The Essential Move from the Mission of the Disciples to the Mission of Jesus:
As Christians we have come to know and define our relationship with God in and through the life and teachings of Jesus the Christ. With Jesus as our model, we seek to live and love as he did. As such, it has often been said that the goal of Christianity is to become more Christ-like. With this goal in mind, I have argued that at the heart of his teachings and indeed his life and relationships, was the Reign of Radical Kenotic Love. This, as I have mentioned, is characterized as the transformational restructuring of one’s priorities to favor those of one’s neighbor over and above one’s own. Knitter articulates this well when he says of Jesus that, “he was not self-centered—or Jesus-centered [; furthermore,] the ultimate end of his preaching was not to bring people to recognize his authority and no one else’s, but to follow him in his movement of renewing the way people live with each other.” [1] In this way, Knitter agrees with Thangaraj in that Jesus “was not—as his followers have often been—church-centered.”[2] What is more, he rightly contends that, unlike what has been handed down through the Mission of the Disciples, Jesus’ “primary concern was not to increase membership of his own movement or community,”[3] but instead the Mission of Jesus was to transform the way that people understand and operate in their own communities. He offered a new vision of spaciousness and inclusion wherein God is the focus rather than the social, institutional, and religious identities that divide communities into an “us” or a “them.”
If Jesus’ mission and primary concern was growing the Reign of Radical Kenotic Love, than we as Christians must make this our primary concern as well. Consequently, as I have said elsewhere, to do this we must abandon the Mission of the Disciples and thus forsake traditional conceptions of mission that call for proselytizing our neighbor. After all, Jesus’ command for us to love our neighbor necessitates that we allow them to continue to be our neighbor in the process. Furthermore, if Christians are to establish relationships that are funded on mutual interreligious understanding with their Muslim neighbors, the reclamation of the Mission of Jesus is the only foreseeable way forward.
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