Expanding the idea:

God is the source and the beginning of mission. Our mission derives from God Himself being on mission. That is why we are far more interested in what God Himself has set out to accomplish than we are focused on what we may have been assigned to do. If there really is a missio Dei (mission of God), initiated and accomplished by a personal God, then anyone who enters mission must do so as God would allow and invite.

Some versions of missio Dei regard the workings of non-personal forces of history and/or political powers as the extent of God's involvement in human affairs. We, however, assert that God is personally involved in all of history, without suggesting that God is the cause of evil, or advocating extreme models of determinism.

We reject the notion that mission is simply Christians sending out representatives to deal with problems or needs. Mission is not essentially a response to perceived needs. True mission involves partnership with the God of mission.

Expanding the idea:

God relentlessly presses onward through history toward the fulfillment of His purposes. He orders His words and deeds with wisdom according to His purposes. His purposes are not furthered with rigid, mechanical constancy. Instead, He acts with intelligence, emotion and will, with relational faithfulness throughout history.

God has not launched His mission in a way that leaves it running on auto-pilot. He is personally involved. This feature of the abiding desire and action of God guards against a "blink-on, blink-off" view of history.

Expanding the idea:

Mission is personal and relational. God authorizes and invites people to join Him in mission. And it isn't just any people. This is a chosen people. We could arrive at the idea of "a people for all peoples" by combining notions from Ideas 3 and 5. Why the two prepositions "by" and "with"? God delights in giving His people the dignity and intimacy of walking with Him in the doing of the task. But when they fail to obey Him, God still works in the events of the disobedience of His people, therefore working by them. Because of the idea of hope in Ideas 4 and 5, there can be genuine stewardship of the task. We are mandated to complete the task, and yet we can be sure that He is with us in it. The relationship of co-working with God is a marvelous privilege throughout history, but this relationship finds its highest expression as people are joined with the risen Christ by the power of His Spirit. Joined with Jesus, mission-obedient people share in His sufferings, His joy and His glory.

God does not use people. Mission is very much a task, but it is accomplished by God's people in direct and close relationship with Him. The call to mission is not a condition of God's covenantal love, but rather a high dignity and privilege. Mission is not essentially volunteerism. Neither is the missio Dei fulfilled by depersonalized historical forces.

Expanding the idea:

Any concept of closure of our mission (Idea 10) has to be grounded on God Himself accomplishing His mission. This idea has a lot to do with the nature of God's purpose. God aims to fulfill what He has initiated. This means that God follows a decisive and directive course of action, which is inherently strategic because it is aimed at completion. But the paramount idea is hope. We are moving toward the accomplishment of a promised destiny rather than doggedly laboring to fulfill a duty.

Without this idea, we are vulnerable to misguided and short-lived mobilization efforts. A commonplace mission harangue is to press Christians to finish what God has left to us to do. God appears to be waiting passively for someone to step up and finally get it done. This may come across as a vibrant, forceful appeal, but it can backfire. To much hinges on our obedience. We feel pressures to get things done in a hurry because there is so much for us to do. And too much seems to be awaiting latter day heroes who finally obey and do what all previous delinquent generations have neglected.

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It is important that we are succinct in stating what that purpose is, and that we articulate it in terms of what comes to God. In this vision of every people group drawn to glorify Christ, the peoples are indeed blessed, but they are blessed in order to glorify God. As they glorify and obey God's appointed leader, the Christ, they find that His kingdom governance brings genuine transformation to their communities. This triumph over evil and the transformation of communities by Christ's effective lordship constitutes the blessing of the nations. The kingdom of God is not one of the core ideas, but it could be. It is implicit in the messianic title of the Christ.

Without a theocentric or God-centered purpose, we are vulnerable to framing mission in terms of perceived needs. We may see those needs accurately, but miss the paramount value of accomplishing the mission of God: that God is glorified and that God is delighted.

Expanding this idea:

We presume that our students are from an evangelical background and thus have a relatively high view of the authority of the Bible. Despite the high view of Scripture, many students are barely literate about the basic characters, events and ideas of the Bible. If they are acquainted with the biblical stories, they rarely have an awareness of their sequence. And even if they are aware of the sequence of biblical events, they rarely grasp the cohesiveness of the diverse stories as one prolonged saga. To make this idea clear we don't need to introduce each of the events in detail; we usually need only to demonstrate how the different stories and prophetic statements flow together as one unfolding drama. But since students often are unfamiliar with details of the story, we have to recount the basic gist of the main events. Enabling students to see one encompassing story is likely the single greatest factor in forming the new paradigm we want to see formed.

