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Urbana^® 2000:
What is this Mission All About?
Paul Grant, writer
Madison, WI

Just what exactly is this “mission” idea that Urbana is all about? How is it at all relevant to life on campus? And why would anyone want to associate themselves with such an imperialistic term?

Words like ‘mission’ and ‘missionary’ are deeply rooted in the American consciousness. Vivid images come to mind, from crusty schoolmarms forcing happy naked people to wear clothes, to white adventurers breathing pestilence all over isolated immune systems.

Let’s go back further. Who was the first missionary? If we look at the book of Genesis, it is God! In fact, the entire Bible can be summarized as the history of God’s pursuit of humanity. That is his mission. People who get paid to think about these things (they’re called missiologists) have a term for God’s purposes as revealed in the Bible—missio Dei. This is an important term, because it will help us understand what Urbana is all about, what missions should and shouldn’t be, and most important, what God is up to in all of this.

Missio Dei simply means God’s purpose. God had one purpose in creating the universe, one purpose in creating conscious, speaking beings (us), and one purpose in sending Jesus to die for our sin. God created us so we could worship him, know him, love him and be loved by him. When we sinned, we brought more than misery upon ourselves and the world; we also severed an intimate relationship with our creator—the greatest relationship in history, broken over our desire to assert ourselves. All that is just an introduction to the Bible, found in the first few pages. From then on, it’s all about missio Dei, about God’s loving pursuit of his people.

Ordinary People
The amazing thing about God’s purpose is that he uses ordinary people to do his extraordinary work. He uses shepherds, prostitutes, priests, widows and bill collectors to introduce his love to others. He is so beautiful, so powerful, that he could simply coerce us into worship by laser-beaming us. Instead, God uses ordinary folks with very human frailties.

The first person the Bible describes in detail is Abraham. God called Abraham away from his home and into the desert, with the promise that he would make Abraham a blessing to all the world. If you read Genesis, you’ll find that Abraham was not a real hero. He lied, swindled and worse. But he had a reckless faith in God, and in Genesis 15:6, “He believed the Lord, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”

The list of God’s ordinary people goes on. Lest we misread the Old Testament as a story about one ethnic group, from Ruth to Rahab, from Daniel to Jonah, there are dozens of stories about God’s call on all nations.

Then comes Jesus, the Son of God. Jesus demonstrated how the missio Dei runs throughout the Jewish law. He taught humility, justice, love and holiness. Then he lived out humility, justice, love and holiness. Then he let himself be killed. But God brought him back to life! This is key. Through Jesus’ work in taking on our sin and punishment, people of the whole world can be the children of God. We can boldly approach God, in spite of our sin. Our faith in Jesus’ love and forgiveness empowers us to take our eyes off ourselves, and focus on him in worship. In Jesus, the missio Dei expands to us, and Jesus sends us out to include all people in the worship of God.

Today there are worshipers of Jesus in every corner of the globe. There has been an indigenous church in China for more than a millennium. In southern India, people have been calling on the name of Jesus since about the first century. Yet Jesus’ desires for his church are far from fulfilled. There is a stunning need for Jesus around the world, yet the church all too often remains immobile, paralyzed by its own sluggishness and sin.

At Urbana, we will be looking at the work of missio Dei around the world, looking our sin squarely in the eye and, by the grace of God, moving forward.

For Us Ttoday
If ‘mission’ means God’s purposes, then every single Christian is most certainly called to be involved. Our whole lives are sacrifices to God, whatever he has us do. The actual details are not as important as our living service to God. We are not all called to lead Bible studies, but we are all called to help reach the communities we find ourselves in. We are not all called to be policy makers, but we are all called to love justice. God may want someone to be a software designer with IBM in Pakistan, and another to become an honest contractor in a large city.

If all of us are part of God’s mission, some of us are specifically called to missions. Missions describes the structures and strategies for spreading the gospel around the world.

Urbana is about both: it’s about calling all students to join in God’s mission, and giving them the tools to begin. It’s about helping students develop lives committed to justice, to racial reconciliation and to evangelism. It’s about helping us repent from those passive life-style choices that lull us to sleep. It’s about refreshment and a new start in experiencing the missio Dei.