The mission of God’s people, then, calls them to participate in a long and rich tradition of sending and being sent that originates within God the Holy Trinity. The God of the Bible is the sending God–even within the relationships of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

That dynamic sending flows first through many examples of people whom God sent in and to Old Testament Israel, as agents of salvation and messengers of revelation. To be sent by God, for whatever purpose, meant bearing the authority of God (e.g., in achieving deliverance or in speaking in his name), but it also frequently involved suffering and rejection.

The long story of God’s sending reaches its climax in the one whom God sent into the world so that the world through him should be saved. Jesus embodies all the dimensions of Old Testament sendings, but with the supreme distinction that he finally and completely accomplished the purpose for which he was sent, as we hear from his prayer in John 17 and his climactic cry, “It is finished!”

From Jesus, then, flows the mission of the church until he comes again. His final words to his disciples and action form a sending, a commission, a mandate. Those who are disciples of Jesus today are to be like the disciples of Jesus in the Gospels–called to be with him and to go in his name to do his work, to the ends of the earth and until the end of the world.

Churches, then, are to be communities around the world, planted, nurtured and connected through ministries of sending, going and supporting–for the sake of the name of Christ and the truth of the gospel.

Where are we sent? Into the world, said Jesus, just as the Father had sent him into the world. So we are to be “in the world”, and yet in another sense we do not belong to the world. How are we to carry on our mission within the world’s public arena without being swallowed up by the world itself? We turn to that in our next chapter.

Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God’s People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission (Biblical Theology for Life), 220-221.