How the Missional Church Affects the Marketplace

I always sensed some kind of a blockage in my ministry as a preaching pastor when seeking to communicate a missional vision to people in the marketplace. Despite my attempt in sermons to stress that the meaning of mission was not limited solely to evangelizing their peers who were conveniently trapped in the goldfish bowl of their workplace, inevitably someone would come up to me afterwards and say, “Great sermon, pastor, thanks for giving us a kick in the pants to evangelize more in my workplace.” Of course, it is not that evangelism shouldn’t be emphasized. It is just that evangelism attempted outside of the broader understanding of mission—that is, the cultural mandate and what it means to be human, and the Great Commandment and what it means to love my neighbour no matter what—can easily be reduced to an oppressive power play between persons in an argument. This is accentuated even more so when conversion to Christ is understood first of all as a private and individual decision, so that incorporation into the community of Christ then becomes “a religious or ethical duty.”[2]

In other words, when witness to Christ in the marketplace is isolated not only from the commands of God to be a neighbor and a human person, and when it is isolated from ecclesial community, the understanding of the gospel is actually distorted. The person who bears witness to the gospel does so as one who belongs, is formed, and is being transformed, in the church. In other words, authentic witness is given by someone who is an ecclesial person, not an individual—a person “who has first of all experienced wholeness of person” within a “‘gospel of belonging,’ enacted through rituals which reinforce this reality… . [3]   

This has implications for the nature of the church. In keeping with what I have suggested elsewhere, the missional church, if true to New Testament depictions of the church, is a deep church as well as a wide church.[4] In John’s depiction of the church in his Gospel in 20:19-23, for example, the risen Jesus stands in the midst of the discombobulated apostles and constitutes them the church by his risen presence among them. His speaking of shalom to his disciples anticipated the preaching of the Word in the church, and the showing of his wounds anticipated a church in which remembrance of the crucified Christ in the Lord’s Supper would be central. If this is John’s picture of the church, and I believe it is, then it is a deep church.

Twice Jesus speaks the word ‘shalom’ in this passage. This already suggests the width of God’s mission: the telos of the gospel is the restoration of persons to be fully human, to be flourishing people. On the second speaking of this word ‘shalom,’ Jesus indicates that he not only wishes the apostles to receive it, but also to transmit it to the world: “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you” (John 20:21). They were to understand themselves as sent persons, just as Jesus was the sent one of the Father, not just because Jesus is our example. The sent-ness of Jesus from the Father was an outflow of his union with the Father (John 7:29; 17:21).[5] By analogy, the sending of the apostles was an outflow of their union with Christ, a union brought about by his breathing into them the Spirit of God. They were being sent, like he was sent, because by the Spirit they would be in him and He in them. Mission was to be a participation in the sentness of Jesus. That is deep. We don’t do mission for Christ, we do it with him. And our doing is actually an outflow of our being in Him and in his church. So even the width of Christ’s command to a sent people in a church with a sent identity, is an outflow of the depth of union with the inner life of the Trinity. 

But let us not miss the extent of the width of this greatest of the great commissions! There is a definite new creation context here in John 20 which gives critical significance beyond the mere events that occur here, giving profound relevance to the creational and holistic dimensions of Christian mission. This context is inferred firstly by the fact that it occurs on the ‘evening of the new creation’s first day.’[6] N.T. Wright draws an interesting parallel between the initial creation of God and what Christ had accomplished by His death and resurrection here. With reference to the ‘first day of the week’ (v.19), Wright states, “Jesus had accomplished the defeat of death, and has begun the work of new creation… .”[7]  He suggests that the theme of new creation runs deeply in this passage. On the day of the creation of the humanity of the first Adam, Adam and Eve “heard the sound of him at the time of the evening breeze.” “Now,” notes Wright, “on the evening of the new creation’s first day, a different wind sweeps through the room. Then, noting the sameness of the words for wind, breath and Spirit in both Hebrew and Greek, he concludes, “This wind is the healing breath of God’s Spirit, come to undo the long effects of primal rebellion.” A further echo in this passage of the creation account is suggested by Wright. This relates to the parallel between this Johannine passage and Genesis 2:7,[8] the moment of the creation of the old humanity itself, when Yahweh breathed into human nostrils the breath of life. “Now, in the new creation,” Wright continues, “the restoring life of God is breathed out through Jesus, making new people of the disciples, and, through them, offering this new life to the world.”[9] Ramsey Michaels adds the perspective that a comparison of the first and last Adams is made implicit in this breathing act. Whereas the first Adam is the recipient of the breath of God in Genesis 2, the last Adam actually is the breather himself, breathing the Spirit into those who were becoming the new humanity in Him.[10] The primary command given to the first Adam to work, and to do so in ways that continue God’s creation and exercise stewardship of it, are now recapitulated in the last Adam who has inaugurated the new creation. Since we are in union with the last Adam, it is our task in all our endeavors in the marketplace, to participate in that new creation.  

