In the first move, the Statement (Articles 42-47) speaks of Christlike presence and practice as a depiction of the transformed life of disciples to whom Christ’s gives his Commission to make disciples by means of proclamation. This builds on the integrated conception of discipleship already present in the Lausanne Covenant and elaborated in the Cape Town Commitment. In the second move, the Statement defines mission as proclamation but proclamation that has a particular kind of agent (disciples) and a particular kind of aim (the making of disciples):
We affirm that the mission of God’s people is to fulfil the commission that the Lord Jesus gave to his disciples—to make disciples through the announcement of what God has achieved in sending his Son into a rebellious and broken world. Those charged with the task of announcing God’s good news to all peoples must themselves live as disciples and understand that the proper aim of our mission is the transformation of those who hear and believe the good news to live as disciples who obey all that the Lord taught. (Art. 72)
To suggest that these two moves within the statement unwittingly contradict one another is to misunderstand them profoundly and to misapprehend the multi-faceted integration in mission for which the Statement was reaching.
As I indicated at the outset, the Statement is not about integral mission but seeks rather to bolster faithfulness to the Gospel as the basis for mission at this particular. As such, it has a great deal to say about what it means to be formed as those who read Scripture as the progressive unfolding of God’s purposes in the Gospel (Section II); about what it means to speak of the local church as the fulfillment of God’s purpose to form a new humanity through the Gospel (Section III); about what it means to be a human person (Section IV) and to live faithfully as Christians in world ruled by states buffeted by the rising tides of nationalism and violence (Section VI); and about the particular challenges to Christian faithfulness in a world shaped by technology (Section VII).
The Seoul Statement is not the last word on the relationship of discipleship and mission (Section V). But if it provokes a robust conversation about what faithful discipleship looks when displayed by those who declare the excellencies of Christ and by those to whom we declare them, it will have done what it was meant to do.
