Tag Archives: Missional

How Church Planting Relies on the Power of Prayer

After my wife and I planted and established a Wesleyan congregation in the Indianapolis area, we shifted gears toward a different mode of reaching people for Jesus. Church planting continued to be our heart, so as a ministry team, we accepted the opportunity to serve as Directors of Church Multiplication for the Great Lakes Region District of The Wesleyan Church. In both settings, we believe that the number one way to enter a community missionally is through prayer.

Prayer and church planting have always gone together. In our strategy, there is little room for action or “doing” without also engaging in the constant work of prayer. In fact, I sometimes say that while some whistle while they work, people in church planting pray while they work.  Before a planter enters a new community, we ask that she first prepare herself with an army of prayer warriors; we actually recommend 500-1000 people committed to regular prayer. Church planting and prayer always go hand in hand.

Part of the way we invest in church multiplication is by training church planters in what that prayer looks like as they prepare to enter a community, because it’s not necessarily obvious. We encourage planters to pray for discernment, wisdom, and humility. This will shape how they engage with their team and their community. Planters have coaches and mentors as well, but praying in this way shapes moments of engagement.

Here are some of the ways we have learned to pray in church planting:

Pray for discernment in sharing faith and vision.

Pray for discernment in spiritual conversations.

Pray for discernment for receptive people.

Pray for wisdom to contextualize ministry.

Pray for wisdom in discipleship that makes disciples who make more disciples.

Pray for humility to enter a community as a learner, servant, and witness.

We believe that when you enter a community through prayer, you enter in stride with the Holy Spirit.

Surrendered Intercession

“‘Oh, that Ishmael may live before you!’ Abraham cried to God.” (Genesis 17:18) This cry has always moved my heart. I have always felt a deep connection with Ishmael; we are him. That cry from the heart of a loving father is God’s cry for you and me. This is intercessory prayer. In My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers wrote, “You cannot truly intercede through prayer if you do not believe in the reality of redemption.” We must believe that God is mighty enough and lovely enough to make things right and that God desires to make it so. Intercession then is locating a person or a situation into the lap of dear God, confident that God will make things right.

I was 24 years old, a freshly minted American resident when my six-month-old baby went into anaphylactic reaction. Out of my belly came the cry, “God, what’s going on? He’s yours; please heal him!” I had given him peanut butter, and apparently, his body did not like it. I watched all the swelling go down within a few minutes as I cried to God in dance. I never considered calling 911, not because I have something against it! In the moment, I simply did not think of it; I knew prayer and God’s reliability.

Another time in a conversation with a friend, she said, “I get migraines,” welcoming my prayer. I prayed immediately. A few days later, she called to say that she had not had pain since our prayer together. Her migraines are still gone. I can go on and on sharing situations in which God has intervened because of intercession. I keep a journal of people and things I bring before God daily. God is reliable.

Intercession is becoming love; it is becoming the heart of God for humanity. It is asking God to redeem, to make right according to his perfect love. We do not tell God what to do, but we allow the heart of God to flow through us for our friends, families, society, and even enemies. Enemies don’t stay enemies in prayer.

It’s 2021; we see enemies everywhere – strange ideologies, racism, bigotry and such in the world and in the church. We are wary of each other and perhaps weary of God. God is not answering fast enough for you, or maybe he allowed things you did not want. There’s a sense in which we wonder, “why pray, when God will do whatever he wants anyway?”  But remember how Paul encouraged the Galatians: “Let us not became weary, [in interceding prayer] for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” (Galatians 6:9) We must believe God is mighty enough to save and lovely enough to want to save.

Surrender is the key to intercession. Without it, love cannot and will not flow. We cannot avoid surrender. Revival will not happen without it. The transformation we desire in the lives of those we bring before God will not happen unless we raise our flags in surrender. Healing will only come to our earth – your flesh, mine, and the world – when we are free of our preconceived ideas of how reality should be, and we yield to God.