In sum, the commission of the church is indeed wide, in that it sees its mission to be inclusive of evangelism, social justice, compassion, vocation and creation care. But, to return to the depth emphasis, this scattered life of the church is an outflow of the deep life of the church, deep in its practice of Word and sacrament, deep in its life together in hospitable and generous community. It is not a shallow community merely focused on the seeker or on social action, but rather it is a deep communion which overflows in love to the world, a communio in ekstasis, as an echo of the Trinity of which the church is an icon.

In light of this understanding of the missional church, three perspectives arise concerning marketplace mission. First the deep nature of the missional church suggests that marketplace mission flows from deeply formed persons by life in God which is centered in life in the church. Secondly, participation in the deep nature of the church enables characterial transformation of the missional marketplace person. Thirdly, life in the missional church as gathered leads to information about the width of the scattered mission of God. Marketplace mission is about communal persons who are formed, transformed and informed.

Ecclesial Formation of People in the Marketplace as Persons

The first consequence of the deep aspect of the missional church is that it forms persons, and by that I mean persons rather than individuals. They are persons who in their marriages as well as in friendships as singles, are an icon of the church, which is in turn an icon of the Trinity. We are persons-in-relation with God, and then with the church and with our spouses and friends, and with all humanity. Yet we are persons of irreducible identity.

This comes from insights gained from who God the Trinity is as three persons-in-relation, persons of irreducible identity who cannot be reduced to the essence of the Godhead, even though each shares fully in that essence. The mystery of the Trinity is that the three persons with their irreducible identity are at the same time, persons who are mutually internal to one another, interpenetrating and interanimating one another in complete communion. God is clearly not three individuals, as that would lead to the heresy of tritheism, not Trinity. Made in the image of the triune God, we as humans are also not individuals, but persons who are analogous with the persons of the Trinity, though not exactly in a univocal way. As Kallistos Ware has said,   

Personalism stands in this way at the opposite extreme from individualism.  It is exactly communion after the likeness of the Trinity that distinguishes the person from the individual.  It is not the individual who is in the image of the Trinity but only the person…To be human, after the image and likeness of God the Holy Trinity, means to love others with a love that is costly and self-sacrificing…Without mutual love there is no true confession of faith in the Trinity.[11]

The analogy between divine and human personhood is justified above all in the revelation of the person of Jesus Christ. The pre-existent person of the Son of God took on a human nature and remained one person who was both divine and human. The divine and human natures existed and exist today in the one person who is both human and divine. The Chalcedonian definition of Christ centered on the concept of personhood, and it prepared the way for the analogy between divine and human personhood. Indeed, it is the case that a divine person who is also a human person has ascended to the right hand of the Father. There is a human person who is first a divine person in the very Godhead! This point is summed up well by Alan Torrance when he refers to the “radical and dynamic continuity between the divine and the human that is the event of Christ.”[12] So what’s the point? Our witness as people in the marketplace finds its credibility in who we are as persons who know who we are, and as such are persons-in-relation, who are not self-centered, but are persons-for-the-other.

