Baakham's Bible And Mission, By Richard Bauckham

Over coffee in a Barcelona neighborhood, a friend spoke the words, “I can’t invite my friends to church, they would never come back and that would end our discussions about God.” It is an astounding comment. Many believe that church is exactly where you are supposed to have conversations about God. The implications of this statement are insightful. One such implication is that there are discussions about God happening. People in a postmodern, secular, pluralistic world are engaging in talk about God. Some of these discussions are occurring in church and others outside of a church environment. However, another implication is that there is some disconnect between the discussion occurring about God in the church, and the discussion occurring
He develops this hermeneutic, not by focusing on what is said about mission in the Bible, but by looking at the action and purpose of God as narrated in the biblical story. God’s purpose, as Bauckham sees it, results in the kingdom of God or “the achievement of God’s purposes for good in the whole of God’s creation.” Bauckham is concerned with how one reads the Bible, “in a way that takes seriously its missionary direction.” This is essentially why we can call this hermeneutical framework missional. Missional describes something that “is related to or characterized by mission,” and Bauckham is stating that, at its core, the whole of scripture and what we know of God, is characterized by God’s purpose or mission. Herein lies the first critical piece of Bauckham’s hermeneutic—the mission is
The way we live our everyday life demonstrates, to whomever cares to pay attention, our understanding of God. If we believe that God is a God of mission, engaging and caring in our lives for the good of God’s creations, then we in turn as followers of God, will find our mission or purpose within this mission or purpose of God. David Bosch refers to this understanding of a God engaging all of creation as the misso Dei by which he means God’s love of the world, and engagement in the world, is that in which the church participates. Mission precedes the church. God is the starting point of all purpose for creation because purpose “originates with divine, not human, initiative”. The stories we have in the Bible are stories about people living life with purpose. This purpose is received from one God, and the stories of the Bible present us with the issues faced by this people as they attempt or don’t attempt to live by this given purpose. But the story is only about this purpose because their God is a God of