Tag Archives: gospel of peace

A new season in my life; a forthcoming book

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My 32-year career with Mission ONE just came to a close at the end of 2024.

I am humbled and grateful for all the ways that I was honored to learn from and collaborate with—people in the global church, both in the United States and in various parts of the world. Profound thanks are due to the many generous people who have supported my ministry with Mission ONE. None of us can do what we do on our own. We are all interdependent. We are part of the body of Christ with every member giving and doing its part so that the body thrives. I feel unjustly blessed. God is faithful.

Bob Schindler, the founder of Mission ONE, remains my dearest friend; it has been a wonderful privilege to serve alongside him all these years. Olivia Mulerwa has been Mission ONE’s president for three years. Olivia has embraced Mission ONE’s original DNA and is truly building on that. I believe I am leaving Mission ONE when it is in a healthy place and getting healthier. By God’s grace, I also plan to collaborate with some Mission ONE partners in 2025—doing some teaching and training in India and Nepal concerning honor, shame, and the gospel.

What’s next for me? 1) Finishing a four-year book project, and 2) a new season of ministry focusing on the gospel of peace for all persons and peoples, and honor-shame in missiology and theology. These two arenas are briefly described below.

1) Forthcoming book: One New Humanity: Glory, Violence, and the Gospel of Peace

One New Humanity: Glory, Violence, and the Gospel of Peace, by Kristin Caynor and Werner Mischke (William Carey Publishing, April 2025)

Here’s the book thesis: One New Humanity argues that Ephesians 2 offers a radical vision of human dignity and peace that challenges the shame and violence of the Roman Empire and the contemporary world. Drawing on insights from early Christians, the global church, social sciences, and the biblical narrative, we show that through Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, we gain a peaceable way of being human for the world—impacting identity, relationships, church, and vocation. In the process of deeply examining glory, violence, and the gospel of peace, we answer the question, “What does it mean to be human?”

The book has three sections: 1) GLORY and Shame, 2) VIOLENCE and Sin, 3) The GOSPEL OF PEACE and its King. Zac Niringiye, who served as an advisor to us on the book project, provides the Afterword. Brad Vaughn (a.k.a. Jackson Wu) provides a rich and compelling theological article, “Reconciling Atonement in Ephesians 2” as Appendix 1. CLICK HERE for a chapter-by-chapter overview of the book.

Kristin Caynor and I have been working on this book for four years. The book layout is nearly complete, and it is now going into the proofreading stage. Kristin and I hope the book will be a catalyst for many crucial conversations—near and far.

2) A new season of ministry focusing on the gospel of peace for all persons and peoples, and honor-shame in missiology and theology

I will be under the ministry umbrella of Antioch Network as an independent contractor. Their ministry is about unreached peoples, and reconciliation. I have known some of their key leaders. Antioch Network is a good fit.

My work will have three areas of emphasis:

  1. Christ’s gospel of peace for all persons and peoples
  2. King Jesus, our example of true humanity
  3. Honor-shame in missiology, theology, and the gospel

My activities will include:

  1. Writing about various facets of Christ’s gospel of peace for all persons and peoples
  2. Facilitate conversations and conferences about the gospel of peace and honor-shame
  3. Speaking, training, writing—advocating for Christ-centered peacemaking, and honor-shame in missiology and theology
  4. Serving locally and globally through open doors of ministry

I am calling my ministry “Werner Mischke / Far & Near” (the far-and-near theme comes from Eph 2:17). Want to learn more? CLICK HERE for a two-page overview.

Finally, I want to share this verse below (John 15:2). It was meaningful to me when I left my business in 1992 to join Mission ONE; this verse is meaningful to me today. Naturally, there is pain in any pruning, but there is also the hope of more fruitfulness. This is how I am seeing my transition. Are you facing any “pruning” in your life? Take heart. God is faithful.

Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit.

John 15:2 (ESV)

Ephesians 2 Gospel Project—it’s partially rooted in Germany

Ephesians, Ephesians 2, Violence, violence and Christianity, WW2 Germany, ,
At the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on August 6, 2015, I took this picture of myself in front of an aerial photo of the center. I did this to acknowledge the shame of human beings (me being of the same species) who committed the atrocities there.

First, some background material:

But now in Christ Jesus, you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached [the gospel of] peace to you were far off and peace to those who were near.

