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Book Review: Justin A. Schell, The Mission of God and the Witness of the Church. Crossway, 2024. 127 pages. $24.99.

“Are you saying that Jesus is in the Old Testament?!”

I will never forget my first lecture at Westminster Theological College in Perth, a tiny seminary that was one part of the consortium that became Trinity Theological College in 1998.

It was 1993 and I was twenty-two and not yet a Christian – I enrolled because I wanted to know more about the Bible. It was my first class in Old Testament Biblical Theology. The lecture room in Principal Steve Rarig’s basement smelled of brewed coffee and warm cinnamon scrolls and there was a little library of a couple of thousand books. I had never seen so many books about the Bible in one place.

Steve began teaching at seven in the evening and didn’t pause or finish ’til well after ten. I had never heard anything so gripping. By showing how the Lord Jesus of the Gospels was the same Lord God of Genesis 1 to 3 he turned a key that unlocked the entire Bible to me.

Thanks to good Sunday school and Scripture teachers I knew a lot of Bible stories, but laboured under the vague idea that there were two religions in Scripture: a kind of rough and violent religion in Israel with priests and sacrifices, and then a new more gentle kind of religion beginning with Jesus in the New Testament.

That first lecture unveiled the unity of the Bible. Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, I heard what was said in all the Scriptures concerning Jesus (Luke 24:27). The entire Bible – every sentence on every page – unfolds the person and work of Christ.

This is the discipline of Biblical Theology, which shows how all the Bible’s great themes – whether creation, Spirit, chaos, fall, judgment, redemption, land, covenant, sacrifice, work, Sabbath, wisdom, the devil, resurrection, sanctification, kingship, Scripture, prophecy, sacraments – are threads that run through the Bible as a whole, which when platted together build up a strong and wide understanding of all that Jesus has done for his people.  

Crossways are publishing a series of short books which lay out seventeen of these key biblical-theological themes, and in this volume Justin Schell presents the theme of mission. A graduate of Gordon-Conwell, Schell is the Director of Executive Projects for the Lausanne Movement, an international mission network.

Let me get the negatives out of the way. The book is a bit dry and sometimes reads like a seminary capstone project: “In this chapter we will…” “Let us conclude this chapter by…” Don’t look for sparkling anecdotes or vivid practical applications. It’s solid and nutritious, but I would have liked a little more salty crackling and a dash of chilli.

Certain descriptions I find too simplistic. For example:

God’s mission is defined, more or less, by the time we reach Genesis 12:1–3…. The Exodus shows us what redemption looks like. It is a type of the greater salvation to come. What we observe in the rest of the Old Testament is the Lord keeping his promises he has already made, and Israel failing to keep covenant and join God’s mission in the world.

We can’t line up the books of the Old Testament like the carriages of a train, overlooking the overlapping, intertwining, backtracking, and complex interplay. We see Israel’s mission failures right from the get-go (Abraham’s dangerous lies to Pharaoh); and we see “what redemption looks like” in every book of the Bible.

On page 71 Schell writes that “in the Old Testament, the Lord makes a way to overlook the sins of his people (i.e. the sacrificial system).” But Jesus’ death was, in part, a demonstration of the righteousness of a holy and just God who cannot overlook sin (Rom. 3:25–26). And when Schell tells me that the Great Commission is “far from an add-on to the Gospel”, I wonder who ever said that it was.

Taking the book as a whole, however, I find it to be a solid description of how God’s mission, that the Good News of redemption be taken to every corner of the earth, does not begin with the Gospels and Acts, but unfolds from the beginning to the end of the Bible. God’s promised blessings to Abraham in Genesis 12 would overflow to all nations: “All peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

I find the book really hit its stride in chapter 7, “The Church on Mission.” Schell does a fine job of clarifying exactly how Jesus has commissioned the church to witness to the world:

The witness gives courtroom testimony. This testimony is not like one’s personal testimony…. No, this word is forensic, carrying the sense of an eyewitness.  

I am helped and inspired to be reminded that “though we are not eyewitnesses, the church continues the apostolic witness to the Christ event…. The church is a witnessing community.” Thus, Schell describes churches as “gospel outposts through whom the witness will spread further and further.”

The Mission of God would be a valuable addition to the reading list of any Christian mission curriculum. By reminding us concisely and clearly that God’s salvation mission is unfolded from the alpha to the omega of God’s written revelation, it should inspire the church to fervent and diligent evangelism to every community on earth, not least the one in which God has placed us right now.

– Campbell Markham