Missio dei

Jodi Adams does it again! Here’s her eloquent and compact definition of the “missio dei,” a term that gets bandied around a lot. I’m sure there are other theologians who would offer differing versions, but I like this one a lot:

it is best for us to approach The Missio Dei as a world-view where God shows up in unexpected decidedly non-spiritual places, where the world gets thin between what is tangible and what is ethereal outside the church more often than inside, where the poor and the crushed have a voice and a compassionate hand up, where the liturgy of God's people is steeped in honesty and poetry because it can't help but to be beautiful and mysterious, where humankind is drawn into a new kind of living that is rich in experience and profoundly human, where the soul is deeply integrated into the body, the mind, the being and the walls between sacred and secular crumble around us to reveal the Divine, and so importantly, where people are truly found by God not through gnostic thinking, fear of death, hell, or pain, or even because they hit the bottom of the bottle but because the revelation and invitation of Yahweh is so apparent and winsome in the world around them that they are made captive by God's immense beauty and love.