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:
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.
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.’
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).
about Lord of The Rings is that it reminds me of our time.