Aotearoa New Zealand Association for Mission Studies

Revisiting the Missionary Nature of the Church

John Roxborogh

The early 1960s saw "mission" and "church" come together in the revolution of Vatican II and the amalgamation of the International Missionary Council and the World Council of Churches. The theology of the Vatican II documents, and Joahnnes Blauw's classic, Missionary Nature of the Church, 1962, gave theological and biblical weight to a view of the Church as missionary in its essence. The 1990s have seen a  theologically sophisticated renewal of these emphases in the "Missional Church" project of the North American Gospel and Our Culture Network.

This paper revisits the issue of the Missionary Nature of the Church and asks whether this emphasis has the centre of gravity of a theology of the mission of the church in the right place after all. The church has other valid purposes  besides "mission" which require their own theology, language and commitment . A concern to stimulate missionary commitment that collapses the identity of the church into its external mission runs the risk of the language of mission being retained without the substance. The renewal of mission cannot achieve its end by seeking to take over the entire enterprise of the Christian life. A secure commitment to mission requires a credible and sustainable engagement  rooted  in the actual nature of the church more than in a desire for motivation for its own sake. If some claim can be made for seeing mission as the mother of the theology, we might do well to think about worship as the mother of mission.

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