Missio Dei Quotes

Through the eyes of Jesus, we will see God differently, no longer as a distant father figure, but through the paradigm of the missio Dei to find the sent and sending God. Second, we will see the church differently, no longer as a religious institution but as a community of Jesus followers devoted to participating in his mission. We call this the participatio Christi. And third, through Jesus’ eyes we will see the world afresh, not simply as fallen or depraved but as bearing the mark of the imago Dei–the image of God.

Up until the 1950s the subject of the missionary movement was referred to as "missions" in the plural form. In fact, the term "missions" was first used in its current context by the Jesuits in the sixteenth century. But the International Missionary Council discussions in the 1950s on the missio- Dei convinced most that the mission of the Triune God was prior to any of the number of missions by Christians during the two millennia of church history. Consequently, since there was only one mission, the plural form has dropped out of familir usage and the singular form, "mission," has replaced it for the most part. Nevertheless, most churches and lay-persons hang on the plural missions. For that reason, and to make our point clear here, we will refer to it in this work from time to time while alerting believers to the coming change.

To be an Eikon means, first of all, to be in union with God as Eikons; second, it means to be in communion with other Eikons; and third, it means to participate with God in his creating, his ruling, his speaking, his naming, his ordering, his variety and beauty, his location, his partnering, and his resting, and to oblige God in his obligating of us. Thus, an Eikon is God-oriented, self-oriented, other-oriented, and cosmos oriented. To be an Eikon is to be a missional being – one designed to love God, self, and others and to represent God by participating in God’s rule in this world. We are now back to perichoresis: to be an Eikon means to be summond to participate in God’s overflowing perichoretic love – both within the Trinity and in the missio Dei with respect to the cosmos God has created. When we participate in this missio Dei we become Eikonic. To be an Eikon means to be in relationship.

There is no better way to situate all missionary endeavors and mobilizations in the missio dei than through a commitment to prayer.

There are three important observations about the emergence of Korean Christianity that are crucial to our understanding of the emergence of global Christianity. First, Korea is one of the few countries in the world where the church was born outside the country through expatriates who were being held as prisoners. Second, the first missionaries to Korea were not foreign missionaries but Koreans themselves who had come to Christ outside of Korea and returned as indigenous propagators of the gospel. Third, one of the earliest documentations of the Christian message was from Chinese Christian documents, rather than literature that explained the gospel in Western terminology. Since Korea has become one of the most Christianized countries in Asia and today is the home of the largest Christian churches in the world, it is important to recall the unusual origins of Korean Christianity, which was birthed through indigenous expressions of faith. If the missio dei is best understood as the arrival of the gospel prior to the missionaries, then the Korean church represents one of the foremost examples.

we should recognize the antiquity of Christianity in Asia. Later, Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries arrived in China and discovered that the message of the gospel had already preceded them. This is an important reminder of the relationship of the missio dei to the missionary agent. Missionaries sometimes have mistakenly seen their role as "bringing the gospel" to a particular people group. However, one of the important lessons of the missio dei is to recognize God's primary agency in the missionary task. The missionaries did not bring the gospel to China; God brought the missionaries to China.

Mission began with God. God has a mission. That’s why he made for himself a people, but his mission came before people. His mission came before the Bible. He gave his mission a Bible. He gave his mission a people. God’s mission, God’s project, is to bless. Open doors are an invitation to be part of the missio Dei.

by linking God with mission, missio Dei appears to be a theological veil, a way to justify talk about ourselves with talk about God.