JAC Online

Training Warriors to Win the World For Jesus
by Jonathan Evans

 The Salvation Army’s ‘War College’ Wesleyan Missiology

The Salvation Army traces its spiritual parentage to John Wesley and Methodism. “To me there was one God, and John Wesley was his prophet.” William Booth, the founder of The Salvation Army, declared. “I had devoured the story of his life. No human compositions seemed to me to be comparable to his writings, and to the hymns of his brother Charles.”^[1] Consequently, the interpretive foundation of The Salvation Army’s missiology is Wesleyan. The War College (TWC) of The Salvation Army continues to emphasize Wesleyan missiology through the modus operandi, “Training Warriors to Win the World for Jesus.” This paper will outline TWC’s Wesleyan distinctives that inform and nourish TWC’s mission in Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside (DTES). TWC’s missiology explores first the Triniune nature of God; secondly Humanity’s creation and fall from the Image of God; thirdly the resulting in a Community of Grace who Participates in the Victory of God; and finally the establishment of Jesus’ Kingdom on Earth.

Trinity

To understand mission we must first discover whose mission The War College undertakes. Quoting Isaiah 61’s prophetic mandate, Jesus declared:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

            because he has anointed me

            to proclaim good news to the poor.

            He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives

            and recovering of sight to the blind,

            to set at liberty those who are oppressed,

            to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour” (Luke 4:18, emphasis added).[2]

The mission of God is Trinitarian. Jesus is anointed by the Spirit and sent by the Father. Jesus prays that his followers would participate in this mission through him, “that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:21). Being one with the Father and the Son through the fellowship of the Holy Spirit requires that Christians actively know God in Trinity. TWC undertakes this devotion as its starting point. Engaging with the Trinity through the privilege of prayer informs and energizes the mission of God in this World.

John Wesley’s emphasis was on God’s Triune essence as love. The community of three and one permits loving interaction to a fullness that an individual could not express. Charles Wesley expresses God’s loving nature in his hymn Wrestling Jacob:

‘Tis Love! ‘Tis Love! Thou diedst for me;

I hear thy whisper in my heart.

The morning breaks, the shadows flee,

Pure Universal Love Thou art:

To me, to all, thy mercies move–

Thy nature, and Thy name is LOVE.[3]

“The [Trinitarian] text (1 John 5:7), and so also presumably the topic,” Outler remarks on Wesley’s Sermon, On The Trinity, “must have been a favourite in Wesley’s oral preaching, for its use is recorded twenty-three times.”[4] Wesley’s understood the Trinity as the source of all love for those who believe in Christ and who have received the Holy Spirit. He explains in The Scripture Way of Salvation, “We feel the ‘love of God shed abroad in our heart by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us’, producing love to all mankind and more especially to the children of God.”[5] The Trinity’s mission is relational because God is relational. Wesley described how the Word and Spirit work conjointly in God’s revelation of himself. Paul Chilcote summarizes Wesley’s concern for meeting God, “He explained that unbelievers were those who are strangers to the work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness to the Word in their hearts. They have no familiarity with God, and the love of God is a foreign concept to them.”[6] Wesley’s Sermon, “On Predestination,” emphasizes the Triune call unto Himself: 

Could you take a view of all those upon earth who are now sanctified, you would find, not one of these had been sanctified till after he was called. He was first called, not only with an outward call by the Word and the messengers of God, but likewise with an inward call by his Spirit applying his Word, enabling him to believe in the only-begotten Son of God, and bearing testimony with his spirit that he was a child of God.[7]

The mission of God is both personal and active as exemplified in the economic revelation of the Trinity. The Father’s personal agents, the Son and Holy Spirit are sent with purposes to fulfil. Through the incarnation, TWC, is given an incarnational model of mission. Jesus commissioned his disciples, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you” (John 20:21b). Jesus was sent from the Father, not in power, but as a vulnerable child to inhabit an afflicted people-group who would plot his death. Jesus was therefore baptised with the Spirit of resurrection power, “and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form, like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased’” (Luke 3:22). Indeed this is the same call believers hear by the inner witness of the Spirit, “For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (Romans 8:15-17). Christ’s embodied and sacrificial mission to the church is empowered by the Holy Spirit rather than by human or earthly powers. The Church represents of the community of God (relationship) with a message of adoption (vocation). A relationship with God precludes any mission the church undertakes. The dialectic between relation and vocation can be illustrated by the story of a brother who came to Mother Theresa for counsel, “My vocation is to work for the lepers. I want to spend all my life, my everything, in this vocation.” He declared.

