Being Generous, but Orthodox
Balancing breadth with focus
One of the challenges that I face in my day job at Missio Nexus is the balance between a theological focus on the global fulfillment of Jesus' command to take the Gospel to the nations and the many ways that people attempt to fulfill that command. Mission drift is real. Now, when I say this, a double entendre is intentional. Here I mean "mission" as in organizational purpose, and I also mean "mission" as in the Great Commission. Companies, movements, and ministries all face the challenge of balancing breadth and focus. I am going to argue here that leaders need a rubric for how this is done.
A community like ours, made up of about 350 missionary agencies, 200+ churches, and a few hundred individual missiologists, schools, and activists is, by definition, broad. We like to say, "The Great Commission is too big for anyone to accomplish alone and too important not to try to do." My board recently confirmed a commitment to being a broad community. "Broad" is good for encouraging shared learning, diversity, and leveraging the global scope of the church.
But, broad has many challenges as well. The Western church is suffering from the cultural shift toward abject individual autonomy (which is what the current infatuation with identity is). One response to this is to erect more standards and statements of doctrine. This is a reasonable response, but it is not one which a broad collection of ministries can easily do together. If you have ever lived through a significant change to a ministry’s "statement of faith" you know the amount of leadership attention this requires.
Another way to be broad is to drift with the majority's direction. This approach was the de facto approach for many ministries up until the past five or six years. This was because the changes were mostly about acceptable variations of orthodox faith. Of course, what was acceptable changed. Missio Nexus itself is the product of a merger between two historic missions associations that, prior to the 2000s, could never have conceived of partnership. But the rise of collaboration brought on by massive Western moral decline painted differences in pastels instead of stark, bold, primary colors, and partnership became inevitable.
I recently thought about this dilemma when I learned that the editor of Evangelical Mission Quarterly (EMQ), the flagship journal of Missio Nexus, was planning an issue on the topic of "creation care." Because of my affiliation with a couple of other evangelical networks, my gut reaction was to oppose this. In my view, there are things we all care about as Christians, but there are more specific things we in the Great Commission community care about (I know, the dichotomy will upset some of you, but there is a difference between expanding the borders of the Kingdom and building castles within the borders).
When our team frames the Great Commission (I actually don't like the two-word phrase but that is for a different article) we tend to think in terms of the activities that result in obedience to it. This flows into evangelism, discipleship, and church planting. Granted, these three are themselves carried out in a myriad of ways, yet they all are part of obedience to the five-fold command of Christ which we call the Great Commission (John 20:21, Mark 16:15, Matthew 28:19-20, Luke 24:44-49 and Acts 1:8).
So, I asked the EMQ editor how this issue would integrate creation care with evangelism, discipleship, and church planting. We reviewed the articles through this lens. After some back and forth, and with a few edits and suggestions (with one article directly answering the question, "Is Creation Care Really a Gospel Issue?") we arrived at an interesting edition of EMQ which speaks to our community and stays within the bounds of our mission.
I should note that our mission statement and our vision statement are also helpful for achieving focus. However, they are about Missio Nexus - our team’s purpose and our preferred future. The evangelism, discipleship, and church planting categories are more about what we want our community to be about. They provide focus for the community, not just our team.