Why the Mission Needs the Marks of the Church
by R. Scott Clark |
(page 7 of 7)
Conclusion
If the mission of God in history is to announce, accomplish, and
apply salvation to all of his people in all times and places, in
that case the marks of the church are absolutely essential to the
mission. Throughout the whole history of redemption, the divine
mission was always executed through his covenant people beginning in
the garden, after the Fall, through Noah, Abraham, national Israel,
and finally in the New Covenant church. In every epoch there was
always a visible representation of the kingdom and covenant. Nothing
has changed. Our Lord Jesus cut a covenant with his people in his
blood (Luke 22:20) and he administers his salvation, which is the
essence of the mission, through that people. The marks of Christ’s
church have always been evident: Gospel, sacraments, and discipline.
Therefore, so long as we continue to accept the Reformed reading of
redemptive history, we cannot accept the EM’s definition of “missional.”
By these lights, in order to be “missional” we have to reject what
we understand to be the gospel and what we understand to be the
mission. Finally, and we should have to embrace the EM account of
“mission,” we should have to adopt an Anabaptist doctrine of the
church.
Fortunately, none of this is necessary. We should take the EM as
challenges to reinvigorate our vocation to take seriously our
doctrine of the church as the covenant community, as the visible
representation of the kingdom of God, and as the external
administration of the covenant of grace. Let us agree with the EM
leaders where they remind us that the mission of the church is
grounded in the mission of God. The mission of God is expressed in
the voluntary submission of God the Son to his Father, whose “food”
was “to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work”
(John 4:34). Our work is, first of all, to “believe in him whom he
has sent” (John 6:29) and in response to the mission of the Son, the
institutional church must manifest the marks and in so doing to go
as we have been sent (John 20:21) by him who was sent for us.
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