Biblical Foundations for Mission

If you've read the long sermons I periodically post here, you've picked up on my fascination with mission. It's a term that comes up over and over again, and an idea I keep coming back to.

In fact, I'm working on another sermon for this coming Sunday in which I hope to trace out the unique role of the church in God's mission.

I've read many books and even more blogs on the "missional church." They seem to direct me to Jn 20.21 and Ex 19 frequently, among a few other proof texts. But I'm longing for something more than proof-texting to encourage this small town church in mission.

Do you know of a good biblical theology of mission or missional ecclesiology?

What would you look for in such a study?

Thanks for any suggestions you send my way.

July 8 - What's More Important Than Church?

I want to begin this morning with a question: What is more important than church?

I imagine that almost automatically many of us will have one of two responses. For some, our gut reaction is a firm “Nothing! What could be more important than church?” We honor God by keeping a Christian Sabbath on Sundays. We devote our mornings to worship and the remainder of the day to rest and reflection on God’s blessings in our lives. When we receive a paycheck, the first thing we do is write our tithe. If our children play sports, we tell their coaches that they won’t be able to play in Sunday games.

Others of us, when we hear the question “What’s more important than church?”, we think, “What isn’t?” We have families to think about and bills to pay. Sometimes our jobs demand we work extra hours over the weekend, and even Scripture tells us to provide for our families. We want our kids to use their God-given talents, and sometimes that means extra practices and games on the weekend. The house or the cabin needs looking after and fixing up. We want to take advantage of the warmth and sunshine while we have it, so we’re camping or at the lake every weekend during the summer. Later there’s winter sports and ice fishing. We try to make it to Sunday morning worship at least a few times a month, but, we remind ourselves, “Jesus was really interested in how we worship him with our lives, not in our church attendance.” God, after all, made the world good and wants us to enjoy God’s handiwork.

I won’t ask for a show of hands, but I’m confident many of us can identify with one of these two responses. And there are many of us, perhaps, who nod along with points of both responses, if not with our hearts then at least with our calendars. Sometimes church feels like a sacred duty. We owe something to God and to these people, both on Sunday mornings and throughout the week. Other times, church feels extracurricular, like a club or hobby we add on to the rest of life.

In our hearts, I think many of us aren’t quite sure where church is supposed to fit in our lives. Church, it seems, can have all the importance of family Christmas dinner (the kind you’d better not miss) but also all the superfluousness of seventh grade history class in the Springtime.

I want to clear up, if I can, a bit of our confusion about church. What is it? Is it important? How is it supposed to fit in our lives? As we continue to eavesdrop on Paul’s correspondence with the believers in Colossae, I hope we will find some answers to these questions.

July 1 - Where Our Stories Begin

I’m glad to be with you this morning. My wife C and I are looking forward to getting better acquainted with you over these next few weeks and to sharing some of our own stories and hopes. It’s exciting to hear from you how God is uniquely at work with you building for God’s kingdom in this particular community.

I want to know where we each, individually and together, feel God calling us out into God’s project to bring God’s reign “on earth as it is in heaven.” How does the “love of Christ compel” you to share the good news of Jesus’ reign? Is it volunteering with MCC? Is it inviting your neighbor’s family over for a barbeque? Seeking fair-housing regulations? Do you sing? paint? sew? We might witness to God’s great love in so many ways. I’m curious how you feel God asking you to join in.

I hope to hear many of your stories in the coming weeks, over lunch, over coffee, chatting after morning worship. And I expect you’ll want to hear some of mine as well.

I’ve been asked to share the story of how I began to follow Jesus quite a few times. Every time I tell my story, it sounds a little bit different. I always find it difficult knowing where to begin the story. Should I begin with my decision to get baptized as an adolescent? Or should I start from the night in grade school I walked the aisle when a traveling evangelist gave an altar call? I could begin at four years old, with a winter car ride back from a kids’ Bible club when I mouthed word for word the prayer my mom led me in when I asked how I could go to heaven when I died. I can even remember, faintly, Bible songs from Sunday School when I was three years old. I’m sure even those early songs were moving me toward choosing a life committed to Jesus. For that matter, I could start with my parents’ conversion stories, or how when they were young and first married they purposed that that their home would be centered on God and the Bible. All of these things contribute to my daily decision to follow Jesus as the way to God.

I could begin my story in many places. We each could begin our stories about how God is bringing God’s kingdom to this particular part of earth in a variety places. But back before all these beginnings, before any of us committed ourselves to Jesus or joined him in welcoming God’s reign, there was one beginning.