“You are making a mistake, brother,” she responded. “Your vocation is to belong to Jesus. He has chosen you for himself and the work is only a means of your love for him in action. Therefore it does not matter what work you are doing, but the main thing is that you belong to him… and that he gives you the means to do this for him.”[8]

The idolatry of mission is prevented when God is the source and aim of all love, making him the proper object of religious worship. A loving relationship with God is expressed in good works. 

Faith and Works

Wesley’s missiology encompasses the proper link between faith and works. In his sermon, “The Law Established Through Faith, 2” he argued that faith and works are conjoined. He states that the doctrine of salvation by faith is the response to God’s unconditional love. Secondly, he argues that the purpose of this salvation is the restoration of God’s image: Love. Faith is the means to Love’s end.[9] The War College carries the motto, “Fight with Love,”[10] which beckons the response, “Because love never fails” (1 Cor 13:8). Wesley was adamant that Christian mission represents the loving nature of the Trinity:

Above all, stand fast in obedient faith, faith in the God of pardoning mercy, in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath loved you, and given himself for you. Ascribe to him all the good you find in yourself, all your peace, and joy, and love, all your power to do and suffer his will through the Spirit of the living God. …Abhor every approach, in any kind or degree, to the spirit of persecution. If you cannot reason or persuade a man into the truth, never attempt to force him into it. If love will not compel him to come in, leave him to God.[11]

This implies those who confess Jesus as Lord and are filled with the Holy Spirit undertake Wesleyan mission. If the ultimate goal of mission is the love of God, loving and knowing God are essential. It does not mean, however, that non-believers have no part to play or that they would ‘taint’ God’s mission. Rather, Wesleyan missions are in fullness when God’s glory and purposes are revealed and people are introduced into the personal and social life of the Triune God through his disciples and anointed by the Holy Spirit. “It was by a sense of the love of God shed abroad in his heart that every one of them was enabled to love God.” Wesley preaches, “Loving God, he loved his neighbour as himself, and had power to walk in all his commandments blameless.” Charles Wesley expressed that sharing in the loving the Triune God is the goal of the Christian life:

O that we now, in love renewed,

Might blameless in thy sight appear;     

Wake we in thy similitude,

Stamped with the Triune character;

Flesh, spirit, soul, to thee resign,

And live and die entirely thine![12]

Image of God

Now that it is established that The War College undertakes the Triune mission of God whose aim and means is Love, we will look at the mission of restoring God’s image of Love in Humanity. The Hymn above examines God’s restoration of His image through grace:

Come, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,

Whom one all-perfect God we own,

Restorer of Thine image lost,

Thy various offices make known;

Display, our fallen souls to raise,

Thy whole economy of grace.[13]

The War College aims to develop its students in God’s image while also restoring this image into our neighbours through the offer of salvation and continued discipleship. Wesley asserts God created humans in a perfect state:

In the image of God was man made, holy as he that created him is holy; merciful as the Author of all is merciful; perfect as his Father in heaven is perfect. As God is love, so man, dwelling in love, dwelt in God, and God in him. God made him to be an "image of his own eternity," an incorruptible picture of the God of glory. He was accordingly pure, as God is pure, from every spot of sin. He knew not evil in any kind or degree, but was inwardly and outwardly sinless and undefiled. He "loved the Lord his God with all his heart, and with all his mind, and soul, and strength."[14]

Again, the loving nature of the Triune God is the basis for humanity’s nature. Wesley understood this nature in three spheres for love to be expressed: the natural image, political image and moral image. 

