Dietrich Bonhoeffer observes in the opening paragraph of his book Ethics that those seeking a Christian ethic “must give up, as inappropriate to this topic, the two very questions that led them to deal with the ethical problem: ‘How can I be good?’ and ‘How can I do something good?'”
His words challenge the notion that the goal of Christian ethics is to find out how an individual can become good or how an individual can change the world for the good by his or her actions. He wrote, “Of ultimate importance, then, is not that I become good, or that the condition of the world be improved by my efforts, but that the reality of God show itself everywhere to be the ultimate reality.”
Practically speaking, this means that Christian ethics is a focus on the ultimate reality that “God be known as good, even at the risk that I and the world are revealed as not good.” Ethics is not primarily about how good I am or what good I can do. Questions about such are focused on the self and therefore miss the point. It’s about the goodness of God and how that goodness is being woven into the world. Yes, I can play a part in what God is weaving, but I’m not the center of the action. God is.
These words have caused me to wonder if we have asked the wrong questions about being missional. We write and talk a lot about how to be a missional church. Myself included. I’ve written Missional Small Groups, and I co-authored Introducing the Missional Church, two titles among many that have come out on the topic in the last 20 years.
Now we have missional networks and missional conferences, along with new resources on missional virtues, missional theology and missional leadership. I’m not disparaging the Word, nor these resources, nor the theology. We need to develop a missional imagination. And we need to develop practical ways to engage our world with the Gospel.
However, being a missional church or a missional Christian is not the ultimate reality. When we begin with questions about how the church can impact our neighborhood or how individual Christians can make a difference in the world, we reveal our imagination, one that is shaped by self-focus. In other words, we have an imagination that is shaped by the pragmatic questions like: What can we do to impact our world for Christ? How can I minister to our neighbors? What can the church do to become “missional”? It seems to me that the church gets caught up in chasing its own tail, trying to figure out what it’s supposed to be.
When we do this, we look for missional models that are working elsewhere so that we can have the kind of success that they have experienced. But this is like trying to teach people to be ethical without rooting them in the reality of God made manifest in Jesus. We look for missional rules just like we look for ethical rules. That’s like trying to be a computer programmer without understanding how a computer works. Or an artist who paints by numbers without developing an eye for art. Or a chef following recipes without any knowledge of how the food will be served.