This is what Paul insists on again and again throughout his letter to the believers gathered together in Colossae. In the snippet of their conversation we’ve heard read this morning, Paul tells them that all growth in discipleship begins in one place: the salvation Jesus has won for us. Listen another time to his words in Col 1.9-14:

For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you and asking that you be filled with the full knowledge of what God desires through all wisdom and spiritual understanding, so that you may live lives worthy of the Lord in order to please him in every way, by bearing fruit in every good work and growing in your full knowledge of God, being equipped with every ability according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, joyfully giving thanks to the Father, the one who has made you qualified to share in the inheritance of the saints stored up in heavenly light, the one who rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the reign of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. (my translation)

Each of our stories--no matter where or when met Jesus, no matter where or how far we have traveled with him since then--each of them begins in the obedient life and death and glorious resurrection of Jesus. And wherever, however God’s Spirit is working among us and in the world around us--that work begins with Jesus.

Our stories begin with Jesus. This is not simply an interesting fact to remember. It’s not just a doctrine to file away alongside the Trinity or the virgin birth. (And I’ll try to persuade you, if you let me talk with you long enough, that none of these “doctrines” are things to simply leave in the filing cabinet of our minds, like old tax returns!) No--and this is where Paul writes not only for the Colossians but also for us this morning--the way we follow Jesus today, the whole of our discipleship, flows from the redemption Jesus won for us. This redemption is the wellspring of our discipleship, its beginning and the source that sustains it. If we are to follow Jesus, to grow to be more like him and to bear fruit in working for good, then we need to drink deeply at this spring.

N.T. Wright, the New Friars, and a Small Town Church

I've had time to do a bit or reading over the past few weeks. We've moved north, to Saskatoon following a job for Cindy that will start 1 July. Because we opted for a moving company (for the first time ever), we weren't sure when in the four-week window of June our goods would show up. So we've been waiting, eating off a card table, sitting around on folding chairs, sleeping on an air mattress. I like camping, but I was pretty happy when we got the phone call last week that truck was due in on Tuesday. It came, and now we're gradually unpacked. All to say: I've had some time to read.

Public libraries are great! Even for recent immigrants (like me), libraries offer immediate access to a near-boundless and haphazard collection of books and DVDs. You never know what you'll to find.

For instance: Wandering through our new local branch, I found Scott Bessenecker's The New Friars. I remember hearing about this book shortly after it came out in 2006. I remember meaning to find it and read it, but never quite getting around to it. Now, it seemed, it's time had come. So I checked it out with my brand new Saskatoon library card.

The New Friars is a good read--conversationally written, informative, challenging. I'd recommend it especially to students and twenty-somethings puzzling out how their lives fit into God's good desires for this world. That's the part of me, at least, that I felt it speaking to.

Bessenecker uses five words to characterize the praxis of those he dubs "New Friars"--Jesus' followers who become poor in order to serve the people Jesus loves. They are incarnational, devotional, communal, missional, and marginal. He fleshes each of these out with both stories from practitioners today and also those of their historical forerunners: the desert mothers and fathers, the Celts, the Franciscans and the Poor Clares, the Anabaptists, and the Moravians. Each chapter finds the right mix of personal confessional and prophetic discontent.

The New Friars struck me, got stuck in my mind and my heart, toward the end Bessenecker's discussion of the devotional aspect of the New Friars' work. He tells a story about shoveling snow (something and should get used to) and wrestling with his commitment to Jesus and his mission:

"You love my mission more than you love me," Jesus said to me. At first I found this a bit offensive. I suppose Peter might have felt the same way when Jesus kept asking him later, "Do you love me?" (John 21:15-17). How can this be? I wondered. Of course I love you, Lord. But then I began to ask myself, what was it that motivated me . . .
As wonderful as it is to bring the kingdom of God to the hollow places on earth, even this is rubbish in comparison to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus. Intimacy with Christ must be first. Without it, mission is empty and self-serving.

I hit these words like sparrow hits a window. I went back and re-read the paragraphs. Bessenecker was insisting on a distinction that I simply couldn't comprehend. I read and asked myself, how am I supposed to differentiate between my love for God and my love for God's purposes? If I love God, I want what God wants, right?

I eventually picked myself up and made it to the end of the chapter and the end of the book. I enjoyed it, but I keep returning to this question about what I love. I have a half-forgotten memory of a time in my Evangelical youth when this distinction would have made a bit more sense to me. At times, I feel a vague sense of loss or perhaps even regret that I can't find that conceptual apparatus or feel those feelings at this point. Other times I feel a sneaking sense of superiority or an adolescent air of maturity that I've "grown past" that capability. I'm not sure what I feel, but I keep feeling it because the question stubbornly keeps bobbing to the surface of my thoughts.

