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Men and women who serve as missional leaders work to shape and create a mission-centered ethos within their communities. Ethos is shaped through language, environment, and actions.

Language
Secular leaders have long recognized the power of language. Bart Nanus in Visionary Leadership, wrote, “There is no more powerful engine driving an organization toward excellence and long-range success than an attractive, worthwhile, and achievable vision of the future, widely shared.”

Missional leaders deploy the power of language to invite people to live in a new land—a land that evokes God-sized dreams and is permeated with the love and hope that God unleashed through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and through the subsequent outpouring of the Spirit on Jesus’ followers. We, of course, are not describing mere rhetoric—as if human language alone has intrinsic power apart from God. The Bible as the Word of God invites us into this new world as the Scriptures announce to us God’s mission.

I am convinced that as interpreters of Scripture we need to think about the overarching story of the Bible. Too often we have a tendency to read the Bible as a collection of fragments whose imagery we can capture for a sermon or time of teaching. Yet, as I have discussed elsewhere, the Scriptures focus on the mission of God (missio dei).

Humanity plays a vital role in God’s mission. In God’s original plan, humanity was created to serve as a missional community to reflect God’s character to all creation. Human rebellion (described most poignantly in the narratives of Genesis 3-11 and in Paul’s letter to Rom (Romans 1-3) created the need for God work profoundly for the reconciliation of humanity. This involved the creation of a new people—Israel through whom God would work to bring salvation to the end of the earth. God’s plan of salvation for humanity reached its climax in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah. Jesus fulfilled all that Israel was to be and unleashed his followers to into the world to share the good news of God’s salvation through the power of the Holy Spirit. The Scriptural story ends where it began—New Creation. Ostensibly, life in the New Creation will be a renewal of the original purposes for humanity—living as a missional community for all Creation by reflecting God’s character to it.

Thus we may outline the Bible as a whole in this manner:

Creation — Fall — Israel — Jesus Christ — Church — New Creation

The missional leader understands, breathes, and lives for this narrative. She or he uses the power of language to help others to catch a glimpse of what God is doing. The goal of this deployment of language is simple: conversion. The missional leader seeks to establish a missional ethos through language so that followers of Jesus the Messiah may be (re)converted and (re)ignited to God’s mission and so that those non-Christ followers may be invited to live for God’s mission receiving the gift of life that God offers through trusting Jesus Christ.

1) What are some questions that I have about the overarching narrative?

2) In what ways does my own community of faith function as a missional community that reflects God’s character to the World? Where is it lacking?

3) How well do I use God’s gift of language to paint a new reality for those who listen to me?

© 2006 Brian D. Russell

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