Did God say, “If my people who are called by my name will get smarter in their arguments, independence, possessions, and politics, I will hear from heaven and answer; I will forgive their sins and heal their land”? There is so much to make the heart weary. The earth and people groan for the return of God. We cry revival with our lips, but our hearts are not humbled; we have not repented of our arrogance. God appeared to Solomon when he consecrated the temple. He said, “When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people,[you have to admit it has felt like this for the world] if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” (2 Chronicles 7:13-14, NIV)

Physical, emotional, spiritual, and societal healing all begins and ends in surrendered intercession. When you pray for me, and I pray for you, we manifest God’s love. We are family connected through the explosive love of God who created all things. Your healing is intertwined with mine and mine to yours. Let us pray for Ishmael. “Oh, that Ishmael may live before you!”

Featured image courtesy Henrique Jacob on Unsplash.

Epiphany: A Kaleidoscope of Mercy

We have traveled (less this year than others) through the days of Christmas feasting, arriving like the Magi at Epiphany. This is a blessing on a prosaic scale: as a child, Christmas was one day, not 12; and given all the build-up, something seemed off about abandoning festivities so quickly. The cadence of maneuver through 12 days makes more rhythmic sense in the ebb and flow of liturgical tides.

Epiphany restores to the Magi their rightful place in the sequence of the Nativity, tilting them a bit farther away from the rest of the living room Nativity sets. At a distance, the stargazers are not quite elbow to elbow with the shepherds, whose eyes were sometimes less on nighttime stars and more on the threats of their immediate surroundings. The shepherds and sheep figurines may be clustered around the Christ-child; but the Magi are still on their way.

The mercy of revelation – because revelation from an all-powerful, transcendent God of love is mercy to humans who would not be able to grasp God’s nature on our own – may vary in timing. Like a gently shifted kaleidoscope, God’s mercy appears in one set of colors and shapes, then slides and trickles into another as time passes and the kaleidoscope is moved. The tints and outlines of mercy appear to animal caretakers keeping watch at night; the kaleidoscope tilts, and the same mercy appears, this time to star-gazing scholars – to Gentiles.

Epiphany is a swirl of colors and shapes that, when tilted again, reflects the mirrored patterns of mercy in John 4. Here, we watch Jesus as he “has” to go through Samaria; we watch his disciples go into town to buy lunch; we watch him talk with a woman, a Samaritan woman, by a well. We watch him disclose to her what he rarely verbally affirmed – that he is in fact the Messiah. She doesn’t know about the myrrh and frankincense and gold that strangers brought to his parents when he was two, but she receives the same mercy that the Magi received when they brought their gifts. When the disciples return with lunch and encourage Jesus to eat, we see him respond, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.” In truth, he is revealing that he has mercy that they know nothing about.

To draw from his own well of hidden mercy – this is why Jesus had to go through Samaria. At the time of his birth, what attention did the priests and scribes pay to – astronomy? Yet there was mercy hidden from their view but written in the stars.

“I have mercy you know not of.” A flash, blinding light – otherworldly beings appear to shepherds who smell of dung. An appearance in the night sky of a new celestial body captures the attention of foreign mages. A cleared throat and polite voice sounding young and ancient at the same time asks for a drink of water at a well at mid-day.

The kaleidoscope turns; the mercy of revelation remains.

Is revelation always a mercy? Yes – even if it is our undoing. Madeleine L’Engle wrote of this trade in an Epiphany poem, “One King’s Epiphany” –

I shall miss the stars.

Not that I shall stop looking
as they pattern their wild will each night
across an inchoate sky, but I must see them with a different awe.
If I trace their flames’ ascending and descending –
relationships and correspondences –
then I deny what they have just revealed.
The sum of their oppositions, juxtapositions, led me to the end of all sums:
a long journey, cold, dark and uncertain,
toward the ultimate equation.
How can I understand? If I turn back from this,
compelled to seek all answers in the stars,
then this – Who – they have led me to
is not the One they said: they will have lied.

No stars are liars!
My life on their truth!
If they had lied about this
I could never trust their power again.