Reading The New Friars began to dredge up question about how I am joining in on God's project. Recently I've been talking with a small town congregation near Saskatoon. They need a pastor of a sort. They need someone who will do the things small town pastors do: sermons and committees and weddings and funerals and Children's Moments and the like. Set against the stories of saints and students giving their lives away in urban slums, a small town pastorate looks pretty far removed from the frontiers of God's kingdom. I doubt the church wants someone who spends more time "sitting with" the community than working in the church office.

So I began googling urban ministry opportunities around Saskatoon. I began making lists of the reasons why God wouldn't call me to a small town pastorate.

But the unanswered question of John 21 stopped once again: Do I love Jesus, or do I simply love what looks to me like his mission? Small town churches don't look like the frontline of mission. But maybe I'm seeing things incorrectly. I remember Jesus telling a story about people at the last judgment asking in disbelief when they served him, fed him, ministered to him. And Jesus responds tells them appearances can be deceiving (see Mt 25). Maybe there is a frontier running right down Main Street (even though it doesn't have a single stoplight). Maybe Jesus is forgotten somewhere amid the semi-affluent homes.  If I love Jesus, I have to go when he says go, right?

Which brings up N.T. Wright. After I finished The New Friars, I picked up Wright's Surprised By Hope. This one's been sitting on the shelf since I got it as a gift a few Christmases back. So when I was grabbing a few books to read while we waited for the moving truck to arrive, I slipped it into my bag. I'm glad I did.

Wright's basic argument runs that a revitalized eschatology will give us a more robust political ecclesiology.

Most of us have a pretty foggy personal eschatology. We know we will die, and we're confident that then we'll be with Jesus eternally. For most of us, this is what the good news is all about.

We may or may not have strong feelings about hell (thanks to Rob Bell and the barrage of books responding to his Love Wins).

Some of us (if you grew up in a certain kind of Evangelical church, like me) also have charts and diagrams about the particular of general eschatology. We're familiar with the various interpretations of "time, times, and half a time"; we've read Christian pulp fiction about the end of the world; we've debated pre-, mid-, and post-trib raptures scenarios. But most of us feel that it's best to hold onto these, if we do at all, with a pretty loose grip.

To all of our muddled feelings and convictions, Wright brings a solidly researched biblical theology. He confronts us with the unanimous early Christian hope in a bodily resurrection after a disembodied intermediate sate with Jesus in heaven/paradise/Abraham's Bosom. Because of Easter, he says, we have more to hope for than a spiritual exit from a sin-sick material world. Jesus has not just made us a nice place to go after the traumatic and unfortunate experience of death; no, he's conquered death. And his own resurrection--his own bodily return back from the dead--proves that death no longer has the final word.

And from bodily resurrection, he draws a clear line to concern for and action on behalf of the present social-political-ecological-material world. God called creation good, and God's intent has always been to redeem, to buy back the good in it. Jesus' resurrection shows us the "how" of that redemption.

Wright returns again and again to 1 Cor 15.58: "Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain."At the resurrection and renewal of all the world, God redemptively validates what we do in the present, just as Jesus' resurrection validated Jesus' work.

Wright doesn't want us confusedly to think that our responsibility now is to "build God's kingdom by our own efforts." There is no way for humanity, Christian or otherwise, to progress from here and now to the resurrection new creation. As Wright insists, "God builds God's kingdom."

Wright follows up this important disclaimer with the following: "But God ordered his world in such a way that his own work within that world takes place not least through one of his creatures in particular, namely, the human beings who reflect his image. . . . God intends his wise, creative, loving presence and power to be reflected--imaged, if you like--into his world through his human creatures." This is the key point: God chooses to usher in God's kingdom, at least in a preliminary way, through human agency. As Paul says to the believers in Corinth, "We are God's co-workers" (1 Cor 3.9). We wait for the final day, the day of general resurrection for the world to be made entirely new. But until then, we declare the glorious goodness of the God who saves us by building for God's kingdom (see Mt 5.16).

But how do we partner with God in this work? The kingdom for many of us includes only the souls of the saved. Others may steer us toward government offices and the need to legislate morality. Both these answers, I think, shoot wide of the goodness of God's kingdom. Look at Jesus: how did Jesus herald the arrival of the kingdom?