“And God,” the three-one God, “said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him:” (Gen. 1:26, 27:) -- Not barely in his natural image, a picture of his own immortality; a spiritual being, endued with understanding, freedom of will, and various affections; -- nor merely in his political image, the governor of this lower world, having “dominion over the fishes of the sea, and over all the earth;” -- but chiefly in his moral image; which, according to the Apostle, is “righteousness and true holiness.” (Eph. 4:24.) in this image of God was man made. “God is love:” Accordingly, man at his creation was full of love; which was the sole principle of all his tempers, thoughts, words, and actions.[15]

Being made in God’s moral image afforded sharing in fellowship with the three-one God. Vickers abridges, “Adam was not simply ‘capable of God, capable of knowing, loving, and obeying his Creator,’ but he actually ‘did know God, did unfeignedly love and uniformly obey him,’ so that from this original state and the ‘right use of all his faculties, his happiness naturally flowed.’”[16] Recent scholarship has contributed much to our understanding of what it means to be crafted in the image of God. Images were set up in temples personifying Ancient Near Eastern deities. Creation is rightly be understood as Yahweh’s palace-temple construction and humanity’s creation as Yahweh’s placement of His image in His temple.[17] It is notable that only Israel’s temple had no image of Yahweh because the nation properly observed all creation and all humanity as God’s image bearers.[18] Israel, indeed was different from their neighbours in exclaiming their exclusive God was the only true living God and that all of humanity was valuable as image-bearers. Kellermann asserts that Israel’s narrative is subversively democratic: 

Here is an idea so incredibly subversive it may be the most politically loaded claim of all. Who in Babylon, not to mention virtually the whole of the ancient world, was the image of god? The King, of course, who stands in for Marduk in the creation pageant, and whose authority is annually legitimated. Who, however, is in the liturgy of Israel? Humanity. Women and men. Human beings in community…. made for freedom and responsibility.[19]

Making sense of the Scriptural claims upon the entire human race defines TWC intent to recognize the inbuilt dignity of all people. Thus, we endeavour to recognise and offer our knowledge of the love of the three-one God in our love for all of humanity created in God’s image.

God’s intent for humankind was in relationship reflecting his loving nature to all creation. However, Wesley’s experience and observations of Genesis show that humanity’s capability to reflect the image of God is destroyed. It is as a mirror smashed in thousands of pieces whose ability to reflect the image of its creator is almost entirely lost. Wesley stressed the corruption of God’s moral image and consequently all avenues reflecting God’s image were broken or depraved. Adam no longer carried full image bearing, “In that moment he lost the moral image of God, and, in part, the natural: He commenced unholy, foolish and unhappy. And ‘in Adam all died’: He entitled all his posterity to error guilt, sorrow, fear, pain, diseases, and death.”[20] The War College stresses the loving nature lost due to our sinfulness. Sin forces us to be distant in all regards, physically, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. Our communal nature with God and each other is lost and we are in bondage to sin. “Contrary to popular perceptions of Armenianism as implying free will,” Vickers argues, “this consequence of the fall into sin was not lost on Wesley. Indeed, Wesley could describe human bondage to sin as vividly as Augustine or Luther.” Vickers quotes Wesley’s fitting description, “[Our sins]… are chains of iron and fetters of brass. They are wounds wherewith the world, the flesh and the devil, have gashed and mangled us all over. They are diseases that drink up our blood and spirits, [and] that bring us down to the chambers of the grave.”[21] The experience in Vancouver’s DTES embodies Wesley’s description. Identification with our neighbours and the battle against the world, our flesh and the devil are immediate conceptions. Indeed, the context of TWC is essential to developing a Wesleyan missiology because the bondage of the human condition is so apparent. TWC recognizes this condition, in sin and without God, results in a less than human condition of depravity, disease and ultimately death.

Without the love of God, restoration of this image is impossible. Wesley’s pessimism of humanity’s condition encounters an even greater optimism of God’s Grace. Wesley reflects with Romans 5:20, “if sin abounded,” yet grace “would much more abound;” in his sermon, “God’s Love to Fallen Man.” He reasons that because of our fallen nature there is a greater potential for holiness and happiness on earth and heaven “than otherwise could have been!”[22]  Undeniably, the incarnation, the climax of God’s story offers us a new glimpse into the nature and character of God as we observe God identifying all of humanity:

For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is – limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death – He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine…. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.[23]

Jesus’ incarnation epitomises the act of saving-love, fuelling Wesley’s optimism of God’s covenant of grace. Vickers outlines that Christ inaugurates the covenant of grace in continuation of God’s covenant through Moses that counters the covenant of works made with Adam.[24] “The atonement for sin undertaken by Christ on the cross was not for a particular group of individuals, but for all.”[25] Wesley asserted this Arminian position over Calvinism in his sermon on free grace:

