Some say that the modern world is the most individualistic society that has ever lived. Instead of a worldview where each person sees themselves as being part of a forest; each one sees themselves as a tree. People value self-expression and personal success over being a part of something. Although this worldview might have its roots in the West, the connected nature of the online world and media has caused it to spread like wildfire.
But what if there’s a different story?
Each one of us is an instrument
that is playing a part in God’s great orchestra.
He is like the conductor who shows us where to take the music.
It is our heart’s desire to teach other people how to dance
to the rhythm of the music instead of moving against it.
Even if people cannot see the music,
we can teach them how to hear it by modelling how we do it.
We can teach them the dance.
It is not about ‘making it on our own’, as the world would have us believe. All of our good works for the Kingdom, however big or small, must slot into and submit to God’s big mission. Even though we are instruments, we are not expected to compose our own music, because there is already music playing. We need to become still and listen to the song, so that we can find the right key and add to it in ways that are beautiful and in tune.
We are to ‘declare His glory among the nations, His marvelous deeds among all peoples’ (1 Chronicles 16:24). In simple terms, it is not about our own glory, but His.
God’s music or His song is called the ‘Missio Dei’, or, in other words, The Mission of God. The theologian who popularized the phrase, D.J. Bosch, described it this way: “Mission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God. God is a missionary God.”
In other words, mission is the holistic base of ALL Christian activity – it is not just one task of the believer.
Theologian Andrew Kirk said this: “Mission is not the roof of a building that completes the whole structure, already constructed by blocks that stand on their own, but both the foundation and the mortar in the joints, which cements together everything else.”
The most unexpected (yet unsurprising!) effective way to learn to read God’s music is found in reading the Bible. But it is not just reading the Bible like we are used to it. In the first chapter of The Great Story and The Great Commission, author Christopher Wright describes the term ‘missional hermeneutic’.
This means putting on missional lenses when reading and interpreting the (whole) Bible. Now, we read the Bible from the perspective of the mission of God and His people. Since the Enlightenment, human beings have been called meaning-making-machines for a reason: We crave understanding and we want to make sense of what is placed before us. But we need to be wearing the right lenses in order to do so.
When we were children we used to make craft telescopes by taping colored cellophane paper over cardboard tubes. This allowed us to see the world in whatever color we desired. There is a truth hidden in this craft: the lenses that we wear become the way that we interpret or make sense of what we see.
Here are a few ways of reading the Bible differently:
- What you might not expect is that a missional hermeneutic goes beyond the well-known “mission texts” like Jesus sending out the seventy-two or the Great Commission. The mission of God, the missio Dei, is spread out over the whole Bible, not just certain parts of it. It is like a golden thread running through it all.
- We are born into different families; we develop unique personalities; and we pursue hand-picked careers… The Bible is a collection of stories of broken, normal people (just like us) who were set apart by God and played a big part in this same mission. These stories motivate us and become examples of how God can also use us for His purposes in each of our own contexts.
- The Bible is not just a static set of promises, doctrines, or rules. God is not finished writing His story yet, and to be a part of it, we need to know how it started and what happened before us. We need to listen to the whole song, not just the part that we happened to hear in passing. We need to recognize that we are a part of something much bigger than ourselves.
Missional Theology is all about participating in God’s song and trusting that He will show us which notes are ours to play, because “this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come” (Matthew 24:14). We need to learn how to read the music so that we can understand what the incoherent scribbles on the page sounds like when it plays out in real life.
Each instrument in an orchestra has a unique part to play,
so we cannot keep quiet or stay in our comfort zones.
We need to step out in the power of the Holy Spirit
and go help unblock the ears of those who cannot hear
the melody of His grace and love yet.
Eljoh Hartzer is combining theology and art to nurture faith journeys across generations. She is a masters-level practical theologian with the University of Stellenbosch. She is also a writer and editor in the niche of Christianity and children’s content and she illustrates children’s books. Eljoh resides in the Swartland area in the Western Cape province of South Africa. She is a staff writer at Missional University focusing on missional theology and practice.
