Missional God, Missional Church by Hastings Ross;

Author:Hastings, Ross; [Hastings, Ross]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2012-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

Communities of Christ’s Crucified Presence

Through Christocentric, Cruciform Worship, Teaching and Community Life

The shalom of the church is always given as the redemptive presence of Christ is treasured, experienced and lived out in participation with him. Its attractiveness and capacity to share shalom with others is dependent on its cruciformity, that is, its likeness to the nail-scarred, risen Christ and the degree to which that Christ can be accessed by the world.

A cruciform church centered on the sacraments of baptism and Communion is the manner in which it reflects the beauty accomplished by the cross and is how the church perpetuates the vision of it suggested in John 20:19-23. This is accomplished by a much higher emphasis on baptism than is often present in our grandest evangelistic efforts as the church, which are often focused on the unseen spiritual dimension of conversion and not sufficiently focused on the physical concretization of the act in an incarnational way. This would immediately communicate the cruciform as well as communal nature of Christian life, recognizing that baptism of the Spirit in conversion and water baptism as its sign is an incorporative act, a baptism into the body of Christ (1 Cor 12:13). It would thus redress the issue of individualistic “Jesus and me” conversion, as it is popularly proclaimed. Furthermore, it would begin the convert’s life in the right cruciform pattern and practices of continual mortification of self and sin, and continual vivification, a death and resurrection life lived toward the face of God and the face of our neighbor. It would thus help to address the challenging ethical state of the church, which often causes a credibility gap for mission.

When Karl Barth expressed his change of views on baptism in the preface to his final volume of the Church Dogmatics, he expressed that his desire was to put baptism “at the head of the Christian ethics with which the doctrine of reconciliation concludes.”[12] His desire was that baptism, the Lord’s Prayer and the Lord’s Supper would fill out his final work. With regard to baptism “at the head,” in particular, his aim was that “The Christian life would thus be set forth in its most intimate form in a progression beginning with recollection of the divine gift that demands this answer thus posed for man as his task,” and thus this “doctrine of baptism (as God’s own work: baptism with the Holy Ghost, and also as man’s liturgical work: baptism with water) was to be expounded as the foundation of the Christian life.”[13] Developing the full picture of the Christian life as the baptized life is beyond our scope here. I merely draw attention to the need in some church traditions to raise the profile of the objective and subjective dimensions of baptism in ecclesial life and witness in order that cruciform pilgrims may be more frequently formed and that churches may fulfill their nature as cruciform and missional.

This is especially well accomplished if the Lord’s Supper is restored to prominence. The “as .

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