Persons of irreducible identity

Persons in the marketplace who are formed first as persons in the church can therefore be thought of as persons of irreducible identity, but never without realizing that personhood apart from relations. From the moment of conception, human beings are persons-in-relation, and they are formed as such, either well or less well in their families. The community of the deep church is where fractured identity and a poor sense of self is recovered. It is recovered through baptism in which we are named in the divine Name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is recovered through the repeated practice of facing Christ and feeding on him in the Eucharist, so forming us to develop our identity-in-Christ. It is recovered through the repeated hearing of the Word of God preached in expository fashion, so that by repeated encountering of the living Word we are becoming Christ-like persons.

Being a robust person in the marketplace, that is having a healthy sense of self and worth is crucial to sustaining virtuous and effective, resilient leadership. The most cherished value in our culture is embracing the self and having a ‘voice,’ yet I fear that this tendency easily leads to idolatry of the self. Self-acceptance is certainly a Christian virtue. Self-hatred is certainly not a Christian virtue. Hatred of one’s sinful tendencies, yes, but of oneself, no. Evangelicals can struggle with this distinction. They can easily confuse death to self and legitimate self-knowledge and self-acceptance. C.S. Lewis was helpful with respect to an understanding of the Christian’s proper relationship to the self. It is not the case that Christians are to love the self some of the way, by degree, but rather that “there are two kinds of self-hatred that look rather alike at the early stages, but of which one is wrong from the beginning, and the other right to the end. ”[13]  The first form which is actually un-Christian is a despising of the gift of the self God has given the person, leading to a low view of other persons. When coupled with a distorted view of the doctrine of “total depravity,” this also leads to a masochistic glorifying of suffering. The second which is a “Christian self-hatred” is a hatred of our sinfulness, a hatred of our predilection for independence of God, a hatred of our love of sin, our hatred of the sinful nature which distorts good desires for sex or food or money into lust and gluttony and greed. It is a legitimate hatred for all that twists and defiles every aspect of our personhood, including our love and acceptance of the self as God’s good creation. In summary, Lewis says that “the wrong asceticism torments the self: the right kind kills the self-ness.”[14] What motivates proper self-acceptance is living into our identity as those “accepted in the Beloved.” We must be conscious of our sin, but much more conscious of the Christ in whom we are accepted.

Part of legitimate self-acceptance is knowing and owning what is unique about ourselves, as well as what is shared with all other persons. Our idiosyncracies and our commonalities with others. Crucially, however, obtaining true self-knowledge and proper self-love is not possible unless we know God, that is, unless we know ourselves as persons-in-relation to him. John Calvin’s understanding of double knowledge led him to say that he did not know what came first, knowledge of God or knowledge of self. They are intertwined and inseparable, was his point. A simple Trinitarian way to think about self-acceptance is to say that I know and accept myself because I know the who Father created me in my uniqueness as a person, because I know the Son who loved me and lived and died for me in my uniqueness and in the sinfulness that is common to all humans, and because I know the Spirit who regenerated and indwells me has given unique gifts and a unique calling through which I am to serve humanity. All pursuit of knowing oneself becomes idolatrous when it is pursued outside of the context of knowing the triune God and being known and loved by him.

This kind of idolatry is prevalent in our time, maybe in an unprecedented way in human history. Surely there has never been a generation of people so pop-psychologized, and so under-theologized (a new word, I think!). Endless selfies, endless songs about loving me, and about finding the self or about insecurities about the self. Self-realization without the humility of sin-realization leads to arrogance. It is a house of cards. Self-realization uninformed by the framework of the revealed God becomes an unreachable Holy Grail. Self-realization outside of the context of the love of my neighbour also makes the inward journey endless and futile. As Darlene Fozard Weaver has said,  “the right self love designates a morally proper form of self-relation characterized by the moral norms of love for God and neighbor.”[15]

John Powell, Jesuit author speaks to kind of formation of persons that sustains them especially in conflict. “Fully ‘human people,’” says Powell, “are ‘their own persons’ … they do not bend to every wind which blows, that they are not at the mercy of all the pettiness, the meanness, the impatience and anger of others.” He described a conversation between Sydney Harris, who responds very kindly to a rude newspaper man, and Harris’ friend, who asks, “Why are you so nice to him when he is so unfriendly to you?” Harris responded, “Because I don’t want him to decide how I’m going to act.”[16] 