This idea is not a matter of locating many references to themes like "all the earth," "every creature," or "all the nations," it's about a story, not recurrent words or truths. Take note that the idea is not merely a long story, from beginning to end; it is rather the big story. What makes it big is that it is a story about God. This idea is reflected but not well-expressed in what is commonly called "salvation history." It's not really about people and how they get saved. It is a story about God, and how He brings glory and followers to Himself from all peoples.

This idea of a unified story undergirds anything we might want to suggest about subsequent history having continuity and therefore, a culmination. The notion of completing a missiological task is nearly groundless without a conclusion to the story.

Without seeing the Bible as a single unified story, we are left to face a world of needs with some case histories and precedents for compassion. Any missio Dei would be an inference from a few stories or prophecies. Without a big story, mission efforts can be biblical only in the sense that there are expressed commandments and/or scattered instances of exemplary compassion and/or theological deductions about the state of the lost and the need for evangelism. Without a unified story, the Bible becomes source material for those who are merely looking for proof texts for selling us their particular agenda or cause.

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This is really a theological notion. We do not thrash along through chronological time as if it were ungoverned chaos. Instead, God is the master of, and a participant throughout history. God's purpose is never abandoned and restarted. Even the apparent reversals are but setbacks. We even go as far as to say that history is best understood as it focuses on and pivots around His purpose. We don't try to explore the philosophical depths of this idea, but if the biblical section is done well (with Idea 6 being established), then it is possible to present this idea effectively. If our students lack acquaintance with biblical history, they are even more likely to be ignorant about the last 2000 years of history. This is why we present history using the mnemonic device of repeating cycles of history (first, "supercenturies," and later "eras"). The repeating cycles serve us in two ways: First, it's easy to introduce the basic sequence of events with this rudimentary and memorable outline. Second, the cycles suggest that God's purpose unfolds with the same focus and force throughout every timeframe.

If students have any thought about history at all, they usually have a modified "blink-on, blink-off" theory of history in which God has intermittently been involved, and often seems to be inactive. Without believing that God moves steadily at all times and among all peoples, we can be prone to some significant mistakes. Most importantly, we tend to think of ourselves and our generation/era as the greatest and our contribution as the most significant. Lessons learned at great cost may have to be re-learned at an even greater cost. Missionaries arrive convinced that they are finally bringing God to the scene, but fall into the worst sort of cultural mishaps. Most important, without continuity to history, there can be no culmination of history, which is the next idea.

Expanding this idea:

If there is continuity in history, then there can also be culmination of history. This is the very soul of biblical hope. What God has promised will be fulfilled. What God has purposed He will accomplish. Idea 8 has a strong connection to Idea 10, that the mission task can and will be completed. However, these two ideas must not be entirely fused together. Completing our mandate is different than God bringing about the end of the age.

As much as we honor leaders in previous generations who have linked Christ's coming with the completion of mission, we need to guard against conveying the idea that our mission efforts might leverage heaven and "make" Jesus come back. The flip side of this is nearly as bad: that Jesus cannot come back until we finish our work. A good balance can be found by allowing a breadth of interpretation of Matthew 24:14 with respect to how the peoples are defined (there may be more or fewer in God's eyes) and what constitutes a "testimony" (there may be a one-shot message, or an abiding, flourishing kingdom movement).

Without seeing God working in history toward a greater culmination than the completion of the Great Commission, we will invariably be left to assign ourselves tasks according to whims and interests. Because the liberal view of history tends not to have a conviction of the end of the age, any social ideal one may personally hold dear can become as equally valid a personal mission as any other. In that case, we are left again to frame mission mandate around what may be fashionable or feasible. Without a crescendo of history before us, we are left as merely activists, enacting what we can of God's purpose, seemingly without His help. If instead, we focus on God doing more than He has assigned us to accomplish, then we can focus on accomplishing the missiological breakthrough among every people (our clear mandate). At the same time, we work with zeal on the things that God Himself has promised will be fulfilled (justice for the poor, thwarting of biological evil, reconciling peoples, and more). We are indeed mandated to work alongside God toward the transformation and blessing of the peoples with what we are now referring to as a wider mandate. But these things are ultimately left to God to complete.

Expanding this idea:

One cannot believe that God will make His people to be a blessing for all peoples and also subscribe to the common view that God's people have invariably been a curse upon the nations. This idea challenges the popular caricature of missionaries as marauding crusaders, conquistadors destroying golden temples, dictatorial black-garbed missionaries in the tropics or clandestine right-wing CIA operatives. Many students need the perspective of Idea 9 to buy into the paradigm. They will all need it in order to hold on to the conviction about the primacy of church planting among unreached peoples.

This idea also undergirds the content about transformational development, where we emphasize church planting as the most strategic way of bringing about lasting social transformation. This is the fundamental factor needed to integrate evangelism and social action, which is often polarized into a false dichotomy.