And “the same Lord over all is rich” in mercy “to all that call upon him:” (Romans 10:12) But you say, “No; he is such only to those for whom Christ died. And those are not all, but only a few, whom God hath chosen out of the world; for he died not for all, but only for those who were ‘chosen in him before the foundation of the world.’” (Eph. 1:4) Flatly contrary to your interpretation of these scriptures, also, is the whole tenor of the New Testament; as are in particular those texts: – “Destroy not him with thy meat, for whom Christ died,” (Rom. 14:15) – a clear proof that Christ died, not only for those that are saved, but also for them that perish: He is “the Saviour of the world;” (John 4:42) He is “the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world;” (John 1:29) “He is the propitiation, not for our sins only, but also for the sins of the whole world;” (1 John 2:2) “He,” the living God, “is the Savior of all men;” (1 Timothy 4:10) “He gave himself a ransom for all;” (1 Tim. 2:6) “He tasted death for every man” (Heb. 2:9).[26]

The covenant of grace was established to save all, however, not all are saved as Universalists ascribe. “To be sure, it was God’s intention to save all. Yet, just as Adam was free to reject the covenant of works in creation,” Vickers argues, “so now people were free to accept or reject the covenant of grace. The good news was that they had only to repent of their sins and put their faith in the atoning sacrifice of Christ.”[27] After Wesley’s Aldersgate experience, Wesley upheld Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith as the fundamental doctrine of the church.[28] “In a hundred different ways on a thousand of different occasions, decade after five decades, his one consistent message was,” Albert Outler affirms, “Jesus Christ and him crucified – Christus crucifixus, Christus redemptor, Christus victor.”[29] Wesley asserts that the gift of faith is free and vital “All sons [and daughters] were and are under the covenant of grace. The manner of their acceptance is this: the free grace of God, through the merits of Christ, gives pardon to them that believe, that believe with such a faith as, working by love produces all obedience and holiness.”[30] TWC trusts with the disciples of Wesley in God’s atoning work through the life and sacrifice of His incarnate Son Jesus was offered for the whole of creation. We live and preach free grace in our neighbourhood so that whosoever will may be saved. This proclamation is praiseworthy for we who were in bondage have been saved by God’s atoning work.

With Jesus as our example, we value the incarnational model. A Salvation Army anthem captures the imperative of God’s atoning work:

See the brazen hosts of Hell,

Their art and power employing,

More than human tongue can tell,

The blood-bought souls destroying.

Hark! from ruin's ghastly road

Victims groan beneath their load;

Forward, O ye sons of God,

And dare or die for Jesus.[31]

Through faith TWC offers our lives as a living sacrifice for the sake of the gospel to the praise of God. We undertake this battle in an attitude of victory because God has provided grace for the world. Therefore we sing:

O for a thousand tongues to sing

My Great Redeemer’s praise,

The Glories of Our God and King,

The Triumph’s of His grace!

He breaks the power of cancelled sin,

He sets the prisoner free;

His blood can make the foulest clean;

His blood avails for me.[32]

Grace

Christ’s crucifixion is the climax for all humanity, whether cognisant or ignorant of the freedom God offers. Wesley summarized,

The benefit of the death of Christ is not only extended to such as have the distinct knowledge of his death and sufferings, but even unto those who are inevitably excluded from this knowledge. Even these may be partakers of the benefit of his death, though ignorant of the history, if they suffer his grace to take place in their hearts, so as of wicked men to become holy.[33]

Indeed, through God’s people and creation, the knowledge and grace of God is offered. The free position of humans to respond to God’s offer of salvation is not independent. Just as God has initiated Creation and Re-creation through the incarnation and sacrifice of Jesus, He initiates a response to Him through prevenient grace. Wesley’s term “prevenient” means to come before. God’s love exhibited on the cross and revealed by the Holy Spirit draws people to the Father unless grace is resisted. “The grace or love of God, whence cometh our salvation,” He declared, “is FREE IN ALL, and FREE FOR ALL.”[34] One who responds positively to this grace through faith experiences God’s “justifying” and “sanctifying” grace. Thus the prevenient grace of God is available to all enabling humankind a “tendency toward life; some degree of salvation; the beginning of a deliverance from a blind, unfeeling heart.”[35] Wesley was adamant that the grace of God is something experienced.