Persons in relation

It is important not to separate the concept of persons of irreducible and even robust identity from being persons-in-relation. We cannot be persons apart from being in community. There are marks of the deep church beyond the ones mentioned above—Eucharist and the Word. They are fellowship or experienced community, and prayers or worship. What “-in-relation” means is to be “-in-community.” One cannot hope to be formed as a person-in-relation apart from being in relation in intentional ways. The crucible for the forming of relational persons is in the ecclesial community and this paves the way for redemptive and just relations in the marketplace. People in the marketplace need close communion with a small group of people who hold them accountable and pray for their endeavours. A small group is the place of new covenant community in which individualism can be cured, egos kept in check, where healing can happen, and where new ideas for the marketplace can be discovered. It is also a context for participating in spiritual practices.

This reminds us forcefully that persons are embodied in community, and that materiality, as Dejan Aždajić has said, is “an essential element of any true spirituality that desires to go beyond theoretical abstraction.”[17] This is especially true since the “Incarnation was not simply a theological premise, but a methodological practice.”[18] Aždajić goes on to say that:

[t]his important consideration keenly expresses that bodies are not simply something we possess to fulfill the demands of rationally held beliefs. Bodies fundamentally comprise an ontological reality. Any valid interpretation and contextual application of religious narratives in the form of meaningful practices depend fundamentally on a bodily involvement. Meredith McGuire points out that, “Bodies matter, because humans are not disembodied spirits.”[19]

This helps the marketplace person to overcome any latent body/soul dualism that may infiltrate their marketplace ideologies. Persons do not so much have a body, as they are a body. Work which overemphasizes the mind or that involves perpetually viewing computer screens requires some counter-embodied-practices when people are away from work, and maybe even when they are at work. Engaging all of our senses is a significant part of what it means to be human… tasting our food, touching some soil, hearing good music, smelling the roses keeps us human. 

Characterizable Transformation - Virtue within Personalism

Wise and virtuous leadership is an important theme in marketplace theology. I have argued elsewhere that the pursuit of virtue and character is certainly an important part in Christian ethics. However, I have also argued that virtue or character are a product of personhood and the participation of persons in the person of Christ.[20] For this and other reasons I have suggested that the meta-ethic most suited to Christian theology is Trinitarian, person-centered ethics, and that deontological, utilitarian and even virtue ethics come under this largest category. Virtue outside of participation of persons in the life and love of God leads to anthropocentricity and self-absorption.

However, having established that the category of character comes under that of personhood, I still want to say that life in the deep missional church, precisely because it is a community of persons in relation, is a community where character and virtue are cultivated. This is a result of the communal practices of Word (with its important formative narratives and doctrines) and sacrament, fellowship and worship. The transformation in character of persons in the deep church is vital to the witness of the church to the gospel and its transformative power in the marketplace. In fact, the embodied nature of the life of the church and its theology is crucial to the overlap of influence from the church to the world.     

This is emphasized by Nancy Tatom Ammerman who says, on the one hand, that “theology cannot be reduced to disembodied, abstract ideas, since the physical reality of space, material objects, and the human body is not only implicitly expressing theological content, but is indispensable for theology’s existence and its concrete articulation in the first place.”[21] Related to this, Edward Capuchin explains, “Whether worshiping communities are aware of it or not, they are engaged in a ritual form of public theology whenever they gather for worship.”[22] Another way to say this is that the church properly understood is the new humanity, as Paul calls in in Ephesians 2:15. This not only celebrates the unitedness of all nations in one church. It also implies that the church as it engages in a deep and wide mission in embodied ways, is a harbinger of the humanity for which Christ died and desires to be saved. Its public life as the church celebrating good news is intended to become a public sharing of good news. When persons of character are present in public spaces with virtue drawn from life in Jesus, they are salt and light. Our world needs that today.      

