"COVENANTED, REVEALED, IMPLICATED": HOW GOD'S MISSION CREATES THE CHURCH'S VOCATION AND INAUGURATES NEW CREATION, STARTING NOW

What is the mission of the Church in the world? How should a local congregation understand their vocation? What counts as "success" for the church – both locally and globally? The mission of the Church in the world is the mission of God embodied in the world, paradigmatically exemplified in the mission of Jesus, localized to our stage in the covenant history of God's people, further localized within our culture to our place and time. The vocation of our local congregation is God's mission contextualized to our local world. "Success" for the church is embodying Jesus' fidelity to God's universal mission, "whatever happens." Canonical reading of Scripture exemplified in Wright's "missional hermeneutic" identifies God's mission to the world as the primary mission encompassing Creation to New Creation, producing an outflowing sequence of enabling mission: God's loving mission in Creation; human mission in our designated place of creation care, work and culture; Israel's covenant mission to the nations, Jesus' personally incarnate mission to the world, and the church's mission to the world developed from within this larger scope of mission. This more integrated comprehensive reading of Scripture improves a long-standing limited hermeneutic which confines God's mission to history from Genesis 3's Fall to Revelation 20's final judgment, targeting individual human salvation as the mission goal, and essentially reducing the church's missional task to proclaiming the event of Jesus' atoning death and the offer of its implications. This unfortunately ignores the larger work and implications of God's creation and redemption, minimizing the value of the history of God's elect Israel, Jesus' earthly ministry, resurrection, and the outpouring of the Spirit. The larger "missional hermeneutic" takes in the full "drama of Scripture" and helps the church find its place as the covenant people of God historically and missionally. It creates room for envisioning and acting missionally in ways that anticipate the coming new creation in our experience of the Spirit now and in the words and deeds of the new Kingdom, lived out in the eschatological ethics of the church. Much as Torah guided Israel to community life with the ethics of God's original creational intent (albeit in a broken world, a "proximate justice") as witness to the nations, the Spirit of Christ guides the church's community life in "new creation" ethics of the eschaton, as testimony to the nations now. "Surely it is to live as those who have experienced that redeeming power of God already, and whose lives – individual and corporate – are signposts to the ultimate liberation of all creation and humanity from every form of oppression and slavery."