Understanding Mission: A Guide for the Church
Christopher Wright, Understanding Mission: A Guide for the Church (Carlisle: Langham, 2025) x+82pp, £7.99
We aren’t as focused on mission as we used to be and could spend time very helpfully reminding ourselves of what we mean by mission, its importance and a fuller perspective. Understanding Mission, which can be used as a short, accessible and helpful book to work through but ideally used in a group, helps us to recognise that mission isn’t something done by those who are keen but is what the Church exists for and perhaps is an area we increasingly need to rediscover.
The eight sessions start with a couple of questions to introduce the area, then a short video clip which is accessed via the QR code on the page. This is followed by three or four areas for conversation that are based around biblical passages, a couple of questions to help draw the themes together and then additional follow-on material. It’s a very familiar format that works really well for home and Bible study groups. The material is all there and nothing more needed and like similar courses each session could easily be stretched to a couple of evenings and so it’s a four month programme if wanted.
Over the years I’ve found Chris Wright to be a most insightful writer focused on mission, often through an Old Testament lens. Originally from Belfast, he writes at academic levels and then often rewrites his material so that it works really well for a much broader readership. Understanding Mission is a course developed from Wright’s The Great Story and the Great Commission (Baker, 2023) and that text works really well to further develop the insights in the course.
The various sessions unpack areas of ‘Whose Mission?’, ‘the Missional Drama of Scripture’, ‘Integral Mission’, ‘Building the Church’, ‘Serving Society’, ‘Caring for Creation’ and ‘Mission and the Local Church’. Its this final session that, for me, gives a key reason why this short book and programme are useful to Irish Methodism today. We believe in mission and at times think that everything we do is missional. There is some truth in that and mission is far from just evangelism, even if faith sharing is a key and essential element. A helpful way to look at this ‘is to recognise that while all church activities should have a missional dimension, some activities may have a specific missional intention’ (p66). Wright points us to a mission audit where we consider five marks namely ‘evangelism, teaching, compassion, justice, creational responsibility’ and the three spheres of mission as ‘building the church, serving society godly use and care of creation’ (p70). The relatively simple audit he suggests helps us to recognise better where we are serving well and where there are gaps, and if so what we can do about this. A missional audit is a really useful activity for a church, and if we are really brave also consider it against our own walk with Jesus. Following this course, learning and recognising more and then naturally and authentically considering how we match up to what we better recognise, could be a wonderful and transforming experience for a church group, a church, and perhaps even ourselves.
Rev Dr Stephen Skuce
Superintendent for Growing Churches