But I believe they showed the truth,
truth breathing,
truth Whom I have touched with my own hands,
worshipped with my gifts.
If I have bowed, made
obeisance to this final arithmetic,
I cannot ask the future from the stars without betraying
the One whom they have led me to.

It will be hard not ask, just once again,
see by mathematical forecast where he will grow,
where go, what kingdom conquer, what crown wear.
But would it not be going beyond truth
(the obscene reduction ad absurdum)
to lose my faith in truth once, and once for all
revealed in the full dayspring of the sun?

I cannot go back to night.
O Truth, O small and unexpected thing,
You have taken so much from me.
How can I bear wisdom’s pain?
But I have been shown: and I have seen.

Yes. I shall miss the stars.

This is mercy – even when it seems harsh: “I cannot go back to night.” We cannot love what leads us to Jesus more than we love Jesus, any more than the Magi could love the stars that led their discovery more than the discovery itself. Who can cling to stars when they have seen the Daystar enfleshed? The stars didn’t lie; but the stars became insufficient. The kaleidoscope simply shifted, putting all their wisdom at the mercy of revelation.

You and I cannot go back to night, even if we love the minute adjustment of telescopes, the star charts, the constellations. Mercy will not let us. This is Epiphany: light to the Gentiles, God’s mercy in vivid form, appearing with ruthlessly consistent love.

Featured image courtesy Biswarup Ganguly.

Vicarious Faith in Community

A few years ago, I ran into a friend who was going through some tough family times. I asked him if there was anything I could do; his response caught me off-guard. He said, “I am struggling to have faith, and I just need other people to have faith for me.” I confess that before this, I didn’t really consider “having faith” for someone else. Of course I prayed for people and situations; but to have faith for someone – that seemed a bit strange to me. But I have come to believe that having faith for others – what you might call vicarious faith – is one of the most powerful, Christian things we can do as followers of Jesus.

How do you define faith? The writer of Hebrews defines it this way In Hebrews 11:1 – “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (ESV) So faith might be defined as “trust” or “belief.” One of my favorite definitions is that faith is “leaning our full weight upon” someone or something. I think many times we tend to think of faith as something we have (or don’t have).

It wasn’t until I ran across a chapter in a book called Humanity and God by Samuel Chadwick that my thinking was challenged. He introduced the idea of vicarious faith.

Chadwick says that vicarious faith is a “faith that is exercised on behalf of another and is accepted for another,”* and he points to the Gospel of Mark for the prime example.

In the second chapter of Mark, we read a story in which Jesus has powerfully launched into his ministry and at the end of chapter one just healed a leper. He has now returned to the town of Capernaum, Jesus’ “home base” on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee. A crowd has gathered, as it often does around Jesus. And then something dramatic happens. Four friends, determined to get their friend into the presence of Jesus, lower a paralyzed man through a roof. Mark then reports something that may surprise us: “Jesus saw their faith.” In other words, he saw the faith of the man’s friends – he then pronounces forgiveness to the paralyzed man. There is a very interesting interchange with the scribes about whether Jesus has the authority to forgive sins, which we don’t have time for today, but then Jesus goes further and heals the man’s body. Jesus sees the faith of the friends and then turns to the man and says, “your sins are forgiven.” And then he said, “Rise, pick up your bed and go home.”

Chadwick comments on this scene, “This man received both the forgiveness of his sins and the healing of his body, through the faith of the men who brought him.” It is very interesting that out of more than 20 miracles recorded in the Gospels, at least seven of those were healed through the faith of others.

In Matthew 8:5-13 we read about the Centurion with a sick servant.

“When he had entered Capernaum, a centurion came forward to him, appealing to him, ‘Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home, suffering terribly.’ And he said to him, ‘I will come and heal him.’ But the centurion replied, ‘Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I too am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. And I say to one, “Go,” and he goes, and to another, “Come,” and he comes, and to my servant, “Do this,” and he does it.’ When Jesus heard this, he marveled and said to those who followed him, ‘Truly, I tell you, with no one in Israel have I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” And to the centurion Jesus said, ‘Go; let it be done for you as you have believed.’ And the servant was healed at that very moment.” (ESV)

Not a word is said about the faith of the man who was healed. It is attributed entirely to vicarious faith – faith exercised for him.

