The Heavenly Good of Earthly Work, by Cosden

This was a laborious and difficult read for me but for different reasons than my previous read. After tackling Volf's technical read, "Work in the Spirit," I looked at the writing style and the number of pages of Cosden's book (148 pgs.), and I thought, "I'll get through this one fairly quickly." Not so. Cosden spends a lot of time "exegeting" finer points of Scripture so I found myself mulling over much of his interpretive work, thinking about it, at points coming to a new understanding of "old texts"; at other times thinking, "I respect what Cosden is saying but don't agree with him fully." However, despite the "labor" required (pardon the play on words), my experience was that the book only got better and better as I went along and "my socks were blown off" by the time I reached Cosden's final chapters, especially chapter 6, "Shaping Things to Come: Mission for the Masses.”

Cosden makes the point in chapter 6 (his final chapter) that there is much agreement among various evangelical leaders today that the "modern missions movement" is in crisis, “Most evangelical leaders acknowledge that the western mission enterprise is in trouble and that something is fundamentally wrong with the ‘faith missions movement'” (p. 130).

Cosden gives the example of missions work he did in Russia twenty years ago, right after communism had fallen. This illustration hit me pretty hard as in 1992 I was in Hungary (a former Soviet bloc country that was "liberated" in 1989 with the fall of communism) doing evangelistic missionary work for a couple months. But Cosden writes that right after communism had fallen, "lives and livelihoods were crumbling around us as government-based employment welfare systems, ... fell apart" (p. 128). The most pressing question at that time was, "How does the gospel relate to life?" Cosden writes that "Our model as missionaries guaranteed that we produce 'rice Christians'": in other words, "dependent" Christians who could only hope to be "delivered" from the futility of their situations rather than find hope within them. In a word, this theology of missions that said to people in places like Russia, "trust Jesus and he will save you but has nothing really to say about your 'ordinary lives / work,' but that maybe He just might liberate you to becoming a 'missionary' some day" ... was deeply flawed (and continues to be today). Wow. I finish this post with some Cosden quotes to get us to think more deeply about this "crisis" and the need to re-think how we view work and missions.

“... when done in a way that images God and thus co-operates with him, human work in itself is Christian missionary activity. Why? Because it is largely (though not exclusively) through our work that we reflect God’s image and co-operate with him in bringing people and the whole creation to humanity’s and nature’s ultimate maturity and future…. We are saved to become together the image of Christ, and thus the image of God- and we express and develop this most directly in our work” (pp. 129-130).

“…this means that any understanding of mission that fails to grasp that in itself human work is fundamental to God’s purpose (the mission of God or kingdom of God) for us and creation will be theologically flawed. Likewise, missions thinking that fails to incorporate this theology ultimately undermines the missionary calling of the people of God. For the majority of Christians simply cannot now, nor could they ever, measure up to the modern faith missionary ideal of leaving home and work ‘to work’ for God. For what that understanding of mission unintentionally does is marginalize and thus alienate the vast majority of Christians in the world who will spend most of their lives and life’s energy in ordinary work” (p. 130).

“Thus work is not a platform for mission or evangelism, as if it were somehow subordinate to salvation and eternity. Rather, godly work itself actually spreads by embodying God’s good news, a present experience and foretaste of salvation. For work in itself is a genuine form of life imaging God. It is an ever-open invitation to all to co-operate with God in his purposes” (p. 135).