We are not trying to whitewash the record. We want students to recognize some of the travesties done in Christ's name. We are also not saying that churches automatically or quickly transform societies.

Most students regularly encounter attitudes of hostility against the expanding Christian movement. Without an apologetic anchored in historical fact, their convictions concerning the Perspectives paradigm can easily erode. Without this idea, students can be swayed by humanitarian agendas of relief and development, which may be entirely detached from evangelism and church planting.

Expanding this idea:

By "the mission task" we are speaking of what Christians have been clearly mandated to accomplish. One way to state the task is to see that the gospel is proclaimed so that every people group will experience a breakthrough of the gospel and many will follow and honor Christ within each group. This is a task that can be completed. This is a task that will be completed. Completing the entire task is the strategic reference point that we call every student to use in evaluating their lives.

The basic idea of the course is not that we need to do more mission activity, but that we should allocate our efforts strategically so that the mandate given us is completed. Those who hold a different view of the nature of the task say that it cannot ever be completed. They usually dismiss the idea of framing the task in terms of people groups (Idea 13) and build their argument around the obviously unending task of conveying the gospel to every person.

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We want students to envision a world in which Christ is obeyed in every people group and the gospel proclaimed effectively by local churches. For most of our students we are re-defining what a church is. We move away from institutional models to a Christo-centric and dynamic model. Churches are defined as groups of people committed to obeying Christ, flourishing as multiplying movements. Church movements are described as having a particular cultural affinity and a limited scope of influence within complex societies. Churches are presented as the primary way that entire peoples are evangelized and the beginning points of efforts to bring about lasting social transformation. Because churches multiply, completing evangelization is a feasible task, for which many different agencies can strategically co-labor.

Without clarity regarding church movements, students often presume that evangelists and cross-cultural communicators are the primary agents of evangelism. Without a fresh look at what churches can be, students often presume that the point of evangelization is to replicate churches much like those in their own society.

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While we expose students to a variety of ways to view the world, (e.g. urbanization, literacy, hunger, etc.), the primary lens that we want them to use is that of people groups. We begin forming this world-view from the very first lesson. Biblical and historical material contributes to the idea that the story of God's work in the world is a matter of God and the peoples. We want students to have a well-developed understanding of the different ways that the term "people groups" is often used.

Without a clear understanding of people groups, mission vision can easily become a fuzzy matter of responding to persons and needs of a particular locale. Mission efforts initially focused on an unreached people can swiftly be diverted to responsive individuals dwelling in the same country or city. Mission leaders often take offense that their work is not regarded as being of the highest priority. There are many well-intentioned mission leaders who would persuade Perspectives alumni that the people touched by their ministries are as strategically significant as the most unreached people group on earth. In all the confusion, the slightest accusation that people-specific ministry may be racist can be enough to divert the focus of Perspectives alumni.

Expanding this idea:

This idea pulls together and extends Ideas 10, 11 and 12. Since the mission task of world evangelization can be completed, progress toward finishing the task can be assessed. We use the language of assessing instead of measuring because it's difficult to quantify some important aspects of the definitions of church planting (viability and indigeneity) and boundaries between people groups. Since we want students to shape their lives with a commitment to God's purpose that is inherently strategic, this assessment becomes a huge factor in their lives. Like Taylor's "accusing map" of inland China, we want the facts of what has not been completed to be ever before them coupled with the bright certainty that it will be accomplished. The world's unreached people groups are not necessarily the neediest groups, as measured by physical, economic or other criteria (though there is often overlap between those needs and the absence of the gospel). The unreached groups are the remaining groups which have yet to have a reproducing church movement established within them.

This is an ongoing global assessment that needs to be continually refined by workers in the harvest fields. The cultural dimensions of the task are exceedingly complex. We do not claim that a comprehensive or accurate list of the peoples to be reached (as defined in the course) is even feasible. The task will be completed when God alone is satisfied that His promise to all peoples has been fulfilled. Rather than deny the need for the Holy Spirit's guidance, the nature of the task forces us to humbly acknowledge that we are dependent upon Him to show us who the peoples are by revealing the prejudicial boundaries that cut them off from the gospel.

Some believe it is presumptuous to think that we can or should attempt to assess the status of the mission mandate. They may label such attempts as "managerial missiology," which is caricatured as reductionistic and even unspiritual. While there are many valid components in assessing overall progress such as languages with Scriptures, country-based statistics, percentages of religious adherents, etc., the ultimate assessment must be faithful to the biblical framework of a people-by-people strategy.