In John 4:46-54 we read about the healing of an official’s child:

“So he came again to Cana in Galilee, where he had made the water wine. And at Capernaum there was an official whose son was ill. When this man heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went to him and asked him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death. So Jesus said to him, ‘Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.’ The official said to him, ‘Sir, come down before my child dies.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go; your son will live.’ The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and went on his way. As he was going down, his servants met him and told him that his son was recovering. So he asked them the hour when he began to get better, and they said to him, ‘Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him.’ The father knew that was the hour when Jesus had said to him, ‘Your son will live.’ And he himself believed, and all his household. This was now the second sign that Jesus did when he had come from Judea to Galilee.” (ESV)

Whose faith had resulted in Jesus saving the official’s child? That son was healed entirely through the faith of the father vicariously exercised 25 miles away.

In Mark 9:14-29, we read about the healing of a boy with an unclean spirit. The disciples had not been able to heal the boy. Here the boy’s father is struggling with faith, but he says, “I believe; help my unbelief!” (ESV)

Whose faith moved Jesus to free the boy? Not the boy’s own faith, not the disciples’, but rather his father’s.

We find a final example in Matthew 15:21-28 where a Canaanite woman approaches Jesus and begs him to heal her daughter:

“And Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, ‘Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.’ But he did not answer her a word. And his disciples came and begged him, saying, ‘Send her away, for she is crying out after us.’ He answered, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ But she came and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’ And he answered, ‘It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.’ She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.’ Then Jesus answered her, ‘O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.’ And her daughter was healed instantly.” (ESV)

Whose faith brought her healing through Jesus? It came, not through any faith of her own, but in response to the mighty faith of her mother.

This takes me back to my friend’s statement,  “I just need other people to have faith for me.” He was asking me to have vicarious faith for him and for his family, that Jesus might move in their lives in a powerful way. At the time, he didn’t have faith for himself or his family – he needed others.

Is there someone you know, for whom you might be called to have vicarious faith? Or maybe today you are the one who needs someone else to have faith for you.

Chadwick closes his chapter on vicarious faith with this: “Personal faith brings personal salvation, but vicarious faith brings salvation to others; and in this also it is more blessed to give than to receive. The supreme test of faith is not its personal benefit but its vicarious power.”

This is what the community of faith is about. It’s about having faith in Jesus, but it is also about having faith in Jesus for one another. Lord, may we have faith for one another and remember that it is Christ who saves and heals.

* Chadwick, S., 1904. Vicarious Faith. Humanity and God. London: Hodder and Stoughton, p. 295.

Featured image by James Tissot: “Man with Palsy Lowered to Christ” located in the Brooklyn Museum, New York City. Public domain.

Resilient Prayer in Escalating Crisis: Video

Are you a leader facing escalating crises on multiple fronts? Enjoy this video from Managing Editor Elizabeth Glass Turner, on resilient prayer for leaders juggling the unexpected, and recognizing signals of growing spiritual resilience. Excerpt below.

Excerpt: “The Holy Spirit not only shapes what you want or what you pray for, but how you pray in the midst of crisis, because you cannot pray for what you do not see. This is why resilient prayer begins with deliberately mindfully honing awareness. As you acknowledge your human propensity for blind spots, it allows your spirit to be sensitive to what you simply haven’t been aware of.

So when you pray from awareness of the seen and unseen, awareness of the immediate vs the eternal, the global and not just local, aware of the limits of your own control and autonomy – then you are inviting God to break into the present calamity in ways that you can’t foresee or predict. You are inviting God to put a burden on your hearts for the needs around you that the Holy Spirit helps you discern. You are inviting God to take your availability and propel it into the needs of this world, whether locally or globally, in small or in major steps.

