Chris Wright on the missional God

This is my final post on missional church. Chris Wright, of Langham Partnership, can have the final word. He bases his understanding of missional church on the biblical presentation of the missional God:

In [...] trying to come to a biblical definition of what we mean by mission, we are in effect asking the question, whose mission is it anyway? [...] Since the whole Bible is the story of how this God, 'our God', has brought about his salvation for the whole cosmos [...] we can affirm [...] 'Mission belongs to our God'. Mission is not ours; mission is God's. Certainly, the mission of God is the prior reality out of which flows any mission in which we ourselves get involved. Or, as it has been nicely put, it is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world, as that God has a church for his mission in the world. Mission is not made for church; the church was made for mission - God's mission. A missional hermeneutic of the Bible, then, begins there - with the mission of God, and traces the flow of all other dimensions of mission as they affect human history from that centre and starting point.

Christopher J. H. Wright, 'Mission as a Matrix for Hermeneutics and Biblical Theology', chapter 5 in Craig Bartholomew et al (eds.), Out Of Egypt: Biblical Theology and Biblical Interpretation: pages 132-3.