GOD’S MISSION AND GOD’S PEOPLE: Part 4 — Interview with Eric Zeller on Biblical Mission (Continued)

God’s Mission and God’s People: Part 1 — God’s Perspective (Genesis 18:18-19)
God’s Mission and God’s People: Part 2 — Jesus’ Strategy for Mission (Matthew 5-7)
God’s Mission and God’s People: Part 3 — Interview with Eric Zeller on Biblical Mission

My good friend Eric Zeller, a pastor at Grace Bible Church in Grapevine, Texas and a Ph.D. student at Dallas Theological Seminary, was kind enough to take time out of his full schedule to write the ongoing series on “God’s Mission and God’s People” (see links above).  Eric agreed to answer a few practical follow-up questions to clarify some things and put some skin on the call to biblical mission.  If you have other questions for Eric, I know he’d be eager to interact in the comments.  This is the second half of the interview, and the final post in this guest-series.

GUNNER: You have a wife and three children, you’re a pastor, you’re a Ph.D. student at a Christian institution, and you’re actively preparing for life and ministry overseas.  How do you build relationships with unbelievers?

ERIC: As you suggest, I feel like the way my life is set up doesn’t leave me with the kind of natural channels most people have to meet people who don’t know Christ.  It also doesn’t leave me with much spare time to look for them.  But I have the same calling as every other Christian, and that has to look like something, even for someone who operates mostly within a Christian bubble.

I think life does bring a lot of opportunities to connect with people, and with a little extra effort faces can start to become friendships.  We try to frequent a few local resturants (little ones, not Chili’s!) and have gotten to know some of the people who own them and work there.  Our UPS guy shows up every afternoon with a new book from Amazon and we get to talk to him for a few minutes.  My daughter is in kindergarten at our local public school and Heather and I are doing some volunteering at the school, and that has been a great way to connect with other families in our community.  Also, since I grew up in this area I’ve been able to use Facebook to reconnect with some guys I played baseball with and knew back in the old days, which has led to some lunches and rekindled relationships.  All that to say, I think I’m kind of a worst-case scenario in terms of being cut off from the world, but even I have all kinds of opportunities if I just make a little effort.

One other thing I’d want to say is that I don’t view the people around me as projects; they are friends that I love and value and learn from whether they have the same beliefs as me or not.  Yet it’s true that because I believe that being a worshipper of God, not the stuff of earth, is what we were made for, I do have a hope that my friends would come to see that, perhaps in part by observing how God is changing me.

GUNNER: You attended The Master’s College and The Master’s Seminary.  Most who read this are either connected with these institutions directly or are part of circles that emphasize similar things like doctrine and holiness.  How would you challenge us with regard to mission?

ERIC: For the most part, that challenge is what I’ve tried to offer in the previous posts.  I would want to temper that by saying that the criticism I’m offering in this series comes from a context of great respect and appreciation from what I’ve learned from our tradiiton, but also a sense that we need to come back to Scripture and sharpen our perspective in this particular area.  Let’s not change our focus, but let’s add to it.  We need the focus on doctrine and holiness — but we need to see how it leads to mission.

Thinking about the school I attend now, DTS, I’d offer a slightly different critique.  For the most part they have a focus on mission that is really healthy, but I think oftentimes they don’t sufficiently emphasize the importance of holiness, which I think leads to a mission that is something different than the one prescribed in Scripture.

So I think we all need to develop our biblical theology and study Scripture better, wear the proverbial shoe that fits, and hopefully see our hearts changing to be more in conformity with God’s so that the light that we are will more adequately and deliberately reflect him to the world.

GUNNER: What are some of the best resources you’ve found on mission, both theological and practical?

ERIC: There are a lot of books and articles that have shaped my thinking.  On the other hand, if someone asks me, “What’s one good book to read about mission?” I can’t really name one.  There are good books on overseas mission, evangelistic technique, and biblical theology respectively.  But there is not much that brings it all together.  With that caveat, here are some resources I think everyone should read:

• Promoting the Gospel: The Whole of Life for the Cause of Christ by John Dickson.  Dickson is an Australian evangelist and scholar, and this is an excellent treatment of what it means to “promote the gospel” with your words and your life.  The flaw of this book is that you can’t get it.  It is only published in New Zealand.  But I encourage you to pay for the international shipping and get this valuable resource.
• Radical Reformission by Mark Driscoll.  The flaw of this book is that Driscoll’s style can be very off-putting, and because of that a lot of people aren’t willing to be Bereans about his message.  But I still value this book because it argues that (1) all Christians have the responsibility of mission, (2) all Christians should think like missionaries, and (3) we need to do a better job of putting aside the self-righteousness and separatism that keeps us from our mission.  I think that message is one of the most important things most American Christians need to hear, and if there is a book that articulates it better let me know but until then we’ve got Driscoll.
• The Mission of God by Christopher J. H. Wright.  This is a 700 page academic treatment of mission in the Old Testament.  And it is one of the most compelling, perspective-altering things you could ever read.  Probably the only book that quotes a lot of Hebrew that I’ve had a hard time putting down.  I can’t reccomend it enough.
• The Heart of Evangelism by Jerram Barrs.  Barrs teaches at Covenant Seminary and is a disciple of Francis Schaeffer.  He’s coming from a traditional perspective, but he is one of the best about providing some sound advice about relating to people in way that is gracious and bold and biblical.
• Let the Nations Be Glad! by John Piper.
• Tim Keller is a huge influence, not even so much in talking a lot about mission but in demonstrating the kind of committment to mission we’re talking about throughout his ministry (he’s the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City).  Visit the Tim Keller resource page and start reading and listening.