When this honed awareness provides the basis and architecture of prayer, what will you find? Spiritual resilience that is steadfast in crisis – personal crisis, national crisis, global crisis; it may not feel like you are resilient; you may not feel confident.

So what are some signals that you are growing in spiritual resilience, whether you feel strong or resilient, or not? First, if you find that God is using you in ways you didn’t expect, that is a signal that you are praying with honed awareness. It is a signal that that awareness is structuring how you pray, and that how you pray – no matter what your circumstances – is demonstrating growth in spiritual resilience.

What you wrote off or thought nothing of, you now discover yielding unexpected good things. Maybe someone comments, or says, “you have no idea how much I needed to hear that.” Maybe what you underestimated instead blossoms and flourishes. If you find that God is using you in ways you didn’t anticipate, pay attention; you are praying with honed awareness, and how you pray is demonstrating growth in spiritual resilience – because you were faithful to small moments that seemed insignificant.”

Doubts & the Mission of Jesus

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Great Commission in Matthew 28.  It’s a passage many know well, finding it an inspiration, a call, a light to guide the way. It’s a powerful text, one that has inspired Christians for thousands of years, so it’s not a passage usually associated with doubts.

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”   (Matthew 28: 16-20 NRSV)

There are many things about this passage that may jump out to you.  But for me, in this season of life, what jumps out to me is verse 17 – When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.  Yeah, that’s me right now.  Many right now are worshiping Jesus, but I feel like I’m over in the corner, doubting. 

Yes, Lord, I know you’re risen from the dead – but no one is watching our videos.

Yes, Lord, I know you’re risen from the dead – but I’m afraid we are starting to lose people.

Yes, Lord, I know you’re risen from the dead – but finances!

Yes, Lord, I know you’re risen from the dead – but there is so much pain and loss and hurt right now.

Yes, Lord, I know you’re risen from the dead – but I am inadequate to meet this moment.  

Right now, I feel like my faith is: “Yes, Lord, I know you’re risen from the dead, but…”

Do you ever feel like the disciples who were overcome by their doubts? Sometimes I do. I should know better. Has God ever failed me?  Of course not.  I know God won’t start now.  I know that God is with us.  I know that he is King of Kings and Lord of Lords – but…

Let me tell you why this text gives me comfort.  Notice what Jesus didn’t do to those doubters.  He didn’t kick them out.  He didn’t fuss at them.  He didn’t say they didn’t measure up to the moment. 

And look what Jesus did do.  He saw them. He sent them out. He included them in the mission. They were still part of his team, his flock, his people.  Their doubts did not exclude them from the family. Their doubts did not exclude them from the mission. 

Neither do my doubts; neither do yours.  Jesus still has a place for us, in spite of our fear or inadequacy or doubts. And here’s the cool part of grace: what if Jesus can even use your uncertainty?  In a world full of folks with rock-star faith, maybe it can be the doubters and the “yeah – but…” people who are approachable to doubters; who are realistic, who are touchable.  Maybe, to a world reeling from pain after pain, a perfect God who sits with uncertain people with incomplete faith is exactly what we need right now.

The doubters had a place in the mission. In this moment, that gives me great hope.  Here I am Lord, even with my doubts.  Send me.

Omar Al-Rikabi ~ Being a Waffle House Church in the Storm

“A terrible screaming began among the English,” John Wesley wrote in his journal, “But the Germans calmly sang on.”

Sailing aboard The Simmons from England to the American Colonies in 1736, John Wesley found his ship overtaken by storm after storm. Ironically, the ship sailed in October in an attempt to dodge hurricane season, but now here they were, with the wind and sea tearing the main sail in two and water flooding the boat.

Wesley, a minister starting what would be a failed missionary trip to Georgia, was scared of drowning and found himself in a crisis of faith, “ashamed of my unwillingness to die.” But also on board were 26 Moravian missionaries from Herrnhut, Germany, and as he worried they worshiped.

