Normally in evangelical circles we think of mission as something that we do for God, or at best with God that helps communicate the message of God’s forgiveness of sins. While I don’t disagree with that description, it is not as rich and as all encompassing as the biblical narrative frames it. In the first description, mission doesn’t make much sense any time before the cross, and arguably before pentecost. But God has been on mission all through His story and although we won’t get far without being saved from sin and death, God’s story, focuses on what we are saved for more than what we are saved from.

Often we think of mission as something we do to obey God and win the lost, evangelism and church planting. But the bible shows us that in fact God was engaged in mission long before we came on the scene, He has a plan and a purpose for creation and He chooses to include us, He chooses to ask us to come along and co-create with Him.

Chris Wright¹ helps us see the larger scope

“God’s purpose is to bring a broken creation, spoiled at every level, that is at the level of individual human hearts through culture and societies, nations and brokeness at an international level, right through to the brokenness of creation itself. To bring a world like that, that we see in Genesis Ch 1-11, to a world that is being renewed, restored and purged of evil in the new creation at the end of Revelation.”

In this scope, God is doing things in His world, through His people to the end of the redeeming of everything that God has created.

So being involved in God’s mission is not just the realm of evangelists and church planters. Skye Jethani says the three things that characterised Eden were beauty, order and abundance. Certainly those things take place first as right relationship with God and others, but once we are included in the very life of Christ the outflow of our lives that contribute to the re-newing, re-ordering, re-generating of all of creation is activity that is on mission with God too.

This means that the value of making art, of working for rightness and justice in a work place, and creating jobs are not just useful to God to the extent to which you can witness in those places, but they themselves are part of God’s work through His people to renew the world.

Is God interested in your co-worker at work or co-student at art class hearing about God’s invitation to new life with Him? Certainly, but He is also working through your work to the extent to which you are contributing to the increase of beauty, order and abundance of society and creation.

That’s good news for followers of Jesus who feel left out if they are not involved in the erroneously named ‘full-time ministry’.