The word missional also gets its meaning and understanding from John 20:21 when Jesus tells his disciples, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” We must understand that the Father sent Jesus.  God is a missionary God.  God is on a mission to reconcile the entire world to Himself.  Therefore, the Father sent Jesus into the world to usher in the Kingdom of God in order to begin this reconciliation.  This is what theologians call the Missio Dei (Latin for Mission of God).

Jesus then tells his disciples that he is sending them on the same mission.  Jesus calls his church to go into the world and to share that the King has come and that we can be reconciled to the Father.  Being a missional church means that you understand that the church is sent on mission as an instrument and as a sign of the Missio Dei.  Although the word missional has only been used for a few years, the concept has been around since the 1950s.  Darrell L. Guder and Lois Barrett tell us the following:

By mid-century, the emphasis in mission thought shifted toward a theocentric approach that, in contrast, stressed the mission of God (Missio Dei) as the foundation for the mission of the church.  The church became redefined as the community spawned by the mission of God and gathered up into that mission.  The church was coming to understand that in any place it is a community sent by God.  “Mission” is not something the church does, a part of its total program.  No, the church’s essence is missional, for the calling and sending action of God forms its identity.  Mission is founded on the mission of God in the world, rather than the church’s effort to extend itself.[1]

A missional church exists because of and for the mission of God.

---

[1] Darrell L. Guder and Lois Barrett, Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998), 82.

In Paul’s letter to the Colossians, it is clear that he wants them see that Jesus is their propitiation. Wayne Grudem defines propitiation as “a sacrifice that bears God’s wrath to the end and in so doing changes God’s wrath toward us into favor.”[1] This is a concept that would have been familiar to Paul’s Jewish readers in Colossae. Every year on the Day of Atonement, the high priest would offer a goat as a sacrifice for the sins of the people in order to deter the wrath of God.[2]

Paul clearly shows the Colossians that they were under the wrath of God because of their sin. Paul tells them to “put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming” (Col. 3:5-6). The earthly things that are in them, their sin, will lead to nothing more than the wrath of God. Wright clarifies:

Destruction, indeed, will be the result for those who disregard the warning: because of these, the wrath of God is coming. It is not the case that God happens to dislike this sort of behavior and so has decided as it were arbitrarily, to punish it. On the contrary. ‘The wrath of God’, it hardly needs saying, is not a malicious or capricious anger, but the necessary reaction of true holiness, justice and goodness to wickedness, exploitation and evil of every kind.[3]

Paul wants the Colossians to know that their sin will lead to the wrath of God. On the other hand, Paul doesn’t simply present the wrath of God. He also presents Jesus as their propitiation.

Paul tells them that God the Father is “making peace by the blood of [Jesus’] cross” (Col. 1:20). In the same way that a goat’s blood was offered on the Day of Atonement for the sins of Israel to hold back the wrath of God, it is that Jesus’ blood is offered on the Colossians part to bring peace with God. Unlike the goat’s blood though, Jesus’ sacrifice was done once and for all “by canceling the record of debt…nailing it to the cross” (Col. 2:14). It is through the cross that Jesus becomes a propitiation for the Colossians taking the wrath of God upon himself.

---

[1] Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1995), 1252.

[2] Lev. 16:8-9, 15

[3] Wright, Colossians and Philemon, 135.