MACP 2010

The session recordings and notes from the 2010 Mid-America Conference on Preaching held here at Detroit Baptist Seminary are available here. I was very pleased with the conference overall, and found Dave Doran's plenary sessions to be focused and profitable--a reasoned and careful overview/critique of the missional church model.


For my part I contributed a presentation with notes) on a modified (dispensational) form of two-kingdom theology as an alternative to the missional model in delineating the response of the believer individually and the church institutionally to social concerns.

Feel free to interact. I plan to address in the next couple of weeks a few spin-off posts addressing some less-than-fully-explored concerns raised in my session.

MAS

As the Father has sent me so send I you.

In doing research on the missional church I am stunned by the glib way that missional proponents use John 20:21 as their guiding text: "As the Father has sent me, I am sending you." The verse is rarely explained or set into context, just offered as a tacit proof text that the mission of the church is coextensive with the mission of God. Three quick observations:

• Exegetically, this is an enormous amount of freight to pack into the word "as." Clearly a point of comparison is being made, but the comparison is far from clear. Most likely the similarity is that of the action only. God sent Christ; God sent the apostles. To conclude that this tiny word "as" must necessarily include in it comprehensive identity of the mission of Christ with the mission of the people of God seems a real stretch. And to conclude (as some do) that this is an extension of functional Trinitarianism frankly reeks of heresy.
• Practically, it seems obvious that the missional understanding cannot hold. The church is not making substitutionary atonement (!); not demonstrating divine lordship over wind, waves, disease, and death; not offering a Kingdom (certainly, at least, not in the sense that Christ was offering it--as King). The distinction of the parties being sent alone seems adequate to topple the missional understanding.
• Historically, for all the strenuous denials by proponents that the missional model is in no way related to the social gospel, I find an overwhelmingly curious resemblance of the missional use of John 20:21 to Charles Sheldon's use of 2 Peter 2:21 as supplying the mission of all believers to follow "in his steps."

There is much to criticize in the missional model. Its glib use of proof texts is a primary one.

MAS