Ephesians 2:13–17 (ESV)

We launched the Ephesians 2 Gospel Project (E2GP) through my work with Mission ONE in January 2021. The key idea of the Ephesians 2 Gospel Project is this: There is a social and horizontal dimension to the gospel of Christ because there is a social and horizontal dimension to the atonement of Christ (Eph 2:13–17). Our short-term goal is a book. Our desired long-term impact is God’s people drawn into and embodying Christ’s peacemaking work through the gospel.

E2GP is a two-year research project which includes:

  • listening to and learning from the Global Church, including Mission ONE ministry partners,
  • grappling with relevant questions about the gospel, the atonement of Christ, the global mission of the church, and why the church has sometimes been complicit with conflict and violence,
  • reading relevant literature (books and articles) on history, theology, missiology, the social sciences,
  • writing a book (to be co-authored with Kristin Caynor), which is the catalyst for developing other resources for learning and practice,
  • facilitating a fellowship of Christian scholars and practitioners around the world to study and embody the gospel of peace as a solution to collective-identity conflict in the church in their own nations and contexts.

Since last January, Kristin Caynor has been contributing as a research assistant to the Ephesians 2 Gospel Project. Kristin grew up on the mission field; she and her parents serve with a mission organization similar to Mission ONE. Kristin is a qualified researcher. She has a lot of cross-cultural ministry experience, has a passion for helping marginalized peoples in the global church, and is a Ph.D. candidate at Trinity College Bristol/University of Aberdeen. (Check it out: Kristin’s recent lecture on the Ephesians 2 Gospel Project is for the Centre for the Study of Bible and Violence; it is outstanding. You can view the video here.)

About Germany and the Ephesians 2 Gospel Project

I am the son of German immigrant parents. My father was a soldier in Hitler’s army; he was a prisoner of war in Poland for four years. He became mentally ill in my teenage years. I took on a shadow of shame from my father and family.

Concerning WW2 Germany, the juxtaposition of two truths (below) should cause us to shudder.

  1. WW2 Germany and Europe was the location of a massive violence and bloodshed. A central part of this conflict was the Holocaust (or Shoah). It was a deliberate, sustained, unspeakable evil. It was murder on the largest scale committed against the Jews on behalf of the supposed superiority of the German (Aryan) race.
  2. At the time of Hitler’s rule, Germany’s people identified as 97% Christian.

Here’s how Holocaust scholar Robert Ericksen describes this statistic of Germany’s people identifying as 97% Christian.

“When Adolf Hitler came to power, 97 percent of the German population considered itself Christian, with about two-thirds being Protestant and one-third Catholic. Less than 1 percent of Germans were Jewish in 1933, and only a slightly larger percentage registered as pagans or nonbelievers. It is true that the entire 97 percent registered as Christian did not attend church regularly or maintain a vibrant Christian identity. However, all of them agreed to pay the church tax, money they could have saved by the simple act of leaving their church. Furthermore, they received religious education in all German schools, and, of course, many of these 97 percent of the population were fervent Christians active in their faith. Germany in the 1930s almost certainly represented church attendance and a sense of Christian commitment and identity similar to that in America today, for example.”

Robert P. Ericksen, Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 9.

In Germany: Centuries of accrued Christian influence from the church, a population that identifies as 97% Christian … and yet, the Holocaust. How does this add up? How can this be?

Missionaries and missions scholars sometimes speak of the “redemptive lift” that comes to a community when the gospel of Jesus is embraced. I believe this.

But what happened in WW2 Germany? Widespread systemic evil and violence occurred in the society, despite the broad sustained influence of Christianity. Could it be that in the rise of Hitler’s Germany, somehow Christianity was complicit with a redemptive fall?

  • Was there a dimension of the gospel de-emphasized, tragically ignored?
  • Was there a cosmic, systemic dimension of sin ignored?
  • Were there forces—social, systemic, cosmic—against which the German peoples’ Christian faith had little or no defense?
  • Did the church in Germany ignore, abuse, or conceal the gospel text of Ephesiasn 2?
  • Is the gospel of peace (Eph 2:13–17; 6:15) about individual, vertical, personal peace-with-God—or something more social, horizontal, and corporate?

We hope to address these questions, among many others, in the Ephesians 2 Gospel Project through a journey together in the Global Church.

What can we learn from the tragic failure of the church in WW2 Germany? How might these lessons apply to nations today that are dealing with collective identity conflict or tribal conflict? What lessons can we learn about the kind of gospel we are preaching and living?

More on the Ephesians 2 Gospel Project will appear here in forthcoming posts from our ongoing research. Subscribe and stay tuned.

Learn more about the Ephesians 2 Gospel Project at Mission ONE’s website / ephesians2.org.