It’s fitting that the founder of our movement hoped to avoid hurricanes, because today the United Methodists are facing their own category 5 storm: General Conference 2020, which will make landfall in May and determine the future of our denomination (and for good measure, we’re also facing the other hurricane of General Election 2020) .

The thing about hurricanes is that we can see them forming out at sea a long way off, days away. The anxiety builds when the weather reports put all the different “spaghetti model” forecasts on the tv screen showing all possible trajectories, turns,  landfall locations, wind speeds, and flooding.

But no one really knows where a hurricane will hit and how bad the damage will be until it actually gets here. And if you’ve ever been through a hurricane, it doesn’t matter how much you prepare or even if you’ve been through one before, when they hit they’re still a shock and they do some kind of damage. The issue is how much, and what it will take to recover.

No matter what “side” you’re on in General Conference (or the General Election), we see it on the map, and anxiety is building. There will be shock and damage. But nobody knows what will actually happen until it gets here, and so we’re left with doomsday forecasts for months.

So what are churches to do while we wait, and who are we going to be in these storms?

What’s our plan? Breakfast. Our plan should be breakfast. Stick with me on this.

In Acts 27, the Apostle Paul sets sail for Rome, and along the way “the weather changed abruptly, and a wind of typhoon strength (called a ‘northeaster’) burst across the island and blew us out to sea.” (Acts 27:14, NLT) The crew panics and starts heaving cargo overboard to lighten the load. They lower the lifeboats, but Paul convinces them they’ll all drown if they jump ship, so they cut the boats loose. They can’t see the sun or the stars, so they can’t navigate. And in dramatic fashion, the Scripture says, “at last all hope was lost.”

All fear and no hope. Sound like anything some of us hear from the pulpit or the pundits?

Finally, after two weeks of fearfully trying to outlast the weather, Paul’s had enough and offers them…breakfast: “Just before dawn Paul urged them all to eat. “For the last fourteen days,” he said, “you have been in constant suspense and have gone without food—you haven’t eaten anything. Now I urge you to take some food. You need it to survive. Not one of you will lose a single hair from his head.” After he said this, he took some bread and gave thanks to God in front of them all. Then he broke it and began to eat. They were all encouraged and ate some food themselves. Altogether there were 276 of us on board.” (Acts 27:33-37 NIV)

Did you catch it? It wasn’t that the sailors couldn’t eat because the storm left them with no food. They had plenty of food but were too afraid to eat because of the storm. And what did Paul serve first? The Eucharist. Holy Communion. The body of Jesus Christ: “[he] took some bread, gave thanks to God before them all, and broke off a piece and ate it. Then everyone was encouraged and began to eat.” That’s the Lord’s Breakfast he started with right there, and the crew had so many seconds and thirds that they were throwing food overboard!

As our hurricane approaches, how do we do the same? How can pastors and congregations learn from and lead like the Apostle Paul?

By looking at the “Waffle House Index.” The Waffle House Index is an informal metric FEMA has used to determine how bad a storm is and how long recovery will take. You see, the folks at Waffle House have a whole system for keeping restaurants open in a storm. They know how to do natural disasters. The index is three colors based on what they can offer: green means Waffle House is still serving the full menu; yellow means they’re serving a partial menu because there is no power or water; red means no menu and the restaurant is closed, so you know the damage is bad – really bad.

We need to be a “Waffle House church,” first offering people the body and blood of Jesus Christ, then offering a full menu of the faith even in the midst the storm.

How? Well first, we need to know our menu: the full story of Scripture and the robust depth of our theology, not just our favorite orders (the items we like to pick and choose). How do we learn (or re-learn) it? Maybe we need a congregation-wide confirmation class, a deep dive into the Apostle’s Creed, maybe a renewed form of class meetings and banded discipleship. Whatever a Holy Spirit imagination gives us for preaching and teaching, we can’t know our menu just for the sake of more information, but for the sake of transformation into being like Christ.

