Author: Steven Hovater

A Christian education cannot be content to produce thinkers; it should aim to produce agents. Such formation not only offers content for minds; it also impinges on the nexus of habits and desires that functions as the activity center of the human person. The driving center of human action and behavior is a nexus of loves, longings, and habits that hums along under the hood, so to speak, without needing to be thought about. These loves, longings, and habits orient and propel our being-in-the-world. The focus on formation is holistic because its end is Christian action: what’s at stake here is not just how we think about the world but how we inhabit the world—how we act. We are what we love precisely because we do what we love.

– James K.A. Smith¹

What Smith gets right here is the moving of education—whether we’re thinking of the University, seminary, or Bible classes or sermons at church—from something we think of as strictly intellectual, or also candidly affective, training our desires so that we will act in a certain way in the world. Thus, education is not just about the head, but about the heart and the body as well.

That’s a really important corrective for much of what happens in all of those spaces where “teaching” happens.

1. James K.A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 2013, p 12. ↩︎

“Mission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God. God is a missionary God…There is church because there is a mission, and not vice versa.”
– David J. Bosch¹

Missional theology starts with God.

Church movements sometimes struggle navigating the relationship between practice and theology. The missional movement that’s developed over the last 40 years is not immune to that, and sometimes devolves into an instrumentalist praxis that makes it a defense technique against the institutional failures of church. (See Andrew Root’s critique.²)

However, I do think that at the heat of the movement has been a marriage of the practical and the theological. For example, there’s been a lot of thought on how the ecclesiology of the movement is grows out of a robust trinitarian theology.

David Bosch, the South African missiologist whose work, particularly Transforming Mission, is an important part of the missional family tree, articulates one of the key principles in the quote above. “Mission” for the church originates in how we conceive of God—”mission” is simply another expression for God’s desires or intentions. God wants something.God’s actions are not random, but come from God’s nature, God’s desires. How we understand what God wants—how we interpret the actions of the Father, Son, and Spirit revealed in scripture—give us a framework for how we can see God’s activity in our own contexts.

That’s the heart of missional.

1. Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 390. ↩︎
2. In, for instance, Evangelism in an Age of Despair, 2025. ↩︎

“Perhaps” turns out to be a remarkably important word for any church seeking to join in the work of God.

“Perhaps” is what enables discernment to begin. It lets you speak the beginnings of what you see God doing, holding it up for the rest of the community to join in discerning how what you see and sense fits into the missio dei, the great mission of God in the world. “Perhaps” lets you test the waters, holding up the possibility without having to defend it as certainty.

Not sure where to begin speaking of God’s work in the world? Let “perhaps” be your on-ramp. Speak the word, and see what follows.

From The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission, 1995:

The reign of God that the church proclaims is indeed present in the life of the church, but it is not the church’s possession. It goes before us, summoning us to follow. The practical implications of this will be discussed in a later chapter. Here it is enough to say that the picture given us in the Acts is one that is constantly being reproduced in the missionary experience of the church. It is the Holy Spirit who leads the way, opening a door here that the church must then obediently enter, kindling a flame there that the church must lovingly tend. (p. 64)

And just below this, Newbigin goes on:

My own experience as a missionary has been that the significant advances of the church have not been the result of our own decisions about the mobilizing and allocating of “resources.” This kind of language, appropriate for a military campaign or a commercial enterprise, is not appropriate here. The significant advances in my experience have come through happenings of which the story of Peter and Cornelius is a paradigm, in ways of which we have no advance knowledge. God opens the heart of a man or woman in the gospel. The messenger (the “angel” of Acts 10:3) may be a stranger, a preacher, a piece of Scripture, a dream, an answered prayer, or a deep experience of joy or sorrow, of danger or deliverance. It was not part of any missionary “strategy” devised by the church. It was the free and sovereign deed of God, who goes before his church. And, like Peter, the church can usually find good reasons for being unwilling to follow. But follow it must if it is to be faithful. For the mission is not ours but God’s. (p. 64)

Yes, this has often been my experience, too. The most surprising avenues of mission open up as we pay attention: often in the most preposterous ways. And yet, there God goes to work, and the church must every time decide again to follow.

What we have to learn from them is not that the church ‘has’ a mission, but the very reverse: that the mission of Christ creates its own church. Mission does not come from the church; it is from mission and in the light of mission that the church has to be understood….

To grasp the missionary church theologically in a world-wide context means understanding it in the context of the missio dei…If the church sees itself to be sent in the same framework as the Father’s sending of the Son and the Holy Spirit, then it also sees itself in the framework of God’s history with the world and discovers its place and function within this history. Modern Catholic and Protestant missionary theology is therefore right when it talks about the missio dei, a movement from God in which the church has its origin and arrives at its own movement, but which goes beyond the church, finding its goal in the consummation of all creation in God.

Jürgen Moltmann,

The Church in the Power of the Spirit, 1975, p. 10-11

By its very nature, grace exists in time. Grace doesn’t just exist, it occurs, being given in a particular moment.

God is gracious by eternal nature, but that grace is doled out in time.

This could be one of those moments, you know. And so, on the chance that you’ve stumbled onto this page in a moment when you need a little grace…it is there for you. It is God’s nature to abound in grace.

May you receive it. May this be a moment of grace for you.

Over time, everybody picks up sources—people whose ideas profoundly shape us. Or perhaps for others, it’s something of their way of life that forms us.

I’m 47 years old now, and many of the threads are so deeply wound through me now that it’s hard to know which particular giant’s shoulders I’m standing on in any given moment. But I feel my debts, nonetheless. And I want to name my sources—even if doing so exhaustively is impossible—I’d have to name every soul I’ve ever met, and each author who penned a word I’ve absorbed, every songwriter whose lyric that ever found its way to my ear; down to every actor who ever tried to sell me Captain Crunch in a 30 second spot between segments of Voltron, Thundercats, G.I. Joe and the others. These are the trillions of cells I’m made of, after all.

And yet, the proportions aren’t all the same, and I’ve felt particularly grateful lately for mentors like Paul Beavers and Keene Steadman, Mike Shepherd and Keith Jones, Laurie Mitchell and Kenny Barfield. At Harding, Daniel Stockstill, Paul Pollard and John Fortner wove their own threads into the way I think about life and God. As a grad student, Allen Black, Dave Bland, Rick Oster, Anna Carter Florence, Jeffery Tribble and Brennan Breed all found me at just the right time.

What got me started thinking about all this were the myriad authors who have influenced me deeply. It’s really too much to enumerate, but here’s a shortlist of thinkers whose work has shaped me as a theologian and minister:

Brennan Manning
Henri Nouwen
Walter Brueggemann
N.T. Wright
Darrell Guder
James K.A. Smith
Charles Taylor
John of the Cross
Augustine
Barbara Brown Taylor
Fredrick Buechner
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Annie Dillard
Jürgen Moltmann
Stanley Hauerwas
Thomas Merton
Anne Lamott