the so-called tension arises, and it is so unhelpful.

After all, the Great Commission is very clear. Jesus did not say, ‘make disciples . . . teaching them to obey what you decide has priority among all that I commanded you . . . ‘ No, he simply said, ‘to obey all that I commanded you’, which, as the gospels themselves show, is a very comprehensive range of obedience indeed.

This is an abridged version of an article first published by Lausanne Movement. You can read the full article here >>