Where is the gospel that will drive the missional movement?

Alan Hirsch argues in Right Here, Right Now (written with Lance Ford) that the future of Christianity in the West depends on the church becoming a people movement again: “Somehow and in some way, we need to loosen up and learn how to reactivate the massive potentials that lie rather dormant within Jesus’ people if we are going to make a difference to our world” (31). He then suggests that two “basic elements” are needed if this is to happen, if we are to reach “exponential impact”.

The first necessary element is apostolic mission, which happens when apostolic leaders organize people into “apostolic networks that expand exponentially” (32). The second involves “activating the whole people of God and empowering every believer to be active agents of God’s kingdom in every sphere of life”. So, in summary, it’s going to take “both missional church plus missional disciples to make a missional movement”.

I’m not convinced that the right response to the marginalization of the church in the West is, in the first place, to develop strategies for exponential expansion, no matter how biblical they may be made to sound. But, surely, the essential element—the sine qua non—of any people movement is not any missional or church-planting or disciple-making strategy but a compelling ideal.

Revolutionary change is happening in the Arab world not because of any grassroots political strategizing (there has been a marked absence of anything looking like “apostolic leadership”) or even because of social media. Such developments may or may not be contributory factors, but change is taking place fundamentally because downtrodden populations have glimpsed the possibility of freedom and reform. It is that vision that generates the people movement.

The question that the church in the West has to ask itself is whether it has an ideal or a dream or a vision or a gospel big enough, compelling enough, and timely enough, to power anything approaching a grassroots movement of transformation to compete with the other narratives at work in the world.

Mission in Right Here, Right Now is framed almost entirely in terms of personal encounters with Jesus, personal acts of peace-making, kindness, and compassion. That may be necessary in order to bring it down to the level of practical discipleship in a North American context, but it leaves us with a shrunken “gospel” that will never compete in public with either the negative or the positive messages of secular pluralism.

Jesus articulated a vision of far-reaching, disruptive transformation for Israel, a program that would culminate in war and destruction and in the radical reconstitution of the family of Abraham. That was the “gospel” that motivated men and women to follow him down a narrow path leading to life. It competed with and eventually won out over the other narratives at work in first-century Israel.

Paul found in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead compelling evidence that YHWH had made him “Son of God”—the king who, through the witness of his liberated and loyal people, would eventually come to judge and bring crashing down the whole cultural-ethical-religious superstructure of Greek-Roman paganism. That was the dream, the “gospel”, that motivated ordinary men and women to defy the dangerous principalities and powers that ruled over the ancient Mediterranean world. It competed with and eventually won out over the narratives of pagan imperial domination at work in the oikoumenē.

In both cases the “gospel” demanded radical conversion, a radical call to mission, and a radical, self-giving discipleship. That is, it had implications for individuals. The problem we have now is that we begin with a very limited gospel of personal salvation, inherited from and legitimized by the successes of modern evangelicalism; and we are having to work out from that small centre in search of a larger sense of purpose. We have it all back-to-front.

Alan Hirsch has some good things to say about the potential inherent in missional communities to subvert popular culture: “One of the most profound ways to embody countercultural dissents against the evil propensities in our cultures is to embody the gospel in a community of Jesus’ people” (56). That, to my mind, is beginning to sound like the sort of “ideal”—the sort of dream, or vision, or gospel—that might generate a grassroots movement of change.

But this subversive potential needs to be much more clearly articulated as “gospel”, in proper continuity with the “gospels” of Jesus and Paul, and placed at the head of the argument about missional movements. The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is a matter not merely of personal interest—as a guarantee, for example, of eternal life. For Israel, for the pagan world, and for humanity it was an event of profound cultural, political, and even cosmic significance. There is no point looking for “exponential impact” today until we learn how to proclaim an expansive good news that has the same power to compete with the other narratives at work in the world.