A small church sits on an isolated salt marsh in eastern England. It was built in the year 654 by St Cedd, on the remains of the wall of a Roman fort. The chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall, Bradwell-on-Sea is a visible symbol of the Christian faith, and the faithfulness which moved St Cedd to travel from Lindisfarne in northern England down to the heathen wilds of Essex on a mission to convert the East Saxons to Christ.As Christians, we often talk about the mission of the church. But it’s not always clear what we mean by ‘mission’. The word itself only appears once in the New Testament (at least in the NRSV version of the bible), in Acts 12:25: “Then after completing their mission Barnabas and Saul returned to Jerusalem and brought with them John, whose other name was Mark.” But the word for mission here is the same word that is translated everywhere else in the New Testament as “ministry” or “service.” So it doesn’t really help us to understand what ‘mission’ means.
The dictionary tells us that ‘mission’ has a number of meanings. It might be a religious ministry of evangelism or humanitarian work. It might be a small church that depends on the larger church for its survival. It might be a series of evangelistic rallies. It might be a vocation or calling. Or, outside of religion, a group sent to a foreign country for diplomatic or political purposes, or a military task, or a space operation. Or, in the business world, an objective or purpose. I suspect that in the church, when we use the word ‘mission,’ we mean a kind of muddle of aspects of all those definitions.
But when we dig deeper in the bible, there are hints of what the church’s mission might look like. The word ‘mission’ comes from the Latin, mittere, which means ‘to send.’ And there’s a whole lot in the New Testament about sending.
First of all, God sent Jesus, as we are reminded time and time again, particularly in the gospel of John, in order to save the world. During his earthly life, Jesus sent his disciples, often in pairs, to preach and teach and heal. And the risen Christ sent the apostles to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing and teaching them.
If we read on in the New Testament, we discover that the early Christians saw their mission, saw their ministry, as being to build up the body of Christ, to testify to the good news of God’s grace, of freedom, justification and transformation, to share, and to praise God.
As Christians today we too are sent, like the early church, to build, to testify, to share and to praise. We’re sent, like the apostles, to make disciples, to baptize and to teach. We’re sent to preach and teach and heal. We can’t save the world - at least not on our own - but we can become God’s partners in that work. And at the heart of it all is Christ. We are sent to bring Christ to the world, to embody Christ in the world.
It’s not always easy. Sometimes we look around us and wonder if anyone is listening. “Why bother?”
But that little church in the salt marshes of Essex reminds us that this mission of the church is the mission of God, and God is faithful. Fourteen centuries later, people continue to meet Christ in that place, and the mission of Cedd, and the mission of the church, our church, continues to be fulfilled. By God’s grace.