Second, we need to become better customers. Yes, there’s a lot of talk about how Christians shouldn’t be consumers, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. If you’ve ever waited tables, you know customers are most known for one thing: complaining. Maybe it’s because “the customer is always right” even when they’re wrong. I get it, because if you feel left out of the preparation process (not in the kitchen, so to speak), or your expectations haven’t been met (“This isn’t what I ordered!”) it’s easy to become disenfranchised. But we’ve got to move away from all the grumbling, criticizing, and fear-mongering. In other words, we’ve got to stop screaming.

Finally, we need to move from being customers to being waiters. Theologically speaking we’re supposed to be “servants,” because Jesus says things like, “For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others and to give his life.” (Mark 10:45, NLT) And of course, one of our mandates is to have the same attitude of Jesus Christ who took the position of a servant. (Philippians 2:5-7)

Consider a story from last November of a Waffle House in Birmingham, Alabama. Because of a glitch in scheduling, just one cook was on duty after midnight to manage about 30 hungry and inebriated customers. He couldn’t keep up, but then one customer got up, put on an apron, and started washing dishes. Another started cleaning tables and serving coffee. With the two customers-turned-waiters at work, the lone employee could keep cooking.

To be this kind of servant in the storm evokes what Wesley wrote about later in his journal at sea: “There is something special about these Germans. They are always so happy! And, they do the menial jobs on this ship without protesting.”

Remember, we’re not a bunch of inebriated customers at one in the morning, we’re servant people filled with the Holy Spirit (Acts 2). This means our storm might give us the opportunity to creatively step up and serve the souls of some hungry and angry people (aka “hangry”). But like Paul, we’re serving them Jesus in the middle of the storm because Jesus is the one who created the very wind and waves (Colossians 1:16) and then later spoke to the storm and told it to calm down (Mark 4:35-41).

And isn’t it interesting that when he was in the storm at sea Wesley asked himself, “How is it that thou has no faith?” which is the same thing Jesus asked his disciples in their boat? Jesus is asking us the same question now. “You have one business on earth – to save souls,” Wesley said.

What does that business look like in our churches in this season of storms? It looks something like the way late chef Anthony Bourdain described a Waffle House: “Where everybody, regardless of race, creed, color or degree of inebriation, is welcomed. Its warm, yellow glow, a beacon of hope and salvation, inviting the hungry, the lost, the seriously hammered all across the south to come inside. A place of safety and nourishment. It never closes. It is always faithful, always there for you.”

Eventually, Jesus will return and there will be no more storms (literal or metaphorical). And when he does we know that, “The servants who are ready and waiting for his return will be rewarded. I tell you the truth, [Jesus] will seat them, put on an apron, and serve them as they sit and eat!” (Luke 12:37, NLT)

Until then, we might as well set the table.

Edgar Bazan ~ Transformative Mission: When the Church Malfunctions

Previously in this series, Rev. Edgar Bazan has written on transformative mission, the purpose of the Kingdom of God, the shalom nature of God’s Kingdom. and the Trinity and the mission of God.

 

In A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good, Miroslav Volf cautions against the errors the church falls into that hinders it accomplishing what it was constituted to be. He calls it malfunction. He describes this malfunctioning as a poisoned well when he says,

In the course of Christianity’s long history—full of remarkable achievements by its saints and thinkers, artists and builders, reformers and ordinary folks—the Christian faith has sometimes failed to live up to its own standards as a prophetic religion. Too often, it neither mends the world nor helps human beings thrive. To the contrary, it seems to shatter things into pieces, to choke up what is new and beautiful before it has a chance to take root, to trample underfoot what is good and true. When this happens, faith is no longer a spring of fresh water helping good life to grow lushly, but a poisoned well, more harmful to those who drink its waters than any single vice could possibly be. (See Friederich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ.) (Volf, Chapter 1)

This “poisoning of the well” presents a very significant challenge to the viability of the church to accomplish the missio Dei.

