Mission: an Explosion of JOY

Lesslie Newbigin, one of the great mission’s thinker of our day, expresses well that mission flows from joy not a sense of religious “duty”:

There has been a long tradition which sees  the mission of the Church primarily as obedience to a command. It has been customary to speak of “the missionary mandate.” This way of putting  the matter is certainly not without justification, and yet it seems to me that it misses the point. It tends to make mission a burden rather  than a joy, to make it part of the law rather than part of the gospel. If one looks at the New Testament evidence one gets another impression.  Mission begins with a kind of explosion of joy. The news that the rejected and crucified Jesus is alive is something that cannot possibly be  suppressed. It must be told. Who could be silent about such a fact? The  mission of the Church in the pages of the New Testament is more like the fallout from a vast explosion, a radioactive fallout which is not lethal  but life-giving. One searches in vain through the letters of St. Paul to  find any suggestion that he anywhere lays it on the conscience of his  readers that they ought to be active in mission. For himself it is inconceivable that he should keep silent. “Woe to me if I do not preach the  gospel!” (1 Cor. 9:16). But nowhere do we find him telling his readers  that they have a duty to do so.