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To recognize, value, and strategically labor toward church planting movements, students need to grasp how these movements actually expand throughout a people group. The most important dynamics of people movements are best described with the vocabulary and concepts of sociology, rather than anthropology. Sociological concepts such as multi-individual decision making and the influence of family structures, help students grasp both the difficulty and feasibility of establishing church planting movements.

An introduction to this idea does not constitute training in church planting. Students should not go away thinking that they have gained church planting skills. Instead, they should blaze with hope and vision that the task can actually be accomplished.

The evangelical tradition so honors gospel communication that it would seem that the task of evangelizing a people group is merely a matter of gospel proclamation. Pioneer church planters, however, find that much of their task involves helping new movements survive and thrive in their social setting. Without insight into the dynamics of pioneer church planting, students will likely focus on the contextualization of the message rather than the contextualized response that allows movements to grow effectively within different social contexts. People specific strategies sometimes go awry for lack of clarity about the sociological dimensions of the task. Because of this, the people group approach may be declared to be unworkable or may be abandoned in flurries of gospel communication with anyone who will give missionaries a hearing.

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Most likely, this idea is already an established mindset of most students taking the course today. It is nonetheless important to explore dynamics of cross-cultural communication of the gospel. Most of the contributing concepts are derived from cultural anthropology. Students should see both the feasibility and the complexity of executing the missionary task.

Knowing that effectiveness requires prolonged effort will help many avoid short-term or "going-solo" blunders. Reviewing the concepts related to this idea (such as finding a redemptive analogy and communicating at a worldview level) will not provide training, but exposure to quality cross-cultural work will help avert some of the worst scenarios.

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Fruitful efforts of evangelization invariably integrate relief and development. The desired outcome is social transformation where Christ is recognized for what He has done to bless entire communities and the kingdom values that characterize His followers. The integration of evangelism and social endeavors should be strategic, i.e., integration is framed on a timeline which positions in some strategic sequence the various relief, development, evangelization, and transformation efforts. The best strategic approach will sometimes call for social transformation to precede or accompany evangelization efforts. But in most situations, there is a primacy of evangelizing in order to establish the beginnings of new community values infused with the operative values of Christ's kingdom.

We are not echoing the common cry for a "both-and" balance with social action and evangelism regarded as separate but equal endeavors.

Without a clear strategic integration, people involved in evangelization find themselves unable to respond to charges that they only care about people's souls. Potential practitioners can be diverted from holistic effectiveness by pouring energy into relief efforts or offering assistance, which unwittingly traps people in debilitating dependency.

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Students are invited to live as "world Christians," following Christ with growing awareness and commitment to His global purposes. This discipleship should shape every area of life, integrating a believer's life around Christ's global purpose. That vision and commitment can be lived out in a variety of ways. The distinction of senders (supporters or mobilizers) from go-ers (cross-cultural missionaries, located at home or abroad) frees people to focus on aligning their lives with God's global purpose instead of making geography and job description primary issues.

There is still a general impression that missions is the business of professional missionaries. Other Christians may have an interest, but feel that they have no compelling part in missions unless they become missionaries. The global culture of materialism assails and corrupts world Christian discipleship. It's unlikely that many students will successfully integrate their lives for God's purpose without a challenge to live in a counter-cultural way. The model of a war-time lifestyle is one way to challenge our students.

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This idea is more about God's preferences than it is an idea about juggling strategic potentials of mission fields and mission forces. It may seem bold to claim that God's global purpose of world evangelization has "always" been advanced by collaborative efforts. However, it is universally true that any effort is always part of a larger historic movement. We include in this idea the many unintended and trans-generational partnerships. Even when someone thinks that they are accomplishing a solo effort, they are merely building on what has preceded them, and preparing the way for those who will follow them. We include this idea because the course itself is a summons to step into a world Christian movement. In order to be part of this movement, it's necessary for people to know about and value some of the diverse expressions and endeavors constituting that movement. This idea celebrates the value of diverse cultures as they are transformed by Christ and turned toward expressing His blessing to other peoples.

This idea is not a blind endorsement of anything containing the word "partnership". It should not be construed to suggest that the only way Americans can be effective is to finance foreign nationals. Furthermore, this idea does not support shallow strategic calculations of resource allocation built around the idea of non-duplication and efficiency. This idea does not suggest the superiority of large, well-funded operations. The best philosophy of partnership does not focus on finding ways to maximize human efficiency. Instead, we primarily focus on how God displays His excellence in the midst of a blend of human weaknesses.

This idea calls people away from false dependencies on themselves. At the same time, it should call people away from a false dependency on other agencies or national movements to complete what God has entrusted to the entire Body of Christ. When followed to its natural conclusion, this idea challenges the notion that each national church has all that it needs to complete the work that is needed in its own country.