Gregg Okesson talks about the problems that cause the church to malfunction when it has a misplaced understanding of what it means to be in mission for the sake of the church and the world. He frames his argument as a mission in the public and private settings. He describes them as follows:

Theology divorced from the rest of life is privatization of what always meant to be proclaimed publicly. The challenge is that we tend to associate theology with the private realm, divorced from public realities, for special people, not everyone… We have allowed “mission” to be compromised by culture. We think of mission as a distinct, sacred task done by special people we call “missionaries.” We give it a separate line-item in our budget, and/or give a week or month to missions in the entire year. We think of it in terms of what we do “over there” as oppose to what every follower of Christ is commanded to do. (Okesson, Why Public Theology PPT, Asbury Theological Seminary 2017)

Okesson’s main concern is that theology has become too specialized, distant from the lives of people (too limited to scholarly elites), and that missions have become a human enterprise, removed from who God is and what God has been doing, limited in agency (to just a few spiritual people), focus (just upon souls), and scope (people within the church but not the public places).

Dr. Stephen Seamands also addresses these malfunctions when he speaks about the understanding and nature of the Christian mission and ministry through the lenses of the theology of the Trinity: the mission and ministry into which we have been called is the mission and, “ministry of Jesus Christ, the Son, to the Father through the Holy Spirit for the sake of the church and the world.” He challenges the privatization of the Christian mission by arguing that the church has become self-obsessed and self-focused. He explains:

Self-will.  I make the plans.  I rather than the Lord initiate things vs. “of Jesus Christ.”

Self-effort.  I do God’s work for him through my own effort, my own strength, my own abilities vs. “through the Holy Spirit”.

Self-glory.  I do things for the furtherance of my own name, my own reputation, my own glory vs. “to the Father.” (Seamands, “Trinity Ministry PPT-Class” Asbury Theological Seminary 2017)

Seamands states that Christian ministry is not, “my asking Christ to join me in my ministry as I offer him to others, but rather it is my joining with him in his ongoing ministry and mission as he offers himself to others through me.” (Seamands, “Trinity Ministry PPT-Class” Asbury Theological Seminary 2017)

This framework for the mission of the church as presented by Okesson and Seamands addresses the malfunctions of the church in public and private settings and is helpful to assess how faithfully and effectively the church is in carrying out the missio Dei.

The tension between the public and private settings have always been a challenge for the church. Okesson describes this divide between the public and the private when he distinguishes between, “everyday people who daily seek to make sense of their world, interact with the sacred, and try to find meaning in life, and theologians who do theology, especially for the academy, that is primarily concerned with the cognitive, theoretical, and academic aspects.”(Okesson, Why Public Theology PPT, Asbury Theological Seminary 2017)

For Okesson, theology has become too specialized, distant from the lives of people; missions have become a simplistic human enterprise, removed from who God is and what God has been doing. Thus, we have made “mission” what we do (not who God is, or what God is doing); we have made mission a specialized task (what only particular spiritual people do), in specific locations (over there), limited in salvific intent (to save souls, but not the rest of humanity), and too narrow in scope (to humans, but not to the public places where people live: work, leisure, economics, power, governance, etc.).

Newbigin picks up on the themes of what Okesson is presenting when he notes,

We cannot look for the security which would be ours in a restored Christendom. Nor can we continue to accept the security which is offered in an agnostic pluralism where we are free to have our own opinions provided we agree that they are only personal opinions. We are called, I think, to bring our faith into the public arena, to publish it, to put it at risk in the encounter with other faiths and ideologies in open debate and argument, and in the risky business of discovering what Christian obedience means in radically new circumstances and in radically different human cultures. (Newbigin, Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth 59-60)

If missio Dei is the initiative of God to redeem, bring Shalom, and heal his creation, then the church needs to reclaim its mission as the mission of God in which the church has been invited to join alongside God to accomplish God’s work from everywhere to everywhere.

In this regard, being missional is not about a specialized ministry somewhere (else), but the embodiment of the gospel of Jesus Christ in everything we do, to teach everywhere we go, to everyone we meet. It is not only the theological understanding, revelation, and confession of Jesus as Lord that ultimately constitutes the church as the mission-carrier of the missio Dei; rather, it is the full engagement in doing what he taught and commanded us to do.