It was Bishop Stephen Neill, the eminent missiologist and church historian, who said, ‘If everything is mission, then nothing is mission.’ This reflects a widespread concern that, by broadening the concept of Christian mission too far, we may lose the heart of the Gospel. So, in looking at ‘creation care as mission’, we need to start by defining ‘mission’. Is creation care part of the core mission of the Christian church, or is it an optional extra activity?
Of course, the Latin root, missio, concerns being sent out and, in New Testament terms, mission arises from Jesus sending out his disciples, initially in twos and then, in the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20), to ‘go and make disciples of all nations’. Several key points about mission are clear from this short passage (and its echoes in the other Gospels and Acts).
The church’s mission is God’s mission
Firstly, the church’s mission (that of Jesus’ disciples) flows from the mission of God (the Missio Dei). Jesus is given ‘all authority’ by the Father, and commissions his followers to baptise ‘in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’. The church’s mission is thus a subset of God’s mission. God’s mission may include things the church is not called to do, but everything we are called to do must fit within the big picture of the Missio Dei.
