If, as I believe, we must make mission the priority of the church, reshaping all we do in church around that imperative, we must also rethink our mission itself in the light of a fully biblical eschatology. Christian mission is neither saving disembodied souls for a timeless eternity, nor building a new world by our own efforts here and now. It includes elements of both, but transcends and transforms both of those highly inadequate models. If the goal is the new heavens and the new earth, in which we will be raised from the dead and given new tasks to perform as stewards of God’s new creation, Christian mission in the present is so to live and announce the good news of Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God which he inaugurated on earth as in heaven; that men and women and children are not only rescued from their sins and formed as forgiven disciples of Jesus, but also reconstituted, as themselves, part of that new creation—not only members of it but also bringers of it. People that both are new creation and do new creation. And the church, I am suggesting, needs to be formed and fastened with this specifically in mind.
-N.T. Wright
Wright states that the Christian vocation to holiness is best comprehended as within, and as framed by, this particular schema.
FOR • THE • TIME • BEING 