The Word That Redescribes the World: The Bible and Discipleship

6. Evangelism and Discipleship: The God Who Calls, The God Who Sends

Evangelism and Discipleship The God Who Calls The God Who Sends Ibegin with four affirmations that I will exposit in some detail: 1.The God of the Gospel is a God who calls persons and communities to God’s own self, to engage in praise and obedience. 2. The God of the Gospel is a God who sends persons and communities to claim many zones of the world for God’s governance of “justice, mercy, and faith” (Matt. 23:23). 3. The God of the Gospel lives among and in contestation with many other gods who also call and send, but whose praise and obedience are false, precisely because there is no commitment to “justice, mercy, and faith.” 4. Consequently, the persons and communities called by this God for praise and obedience and sent by this God for justice, mercy, and faith, also live among and in contestation with other gods, other loyalties, other authorities. Inescapably, the ones called and sent are always yet again deciding for this one who calls and sends.This endless process of deciding again is accomplished in freedom from all other calling gods and all other sending loyalties. That endless deciding, moreover, requires great passion, imagination, and intentionality. I The God of the Gospel calls to praise and obedience. That is because, so we confess, that is the one true God who is the giver of all life, and who intends that all life should gladly be lived back to God. It is God’s rightful place to invite and expect such a turn back to God in joy and well-being. The characteristic response to the creator by all creatures is to give praise 92 chapter six Evangelism and Discipleship d 93 (that is, exuberant, self-ceding gladness to God), and obedience (that is, active engagement in doing God’s will and making the world to be the creation that God intends). The call of God, in short, is to discipleship, that is, to follow God’s presence and purpose and promise with the disciplines necessary to the project. 1. The God to which the Old Testament bears testimony is a God who calls, who disrupts the lives of settled people, who gives them a vocation that marks life by inconvenience and risk. The ground of the call is the good news of the Gospel that God has a powerful intentionality for the world that, when enacted, will make a decisive difference for good in the world. Of the many calls to the disciplines of praise and obedience in the OT, I will mention only two. a. The story of Israel begins in the abrupt address that the God of the Gospel makes to Abraham, an address that is decisive and that is delivered without any forewarning. Abraham is addressed in an imperative, “go”; Abraham’s life is radically displaced. He is caught up in a world of discourse and possibility about which he knew nothing until addressed, a world of discourse and possibility totally saturated with God’s good promises for him and for the world through him (Gen. 12:1). By this call Abraham is propelled into an orbit of reality that completely preempts his life, and removes him completely from any purpose or agenda he may have entertained for himself before that moment. In the answer of Abraham, father of faith, to the address of God, we are told very little. We are told only that he was surely responsive to God’s new initiative in his life. The text says only, “So Abram went” (Gen. 12:4). Later this response is interpreted as a supreme act of faith: By faith Abraham, when put to the test, offered up Isaac. He who had received the promises was ready to offer up his only son, of whom he had been told, “It is through Isaac that descendants shall be named for you.” He considered the fact that God is able even to raise someone from the dead—and figuratively speaking, he did receive him back. (Heb. 11:17-19) b. Parallel to Abraham, this same God also calls Moses by meeting him in the burning bush (Exod. 3:1-6). The call itself consists in three elements: • God calls him by name, “Moses, Moses.” This address evidences God seizing the initiative in the life of Moses. He is known from 94 D The Word That Redescribes the World the outset...