Reviving Mission: Jesus’ Holistic Approach
Linson Daniel, Jon Hietbrink and Eric Rafferty
5min read ⭑
Missiology means “the study of the church’s mission.”
Of course, the linguistic root of missiology is mission — an English word derived from the Latin missio, which means “sending.” However, the Bible wasn’t written in Latin but mostly in Hebrew and Greek, and it’s from those languages that we get the words shalakh (Hebrew) and apostellō (Greek), each of which are verbs which mean “to send.” As you have likely guessed, apostellō is also the root for our English word apostle, which literally means “sent one.” Thus, at the core of a biblical understanding of apostles (or a modern understanding of missionaries) is the concept of sending. Said another way, to live a life of mission is, at a fundamental level, to be sent.
Because mission is all about “sentness,” any framework of missiology must speak to our sentness in a dynamic way. David Bosch captures this idea in his book Transforming Mission when he says, “The term mission presupposes a sender, a person sent by the sender, those to whom one is sent, and an assignment.”
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As such, the holistic missiology we need must point to who our sending God is, it should reveal how we are called to live as sent people, and it should instruct us in what we are being sent to do (See Roger Martin’s work on this threefold model in The Design of Business for more).
Jesus: Holistic Mission Embodied
More than being merely our savior, Jesus is our example for how to live a life of holistic, reviving mission. He is the one who shows us how our sentness can shape our understanding of who God is, how we live, and what we do in integrated ways. Whenever we get out of balance and start to live a lopsided faith, it is returning to the life of Jesus that helps us reorient our lives, and it’s in his person that we see this model of holistic mission fully embodied.
Who God Is: “I am the one who was sent.”
One of the most striking themes of the Gospels is the way Jesus refers to himself and to God, because it gives us a window into how Jesus allowed his sentness to shape his spirituality — his experience of who God is.
Jesus uses a variety of self-descriptions throughout the Gospel of John — beautiful metaphors such as the “good shepherd” (John 10), the “true vine” (John 15), and “the bread of life” (John 6). However, one of the most common ways Jesus describes himself in this Gospel is as “a sent one” and he consistently calls God “the one who sent me.” Indeed, more than forty times in twenty-one chapters Jesus uses some combination of these phrases to describe either his identity or that of his Father.
Mission wasn’t just something Jesus did; it was who he was and who he understood God to be. Jesus’ sentness was essential to his spirituality, and his understanding of God as “the Father who sent me” shaped the whole of his life.
This same thing is true for us. We too are sent by the triune God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — with more than a missional calling; we too have a missional identity. Just like Jesus, our sentness must shape our spirituality, and our understanding of who God is must overflow into how we live and what we do.
How We Live: Jesus Knew
One of the final accounts of Jesus’ earthly life, when he washed his disciples’ feet in John 13, gives us a powerful window into the ways Jesus allowed his sentness to shape how he lived.
The passage highlights the ways that Jesus’ posture of servanthood was rooted in what he knew to be true. John 13:3 makes it clear that Jesus not only knew his own authority (“the Father had put all things under his power”) but he also was keenly aware of his sentness (“he had come from God and was returning to God”).
However, Jesus didn’t allow this knowledge of his sentness to be sequestered as an abstract theological construct. No, he lived his truths. Jesus allowed the fullness of these mysteries — the things he knew about God and himself — to be translated into how he lived. As he disrobed, wrapped himself in a towel, held the basin, and washed the grit and grime off his disciples’ feet, his life became an embodied parable of his sentness that revealed the fullness of his love for them and the world he would soon send them to serve.
“We believe God is calling his people to embrace the kind of holistic mission we see in Jesus himself. He is the original sent one, and it is only his reviving mission that can renew our hearts and transform our world.”
Though the disciples were profoundly confused by what he was doing, Jesus was clear that this embodied demonstration of how he lived was in fact an invitation for how they were to live.
This same invitation stands for us. Just as Jesus allowed what he knew to shape how he lived, we, too, are invited to live our truths. We are to follow Jesus’ example and allow our sentness to be translated into lives of embodied integrity.
What We Do: Authority and Exousia.
In similar fashion, Jesus’ sentness also shaped what he did. At the very heart of Jesus’ ministry was the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. Just as the Father sent the Spirit upon Jesus at his baptism, so the Spirit sent Jesus into his ministry (Luke 3:22 and 4:14). Indeed, the whole of Jesus’ ministry — what he did — was shaped by the power of the missionary (i.e., sent and sending) Holy Spirit within him.
Closely related to Jesus’ power (which in Greek is the word dynamis, from which we derive the English word “dynamite”) is the idea of Jesus’ authority. We see the extraordinary nature of Jesus’ authority in passages such as Mark 1:22, which says, “The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law.” The Greek word for “authority” here is exousia, which is a combination of the prefix ex-, which means “out of,” and ousia, which means “essence or true being.” As such, the word translated here as “authority” can rightly be understood as meaning something like “out of one’s true being.”
Jesus’ ministry — what he did — was so amazing because it was marked by a kind of authority sourced not externally (like the teachers of the law), but internally, from the presence of the sent and sending Spirit within him. Jesus’ mission emerged “out of his true being” — the power to do what he did was sourced in his sentness. It was as he allowed the Holy Spirit in him to flow through him that he ministered in authority.
Just as what Jesus did was rooted in his sentness, so too is this true for us as his people. Ultimately, any authority we have is strictly derivative. It’s only when we align our lives with Jesus’ life and allow the sent and sending Holy Spirit in us to move through us that we can truly walk in the authority Jesus promised us to do the things he did.
In the midst of this new season emerging all around us, we believe God is calling his people to embrace the kind of holistic mission we see in Jesus himself. He is the original sent one, and it is only his reviving mission that can renew our hearts and transform our world.
Linson Daniel, Jon Hietbrink and Eric Rafferty are friends, kingdom collaborators and coauthors of the new book by InterVarsity Press, Reviving Mission: Awakening to the Everyday Movement of God. They each lead in church and campus contexts (Linson is a pastor at Metro Church in Dallas, and Jon and Eric work with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship) and are passionate and deeply hopeful about God’s work in this emerging generation.
Taken from “Reviving Mission” by Linson Daniel, Jon Hietbrink, and Eric Rafferty. Copyright © 2024. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press.