Theological Information about the Width of What Mission Means

This just-mentioned notion of the width of the church made up of communing persons of character brings us full circle to a final word about how the wide missional church affects the marketplace. In sum, mission involves the Great Commission in the Name and by the power of the triune God, the Great Love Commandment empowered by God’s love for us, and the Cultural Mandate to be human. These may be viewed in concentric circles but they are deeply interconnected. Knowing that mission involves such width is freeing for persons in the marketplace. If one moves from the outer circle of the cultural mandate, where Christians can model and point to what it means to be fully human, shalom can be found in work places and in care of creation that may attract people to ask questions. Moving inwards to the realm of the Great Commandment, when justice is championed and compassion is modelled by marketplace Christians and their churches, people may be wooed to know the source of this shalom. Then the marketplace disciples of Jesus may find themselves operating in the inner realm of evangelism, answering the questions created in the outer realms of mission, with the story of Jesus who is Lord. Moving now from the inside out, once persons come to faith, then the task of the disciple-making marketplace person-in-relation is to teach the new disciple all that Jesus commanded them (Matt. 28:20) which is precisely the Great Commandment and the cultural mandate that moves them towards becoming fully human. But all of this journey of the new convert will be within the life of the church, discovering what it means to be a person-in-relation.

---

References:

[1] This article will be a chapter in Volume Two of Working Blessedly Forever  (Wipf & Stock) to be published in 2024.

[2] Ray Anderson, On Being Human:  Essays in Theological Anthropology, 189.

[3] Ray Anderson, On Being Human:  Essays in Theological Anthropology, 189.

[4] See W. Ross Hastings, Missional God, Missional Church: Hope for Re-evangelising the West (Downers Grove: IVP Acad., 2012).

[5] In fact in John 8:29 Jesus states, “The one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what pleases him.” The sent-ness of the Son by the Father does not make the Son subordinate to the Father, since the Father is in the Son. This is in keeping with the Trinitarian axiom of the indivisible nature of the works of the Trinity.

[6] N.T. Wright, John for Everyone, Part 2 (London: SPCK, 2002), 149.

[7] Wright, John for Everyone, Part 2, 149.

[8] There may also be in this passage an echo of the double peace benediction on Psalm 122.

[9] Wright, John for Everyone, Part 2, 150. That the Spirit’s impartation by the breath of Jesus seems to echo Genesis 2:7 is confirmed also by Bruce, The Gospels and Epistles of John, 391.

[10] Paul may be referring to this event when he makes this comparison explicit in 1 Cor. 15:45 – ‘So it is written: "The first Adam became a living being"; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit.’

[11] Kallistos of Diokleia, “The human person as an icon of the Trinity,” Sobernost 8, No. 2 (1986) 6-23.

[12] Alan Torrance, Persons in Communion: Trinitarian Description and Human Participation (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 1996), 209.

[13] C.S. Lewis, God In the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 210.

[14] C.S. Lewis, God In the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 211.

[15] Darlene Fozard Weaver, Self-love and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 91.    

[16] John Powell, Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1999), 36.

[17] Dejan Aždajić, “Externalizing Faith: Countering Individualism Through an Embodied Emphasis,” Studia Liturgica, 51 No.1 (2021), (86–102), 92.

[18] David John Seel Jr., The New Copernicans: Millennials and the Survival of the Church (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2018) 118.

[19] Dejan Aždajić, “Externalizing Faith,” 92-93. The McGuire reference is Meredith McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 118.

[20] See W. Ross Hastings, Theological Ethics: The Church’s Integrity in Contemporary Context (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Acad., 2021) and Pastoral Ethics: Moral Formation as Life in the Trinity (Bellingham, WA.: Lexham, June 15, 2022).

[21] Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 85, cited in Dejan Aždajić, “Externalizing Faith,” 93.

[22] Edward Foley Capuchin, “Engaging the Liturgy of the World: Worship as Public Theology,” Studia Liturgica 38.1 (2008) 31–52 (47), cited in Dejan Aždajić, “Externalizing Faith,” 93.

---