Called and Sent

I remember some years ago, as Sunday morning service where
we interviewed, commissioned and prayed for a young family who were heading overseas to serve as missionaries with an aid agency in a difficult cultural setting. We reminded them that we would stand with and encourage them as they went, but, they needed to be mindful of their calling and accountability to the broader church community and to God! They represented Jesus and his Kingdom out there in the world -- and that's not to be taken lightly.

It was a touching service and afterwards one of our church members, a successful local businessman came up to me and asked: 

"How come you don't do that for the rest of us?"

"How do you mean?"

"Well, aren't we all called and sent? Don't we all need prayer and encouragement to serve God out there? Don't I too need to be accountable for how I live my life, use my money and represent Jesus to my colleagues?"

A great question! Why do we single out 'real' missionaries or 'ordained' pastors for call and commissioning - but the rest of the faith community are not held accountable or supported in the same way?

So the very next week we called him and his household up the front, interviewed and commissioned him to be called and sent into his secular workplace!

One underlying quality of all missional churches, is a strong sense of seeing themselves, the whole community, as being called and sent: 

“All the church does and is should live out God’s life in the midst of the world; missional people should practice God’s life before a watching world. This includes worship, preaching, communion, loving one another, social justice, caring for the poor, and sharing Jesus’s gospel. Being missional is about all of it, not part. This is the missional imagination. All of God’s people are on mission to engage their surrounding neighbourhoods, not just a few who are sent outside the church to do something called missions.” (R&B, 54) 

Church conversations should move away from churched-culture assumptions and toward a focus on God’s work in and dream for the world. This is similar to the three-way conversation proposed by missiologist Lesslie Newbigin that considers first the relationship between the gospel and our culture (context), and only then progresses to reflection on issues of church. 

By putting gospel and culture first, it means we shape our 
church out of what God (gospel) is up to in our context (culture). If we start with church, we often end up either ignoring gospel and culture - or trying to force them to fit with our church traditions and structures.  

We no longer live in a Christian context. The western world is now a multicultural, pluralistic marketplace. This requires that we as the church-community follow Jesus, who pitched his tent 'out there', in the village. We too need to dwell in and become aware of our neighbourhoods. We need to be incarnate in our neighbourhoods. “God is only known in the particularity of place and time.” (R&B, 77).  

For us, the world has shifted from the church being on the central platform in society to being on the periphery. Often congregations have responded to this with strategies that operate as if the old church-centred culture were still the reality that we need to somehow get back to. But, we’re not in Kansas anymore. We’re not going back to 1950s Christendom modernity any time soon! The early church too, was powerless and poor and on the periphery of a great multicultural and pluralistic empire - one that was often hostile to these ‘followers of the way.’  

Maybe we don't need better management and marketing strategies but the courage to move out of our comfort zone and explore this new world. Sometimes experiments don't work! Sometimes we'll misunderstand what's happening around us. It's risky when the old maps don't work anymore but we need to  strike out anyway, working it out as we go and dialogue with local people in our contexts and neighbourhoods.

Firstly, it means entering and listening to one’s context (real human connection, not just demographic stats and profiles). It means analyzing our cultural context, attending to the values and meanings that underlie the surface activities of the neighbourhood and understanding the themes in the culture that shape it. It’s what we would do if we went and lived overseas for a few years, in a place where we needed to learn a new language and local customs and practices foreign to us! 

Secondly, it means re-engaging our imagination with the scriptural narratives – It’s using the scriptures and the experiences of other local churches to reflect on the themes they encounter from listening to their communities. We “read scripture with the eyes of our neighbourhood.” (R&B, 90) 

Out of this work of listening to the context (culture) and listening to the scriptures (gospel) followers Jesus learn to discern God's ways to connect with and bless just that local context -- and the way they live together, embrace the ways of Jesus and relate to their neighbours, well that's church - however it looks.

The model is Jesus who, as Eugene Peterson paraphrases it in The Message: “became flesh and moved into the neighbourhood.” (John 1:14). 

As David Bosch put it: “Mission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God. God is a missionary God.  .... To participate in mission is to participate in the movement of God’s love toward people, since God is a fountain of sending love.” (David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission, Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1991, pp. 389-390).

If I can nerd out for a moment -- one of the things about I love
about Lord of The Rings is  that it reminds me of our time.

Hobbits had lived in the Shire, in their safe and snug homes for generations doing things exactly the way they'd always done them. No fuss, no adventures, no change! And suddenly their world changes. There's danger. There's a new and dark wind of change a-blowing. It's going to take immense courage for Bilbo (and then Frodo) to step out of their comfort-zone and and head into the wild. There's no certainty. There's no maps or guarantees that their quest will succeed -- but they have to go!

And so Bilbo Baggins leaves his nice, safe, comfortable home and goes off on a dangerous adventure with the dwarves to slay the dragon. And later Frodo leaves his place of fellowship and nurture to go on an even more uncertain adventure to save the world! 

And way out of his comfort-zone, he finds fellowship [church] on the road, with a motley crew who come together to share the quest with him

Bilbo looks back and reminisces: “It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to."

I wonder where we will be swept off to as we dare to leave the safety of our paradigms and programmes and head out!