And at the same time that we are justified, yea, in that very moment, sanctification begins. In that instant we are born again, born from above, born of the Spirit: there is a real as well as a relative change. We are inwardly renewed by the power of God. We feel “the love of God shed abroad in our heart by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us”; producing love to all mankind, and more especially to the children of God; expelling the love of the world, the love of pleasure, of ease, of honour, of money, together with pride, anger, self-will, and every other evil temper; in a word, changing the earthly, sensual, devilish mind, into "the mind which was in Christ Jesus.[36]

The experience of God’s grace is a yearning within to experience and participate in the love of God over pleasures of sin. Thus, mission is a joy, an adventure of experiencing God at work. When TWC is active in mission, we do not bring God to those in need of grace but rather participate in what God has done and is doing. Our neighbours experience the grace of God through our good works; as we are “God’s fellow workers” (1 Cor 3:9). We can offer fellowship with the God of our Salvation and good works that demonstrate God’s love. We may too, experience Christ in our neighbours, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me” (Matt 25:40). Therefore, active mission is an act of devotion where we may participate with the Holy Spirit in extending grace and experiencing the love of Christ in our neighbours.

Holistic Regeneration

The mission of God is all encompassing. Jesus came to “destroy the works of the devil” and by restoring humanity into God’s image. We observe this in Jesus’ healing ministry, “he healed sick bodies, resurrected the dead, drove out demons from tormented souls, and carried his message of joy to the poorest of the poor. Jesus’ message means the realization of the future invisible kingdom now; it is the promise that ultimately the earth will be won wholly for God.” [37]  Jesus mission was to give life, “Life to the full” (John 10:10). Consequently, TWC seeks a full salvation in its training of students. A great emphasis is placed on The Salvation Army’s 10’th Doctrine, quoting 1 Thes 5:23, “We believe that it is the privilege of believers to be wholly sanctified and that their whole spirit, soul and body may be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”  The next verse, 1 Thes 5:24, Paul declares, “He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.” Again, we experience an optimism regarding God’s gracious work. Wesley positively expressed God’s regeneration using the biblical language of “perfection.” He acknowledges the difficulty of this topic in his sermon Christian Perfection:

There is scarce any expression in Holy Writ which has given more offence than this. The word perfect is what many cannot bear. The very sound of it is an abomination to them. And whosoever preaches perfection (as the phrase is,) that is, asserts that it is attainable in this life, runs great hazard of being accounted by them worse than a heathen man or a publican.[38]

The difficulty of God’s standards should not discourage us, as Wesley asks, “But are they not found in the oracles of God?”[39] Indeed, Philippians 2 exhorts, “… work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” Wesley comments, “The original word rendered, work out, implies the doing a thing thoroughly. Your own; for you yourselves must do this, or it will be left undone forever.”[40] Here derives TWC’s distinctive of training as soldiers in the conquest of our salvation. The figure of a soldier is the most frequent biblical image for a Christian in the world.[41] This battle is in every facet of our living. “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope exposes the incorrect views of mission that Christians have adopted with their incorrect eschatology. He argues that dualistic philosophies that reject physicality cheapen and discourage proper Christian living in the present.[42] Proper Christian mission incorporates the whole person. Snyder observes that Wesley utilized the healing motif to broaden the normal protestant view of salvation:[43]

Salvation-as-healing makes it clear that God is intimately concerned with every aspect of our lives; yet, biblically understood, it also makes clear that the healing we most fundamentally need is spiritual: Our relationship to God. Biblically grounded (and as Wesley understood it), the salvation-as-healing motif is no concession to pop psychology; it is an affirmation of who God is, what it means to be created in God’s image, and what it takes for that image to be restored in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.[44]

By God’s grace TWC aims to train students into God’s image bearers by adopting an integrated approach that includes all facets of life (spirit, soul and body) while emphasising the regenerative power of The Holy Spirit.

COMMUNITY

Wesley was sure that salvation worked beyond the individual. He emphasized the communal nature of this journey, “The gospel of Christ knows of no religion but social; no holiness but social holiness. ‘Faith working by love’ is the length and breadth and depth and height of Christian perfection.”[45] In Created for Community Stanley Grenz offers a viewpoint of salvation that moves beyond individualism and into an invitation from Jesus, the sent one, to participate in Divine Community:

God wants to save us from sin so that he can bring creation to a higher purpose. God wants us to participate in an eternal community. God’s desire is to create a redeemed humankind, dwelling within a redeemed creation, and enjoying the presence of the Triune God.” Such a community rightfully holds an imago Dei[46], a corporate reality rather than a “human-spirit-after-the Holy-Spirit-in-me theology.[47]

Therefore TWC embraces the model of a salvific community which is sent out into the world with a gospel invitation.

