The De-Jesus-ing of Mission: Andrew Walls and the Church’s Continuing Conversion

Abstract

This article argues that the fragmentation of contemporary Christian witness into specialized ministries—apologetics, evangelism, discipleship, and spiritual formation—reflects not merely institutional differentiation but a deeper Christological distortion: the de-Jesus-ing of mission, in which Jesus Christ is gradually displaced from the living subject who acts through the Church’s witness to an object administered within its ministries. Drawing on Andrew Walls’s account of Christian conversion as shub—the turning of what is already present toward Christ—and Peter Berger’s sociology of institutional reproduction, the article traces how operational maps formed through genuine conversion can, once stabilized within plausibility structures, acquire a logic increasingly independent of Christ’s continuing agency. Quebec’s Quiet Revolution serves as a diagnostic anchor rather than an evidential foundation for this argument. Read alongside John Flett’s dogmatic account of mission and Dallas Willard’s epistemology of Christ’s self-authenticating reality, the essay proposes that the Church’s own renewal proceeds not by new structures but by the continual conversion Walls calls “shub”: the Church’s ongoing turning of its inherited institutions toward the living Christ.