Without thinking of any one particular resource, some things that have been very valuable to me are the commentaries and journal articles written on a variety of subjects by scholars who “get mission” and will show how Scripture connects back to it at all points.  I’m thinking especialy of Walter Kaiser, Andreas Köstenberger, Peter O’Brien, Robert Plummer, John Stott, and Christopher Wright.  Something else I love is Eckhard Schabel’s massive two-volume work “Early Christian Mission,” but that’s a little too big for the “everyone must read” list.

GOD’S MISSION AND GOD’S PEOPLE: Part 3 — Interview with Eric Zeller on Biblical Mission

God’s Mission and God’s People: Part 1 — God’s Perspective (Genesis 18:18-19)
God’s Mission and God’s People: Part 2 — Jesus’ Strategy for Mission (Matthew 5-7)

My good friend Eric Zeller, a pastor at Grace Bible Church in Grapevine, Texas and a Ph.D. student at Dallas Theological Seminary, was kind enough to take time out of his full schedule to write the last two posts on “God’s Mission and God’s People (see links above).  Eric also agreed to answer a few practical follow-up questions to clarify some things he said and put some skin on the call to biblical mission.  If you have other questions for Eric, I know he’d be eager to interact in the comments.  This is the first half of the interview.

GUNNER: Some may be a bit confused when you talk about “mission” instead of “missions” or “evangelism.”  What’s the difference between “mission” and these other two terms, and how are they related?

ERIC: When I talk about the church’s “mission,” I’m thinking of the basic dictionary definition: “a specific task with which a person or a group is charged.”  Then I ask the question, “What task has the church been charged with”?  The task that Jesus charged his disciples with before his departure was that they go into the world to make disciples of all the nations.  So that is what I see as the “mission” of the church.

There are a few reasons why I usually talk about “mission” rather than “missions” and “evangelism”:

1. Jesus did not give the church missions (plural); he gave us one mission (singular).  That mission is to make disciples of all the nations.
2. We are so accustomed to associating “missions” and “evangelism” with specific ministries or departments of the church.  I want to highlight that I am talking about the overall mission of the church, not particular departments and ministry emphases.
3. When you talk about “evangelism,” Christians usually think of (1) sales-type training and memorized scripts, (2) confrontational interactions with strangers, and (3) a ministry that you do at various times but is distinguishable from the rest of your life.  I’m very committed to the biblical concept of evangelism, but I’m not necessarily trying to get people to be more like Ray Comfort.  And sometimes it’s just more helpful to use different terminology.

GUNNER: You’re passionate not just about international missions, but about Christian mission.  Could you describe your own growth process throughout the years — how you’ve grown in your understanding and practice of mission?

ERIC: Before I went to college, mission (of any kind) wasn’t on my radar screen at all.  When I was at The Master’s College, I developed a passion for international missions through studying Scripture and going on mission trips.  This eventually led both to a personal desire to serve overseas as well as an opportunity to lead the international missions ministry at the church I attended.  Both of these made me think through the relationship of mission to the church, and I increasingly saw a contrast between a biblical picture of mission and what passes for mission in most churches.

Since I’ve been a pastor, I’ve had some opportunities to interact with some people with separatistic convictions who strongly challenged my understanding of mission, and that has given me the opportunity to come back to Scripture and come away amazed by the centrality of mission in God’s plan throughout the Bible.  Because of this, I’ve focused a great deal of my academic research on the biblical theology of mission.  In God’s sovereignty, I also have friends around me such as you, my brother Scott, and Nathan Gunter, all of whom have been on a similar journey and have been helpful and challenging conversational partners along the way.

So, to sum up, as I’ve been on a journey of growing in my knowledge of the Bible and growing in maturity as a Christian man, I’ve increasingly come to see the importance of mission, and I think that’s been increasingly reflected in my personal life and teaching ministry.

GUNNER: The two diagrams you posted were very helpful for explaining how all earthly priorities are meant to be channeled toward mission.  How does this work out practically in some key areas like family, church ministry, and occupation?

ERIC: My second post identified Jesus’ strategy for mission as “intentional holiness intentionally visible.”

Let’s use financial stewardship as an example.  How can I be “intentionally holy” in my financial stewardship?  According to Jesus in Matthew 6, I need to be moving away from a focus on the material possessions and security offered by this world (including anxiety over those things), and I need to be moving toward laying up treasure in heaven, seeking God first, and trusting His goodness and provision even in difficult times.  To the extent that I am pursuing that perspective and making decisions that are consistent with it, I am pursuing holiness in that area of financial stewardship.

But how does this holiness become intentionally visible?  It has everything to do with living my life around people who don’t know Christ — and not just living around them on the level of acquaintaince where I know their names, but living around them on the level of personal relationship where they have the opportunity to observe my financial decisions and my attitudes towards money and material things.  They might see that my perspective on a “career” is different, or that my desire to acquire “stuff” is different, or that my level of distress about the current economic crisis is different.  And I might have opportunities to point those things out, not in a self-righteous way but as a normal part of everyday life.  As various topics come up in conversation, I can humbly explain how my perspective is changing because of what I have learned in Scripture.  So biblical mission means being intentionally holy in a way that is intentionally visible, doing this twenty-four hours a day, and doing this not just with financial stewardship but also with my marriage, my priorities, my choices about time, my parenting, and every other aspect of life.

And this is tough because my sinful nature has enough of a hold on me that “let your light shine before men so that they may see your good works” (Matt 5:16) easily gets twisted into “practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them” (Matt 6:1).  The first is commanded; the second is condemned.  The difference has to do with my attitude — am I pursuing holiness as a self-righteous Pharisee, or as someone who is “poor in spirit” (Matt 5:3)?