Robert Bellah has studied extensively the disintegration of community in exchange for the pursuit of individual happiness within North America. Many interviewees reasoned that their circumstances are not optimized for community like past generations. Bellah summarizes that there exists a “profound yearning for the idealized small town” to fill the void for “meaning and coherence” for middle classed Americans.[48] Robert Wuthnow demonstrates that this longing can be characterized in the popularity of support groups such as recovery groups, prayer fellowships, twelve-step gatherings that seem to be replacing more traditional forms of community. He explains support groups are successful because they “provide us with small, portable sources of interpersonal support.”[49] Small groups indicates the need for the “other” in our lives to break apart from radical individualism:

Most people, however, seem to believe at some level that this self-centred individualism is no way to live. They may not have the security of a tight-knit neighbourhood, but they want it. They may not enjoy the comfort of a warm family, but they wish they could. They value their individual freedom, but to go through life feeling lonely. They desire intimacy and wonder how to find it. They cling to the conviction that they have close friends who care about them but they frequently feel distant from these friends. They worry what would happen if they were truly in need. Wanting community, and not being able to find it, they turn to other solutions, some of which become their worst enemies.”

Wesley saw the theological need for community and established within Methodism the band system and select societies for the purpose of authentic fellowship and accountability. Lyle D. Vander Broek in his book, Breaking Barriers: The Possibilities of Christian Community in a lonely World recognizes a multitude of communities exist and are best defined by defining what the members of a group have in common and the type of relationships they have with one another. Or, “put more simply and personally, we need to ask what we share with the members of our group and how we share it.”[50] Scott Peck describes a community as a “group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to ‘rejoice together, mourn together,’ and to ‘delight in each other, make others’ condition our own.[51]’” Larry Crabb goes further calling for a certain type of community, “The greatest need in modern civilization is the development of communities – true communities where the heart of God is home, where the humble and wise learn to shepherd those on the path behind them, where trusting strugglers lock arms with others as together they journey on.[52]” This picture of growing and learning together embodies the gospel and reflects an educational model after God’s design. Communities that can be described as gospel-centred are distinguished from secular ones by Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche, “Community is a place of forgiveness.[53]” Wesley’s community practiced forgiveness in their band meetings, “to obey that command of God, ‘Confess your faults one to another, and pray for one another, that ye may be healed.’”[54] TWC implements accountability groups “Squad groups” and encourages the small group gathering of sessional dynamics. Moreover, the cell group is the primary point of our church life where neighbours may receive and express the love of God.

World Winning

The Community of God has always existed to be a “light to the world” and the “salt of the earth” (Matt 5: 13-17). Wesley viewed the church as a

… body of men compacted together, in order, first, to save each his own soul; then to assist each other in working out their salvation; and afterwards, as far as in them lies, to save all men from present and future misery, to overturn the kingdom of Satan, and set up the kingdom of Christ. And this ought to be the continued care and endeavour of every member of his church; otherwise he is not worthy to be called a member thereof, as he is not a living member of Christ.[55]

Because Christ came to fulfil God’s covenant and the church exists as his body, members of the church contribute to “overturn the kingdom of Satan and set up the kingdom of Christ.” The motif of soldiership is utilised for this emphasis. Luke Timothy Johnson summarizes the militant people motif:

They help reconcile the world to God (Rom 11:15; 2 Cor 5:19) and anticipate the whole world’s rebirth into freedom (Rom 8:20-22). The Christian community is a place where God’s purpose for the world is revealed (Eph 3:9-10)… Indeed, the community participates already in a victory over the world (1 John 5:4-5)… This victory will come to complete accomplishment (Rev 11:15)…The experience led to a fundamental release from the cosmic forces… Christians were no longer subject to these “powers and principalities… When Christians spoke of salvation, they meant not only something that would happen but something that had in some way already happened to them.[56]

Winning the World for Jesus is an experience that has already been inaugurated by Jesus’ resurrection and will be fulfilled at his coming. Oscar Cullmann illustrates the tension of the present and future Kingdom of God through World War II’s D-day and V-day. D-day (June 6, 1944) was the deciding victory was attributed to the “allies.” The war, however, was not concluded until after months of strategy, battle and casualties on V-day (May 7 – 8, 1945).[57] Likewise, the victory for this world against Satan has been declared, the outcome is assured while God’s army is ushering in the rule of God until Jesus’ 2^nd coming when the victory is fulfilled.

