Darrell Guder, in The Continuing Conversion of the Church, speaks of the “Cultural Captivity” of the church.[1] He speaks particularly of the early twentieth century, a time in which the goals and values of the church, in its widest sense, and Western Culture had become inextricable in the minds of many. Guder contends that the term mission “basically meant the Western expansion of its own culturally conformed Christianity, carried out in a complex relationship with colonialism.”[2]
By the early twentieth century, a combination of the skepticism that was ingrained in Western thought as a result of the Enlightenment, a growing understanding of literary and historical criticism of the Bible itself [3] and the eruption of World War I in 1914 was beginning “a profound process of self-questioning”[4] on the part of the church. Guder pegs the culmination of the process to the publication of Karl Barth’s commentary on Romans in 1919. [5]
Guder maintains that this self-questioning led to an examination of exactly what the term mission meant, and contends that the concept of mission is rightly examined as missio Dei, a mission of God or a movement from God to the world. Framed in this light the missio Dei, the proper understanding of the mission of the church, is freed from the “captivity” of Western culture. Guder brings home this point by succinctly stating that “God cannot be restricted to what has been and is happening in Western cultural Christianity.” [6]
So, what exactly does “mission” mean to us? Is it broadly defined or does the term hold a