Wright suggest three pursuits for the church as we build for God's kingdom: justice, beauty, and evangelism. He concludes, "This is the good news--of justice, beauty, and above all Jesus--that the church is called upon to live and to speak, to bring into reality, in each generation." Then he asks, "What might the life of the church look like if it was shaped, in turn, by this hope-shaped mission?"

Wright develops this beautifully, and I can't urge you strongly enough to read it for yourself.

This comes back around to the small town church. Our strongest witness to Jesus' good news, our fullest participation in God's mission, is how we live together as church-communities. We herald the kingdom Jesus inaugurated by how we live and love as a community. Wright devotes final third of Surprised By Hope outlining this sort of ecclesial politics found in the New Testament. 

The work of the new friars, if we look past its (un)glamour, the strangely attractive unattractiveness of it, is primarily to demonstrate the way Jesus lived among the world's poorest people. There work is less one of social development than one of accompaniment. Their expectation seems less to be that they will end poverty than that they will live faithfully with poor people, welcoming them, eating together, sharing their resources.

My work (whatever the outcome of conversations with the small town church) is to love Jesus. In Jn 21, Peter answers Jesus three times that, yes, he loves Jesus. Jesus responds three times telling Peter to care for Jesus' flock. Earlier in John, Jesus said, "If you love me, keep my commands." And what is his command? Jesus continues on to say that his command is that we love one another as he loved us (Jn 15.12).

Loving Jesus (not just Jesus' mission) means, for me, loving as Jesus loved. This is first an ecclesial reality, something that we do together in the church family. If I am not willing to share table with my partners in this body, if I do not care for the, if I cannot forgo my own interests in order to attend to theirs--I have not love. I have not yet experienced Jesus' reconciliation of all things because I am not reconciled to my sisters and my brothers in this gathering. But if I do love them, then the kingdom of God is truly among us.

But as Wright and Bessenecker would both insist, a good congregational life is not enough. Just as my lone wolf activism for the kingdom falls short of God's desires, so also our in-group comfort and harmony does not bring us to the goal God has for us. No.

Instead, our church-community must build for the kingdom in this world. Our mutual love must spill over into love for the entire world, especially those places where justice and beauty are hardest to find. Remember, Jesus says, "As the Father sent me, so I send you." Sent from love to love.

And because we are a community--not just individuals--we can love more robustly. The lonely not only find a friend, they find a family. The movers and shakers of the world are confronted not only by a vote but by a grassroots movement. Politics (ecclesial or otherwise) gains force when enacted by a community, a polis.


So perhaps I'm still struggling to understand Bessenecker's distinction. Loving Jesus seems to entail loving as Jesus loved, which, in turn, seems to be the essence of mission. But I think the struggle is good for me, so I hope it continues.

Revisiting Robert Webber's Ancient-Future Faith

I'm a few pages away from the end of Robert Webber's Ancient-Future Faith.

For many years I've remembered Ancient-Future Faith as a turning point book in my spiritual development. But my memory of its content has been a bit cloudy. I could picture a page where Webber tells students that when life is hard and their faith is insecure to get to the eucharist as quickly as they could because God would meet them there. A story I treasured, but that was about it.

I do remember carrying this book in my backpack as I traveled with a music group through Greece as a junior in college. I remember poring over it while the tour bus passed the endless olive groves along the Aegean. I remember returning to it after our guide led us through the history and the archaeological sites of Corinth and Philippi.

I've mentioned this experience before: At a gig in Thessaloniki, between sets I found myself in the middle of a passionate discussion with a young Orthodox seminarian. While I asked about the personal quality of his relation to the divine, he urged me to return to the Fathers. Later, I remember, I got lost in the majesty of St. Dimitrios and the mystery of its catacombs, in the sacred continuity of the community of the faithful I found in a monastery at Meteora.

I came back from Greece changed, and I remember Robert Webber's Ancient-Future Faith being a catalyst for that change.

Returning to the text, I've been amazed at how much this book presaged the trajectory my faith development has taken. I look here, and I find the roots of my understanding of atonement, the outline of my commitments in ministry, a picture of the way I've come--via circuitous routes--to understand the church. Not a perfect type, mind you, but a quality sketch.

Friends, Ancient-Future Faith, despite the fixation with postmodernity of its historical moment, is excellent book to welcome into the conversation of your growing faith. College-aged friends, especially, check this book out. Find a used copy. Interlibrary loan it (I think that was how the copy in Greece came to me). Drive to the far north and borrow it from my shelf. See where it might take you. Read it.