Wesley was previously observed describing the salvation experience following the trajectory of individual to church to all humanity in a new created order including God’s physical creation. By discussing Noah’s covenant we can observe God has a particular interest in his physical creation. “Once again, just as in primeval creation (Gen 1:2),” Bouma-Prediger asserts, “in this act of re-creation [Noah’s ark] God’s Spirit brooded and blew over the chaotic waters, and the waters subsided. Chaos was controlled. Shalom – peace, harmony, balance – was restored.”[58] This shalom is what we can expect when God fulfils his new covenant. “The Noahic covenant, then, is universal in the widest sense imaginable. It is fundamentally an ecological covenant that includes not only human beings everywhere but all animals – every living being of all flesh that is upon the earth (9:16 repeating what was said in 6:19).”[59] Christ fulfils all of God’s covenants; establishing shalom through all things:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. (Col 1:15-20)

Paul was certain to include all things as a component of Jesus’ rule. Wesley too pronounced a comprehensive view of Jesus’ lordship:

“… God is in all things, and that we are to see the Creator in the face of every creature; that we should use and look upon nothing as separate from God, which indeed is a kind of practical atheism; but with a true magnificence of thought survey heaven and earth and all that is therein as contained by God in the hallow of his hand, who by his intimate presence holds them all in being, who pervades and actuates the whole created frame, and is in a true sense the soul of the universe.”[60]

Wesley adventured to imagine God’s earthly rule in his sermon “The General Deliverance.” He asks, “In What state will creation be in the full manifestation of the children of God?”[61] N.T. Wright answers today that the resurrection life will take place “On the new earth, joined as it will then to the new heaven.”[62]  Thus, the mission of God is to establish now the future reality of God’s rule. Rightly, “Human is thus a kind of midway creature:” claims Wright, “reflecting God into the world and reflecting the world back to God. That is the basis for the ‘truly human’ vocation.”[63] Wesley agrees that the universal human endeavour is in reflecting the political image of God by stewarding (ruling and keeping) over all the earth.[64] Wright further asserts that the gospel mission is,  “… the renewal of creation as both the goal of all things in Christ and the achievement that has already been accomplished in the resurrection; and go to the work of justice, beauty, evangelism, the renewal of space, time and matter as the anticipation of the eventual goal and the implementation of what Jesus achieved in his death and resurrection.”[65] Discipleship therefore is working within created order to bring God’s loving rule into all aspects of life.

Therefore, TWC must train its students in the primary human vocation; that they be “revealed as the sons [and daughters] of God” (Rom 8:19). This, as Wesley asserts, is maintaining an individual’s salvation, caring for others and the world, including creation. Consequently, TWC offers “World Creative Justice” and participates in the physical regeneration of the DTES by right living and establishing gardens (God’s physical pronouncement of new life). Moreover, TWC engages in matters of social justice by exploring consistent life-ethics and speaking out on behalf of the marginalised. Theodore Jennings, Jr. claims Wesley’s Gospel results in a transformation of one’s relation to the world, especially as this world was instantiated in mammon, the desire of riches, the ethos of acquisition and expenditure… Those evangelicals who preach a conversion that does not turn us toward the poor, that does not result in a redistribution of wealth… are offering individual salvation as a substitute for meaningful transformation either of persons or of society. Such a project receives no support from either Wesley or the Gospel he sought to serve.[66]

It is TWC aim to create students willing to lay down their lives for a transformation that extends beyond the individual and into the world’s economic and created orders. With this goal in focus we can claim that our mission is to “train warriors to win the world for Jesus.”

Conclusion

TWC’s understanding of the mission of God is ultimately Wesleyan. Firstly, the 3 and 1 God is the owner, initiator and fulfiller of a whole world salvation. Secondly, the mission is modelled after the life of Jesus in the relational and gracious natures of God that ushers in the holistic restoration of humanity’s image. The Holy Spirit goes before the church inviting humanity to participate in God’s grace together through life in community. Finally, this community endeavours to participate in bringing God’s future rule as a present reality in all aspects of life, stewarding creation and establishing justice.

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