What might the doctrine of the trinity contribute to a christian understanding of mission?

Answer 1

You sound like you know your theology!
I'm a bit rusty on this as I haven't written an essay on this for a while but for what it's worth...

I'm guessing you'll know there are two ways of thinking about the trinity (both are helpful in thinking about mission).
People like the Capadocian Fathers (Gregory of Nisianzus, Basil, etc) emphasised their difference, so the role of the Holy Spirit in sustaining the world and enabling people to come to a relationship with Jesus. There's a lot of research comming out of the UK at the moment about how mission can be understood, not merely as us engaging in the work of making Christ known in the world so that people may come into relationship with the Father through Christ and asking for the help of the Holy Spirit for this. If you google people like Yvonne Richmond, Steve Croft etc you'll find some of their thinking on this as well as some of their reseach (paticularly out of Coventry Cathedral).

Basically they're thinking that mission is intended not to be us asking the Holy Spirit to join in our mission but us being able to join in with God's. God is already at work in people's lives through the Holy Spirit - supernatural experiences, dreams, prophecy etc - they just don't know what to do with these experiences. Richmond in paticular is developing the theory that many more people have supernatural experiences than we realise and that the role of mission in this context is merely to explain what is going on - and people will grow into relationship with God that God has already started to innitiate. So an ontological understanding of the trinity (ie about WHO each of them are) will help us make sense of the experiences that people are already having.

People like Augustine and Karl Barth emphasised the similarity of the trinity (their function within the whole). I'm not sure where this would come into mission. Muslims sometimes struggle to understand the trinity, thinking it's about father, mother and son ... or that all are created out of the father. I'm not sure this really stops them becoming Christians though - it's more of an intellectual excercise where they think they have got one up on Christianity in terms of logic or Monotheism.

Some people struggle to understand the trinity (well just about everyone if they think about it long enough) but I've never heard of it stopping someone becoming a Christian.

If anything an accurate understanding of the trinity helps us rather than those outside the church in mission.

Hope this helps a bit

Answer 2

The doctrine of the trinity may contribute to the christian understanding of mission by elaborating the three persons at work because with the three nothing can be done spiritually.,You can't function in mission field without the three persons at work ie,GOD THE FATHER asthe Head,GOD THE SON asthe way the truth and life.GOD THE HOLY SPIRIT as the helper and the comforter.mathew 28:18

Answer 3

Prince's answer is well said.

The doctrine of trinity helps us understand who is the SOURCE of our mission...that is GOD...who is the MESSAGE of our mission that is Jesus Christ...and who is the our GUIDE for our mission and that is the Holy Spirit.