There has been an upsurge of popularity among systematic theologians to define the nature of God in terms of a ’social-Trinitarian’ portrait. In other words instead of laying out the attributes of God and saying this is who God is, or instead of speaking of God in a comparative sense to other religious views, there are many systematic theologians today saying we need to understand that God is first and foremost ’social’, and this is demonstrated by the very nature of the Trinity itself.

The implications would be that if we are going to be a Church which reflects God’s image we must be ’social’, and since we live in a world that encompasses many people’s our ’social-ness’ must take on a global mentality. Yet while there may be many people in the world there are really only two groups of people, those in union with Christ, and those who are orphan’s without Christ, which means that in order for the Church to reflect the ’social-ness’ of God we must be a missional people. Both our call toward ’social-ness’ or community formation and our call toward being ‘missional’ cuts against the grain of popular values today. Consider Tod E. Bolsinger’s comments in his book It Takes A Church To Raise A Christian;

And in a culture that tells us to march on with ever greater self-reliance and self-expression, the Bible tells us that the story of our life is not our own, and our journey is not our own. God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and his people come along with us (or, to put it a little more accurately, we go along with them). And along that journey, a God who is inherently community changes our human community into his image. (pg. 23)

So how do we as the Church reflect the ’social’ nature of God, how do we live the Trinity, to put it shortly? What does that look like as we wrestle with rubrics like community or fellowship or welcoming? And have we placed mission in its proper focus in our ecclesiologie’s?

- Tony Stiff