Community is the vehicle of God’s mission.
In this blog series, we are looking at the topic missional effectiveness. Once again, missional effectiveness is embracing the totality of the missio Dei—including its message, movement, and marks—and enacting it in the life of a local church.
So far, I have covered the message and movement of God’s mission. In the next several blog posts, I will describe the marks of missional effectiveness. In essence, I will be answering the following question: what does it look like for the message and movement of mission to be enacted in the life of a local church?
Observing the grand narrative of scripture, I have come to believe there are at least three marks of enacting God’s mission. Today, I’ll cover the mark of community.
The Missional Mark of Community Explained
In Genesis 1, we are introduced to God and His mission. We learn that God created man and woman in His image, placed them in the garden, and told them to, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fist of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen. 1:28).
From the very onset, the Bible communicates that God is on mission to create a people for Himself who will be the vehicle by which He advances His kingdom throughout the created order, thus having His glory—displayed through the lives of His image-bearers—fill the entire world.
Therefore, a mark of God’s mission is the creation of a people, or of a community, who serve as God’s vehicle of advancing His kingdom. This is the essence of the missional mark of community. And this mark is present in both the Old and New Covenant in places such as Exodus 19:4–6 …
