Hey friends, welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
Thanks for being with us again as we continue our series on mission,
thinking together about mission,
a word that we use frequently without always understanding what it means or at least,
at the very least,
a word that is becoming examined again to see if we have flattened it
and if there is a way to recapture some of what we have historically meant,
if we can expand
what we think of.
And that’s really what we’re trying to do today as we move deeper into our
series.
Today, we want to connect where we’ve been with each individual person, which is
probably a big goal,
but we have talked about mission in very broad terms,
in the terms of
the church and the kingdom and the people who sometimes are out there doing mission.
But now we want to think about the ways in which each individual Christian is called and invited to participate as well.
So just a short set up on why this conversation is relevant,
because
especially in the 1900s,
the church really had its imagination captured by this idea of sending
people out.
And so Americans of a very diverse set of denominations set to the task of establishing
missionary organizations who would do these very professional ministry training processes,
and then there would be these formalized fundraising networks,
and then churches would
band around supporting, equipping, and then sending these folks out.
And then churches would
get back these updates.
We’re translating the Bible into a language of a people group who’s never,
ever heard the words of scripture,
or we’ve been able to go and do humanitarian aid and to build
hospitals in this place.
And there’s a real kind of push in that 20th century to really move the
church out of the United States into a very international kind of context,
and that is unto
itself good.
In fact, there’s precedent throughout church history of the church as an organization
sending people out to do this kind of work and them trusting God as they go,
that he will carry
them forward, that they’ll have the guidance and the wisdom as they go along that journey.
What makes this conversation relevant,
and I think what makes this a reappraisal per your point as you
kick us off here Clint,
is that fundamentally the church is now asking today not just are we called
to have an international outward kind of thrust where people are trained, equipped, sent,
and supported, but what is the missional calling of every person who’s received the gospel of Jesus
Christ?
It’s an awareness that the mission field is often much closer to home than we imagine,
that the mission field actually lives within our own communities,
within our own churches,
even within our own hearts.
And we begin to see as we unpack some of the even scriptural witness that when
Jesus sends out the disciples,
when we see and ask the church growing from Jerusalem to all the
way out throughout the ancient world,
we begin to see that fundamentally it’s individual Christians
living out their calling to proclaim their faith,
their own witness to the work that Jesus did within
them.
And so as we begin to do that,
it forces us to reappraise some questions.
It forces us to ask
some questions about the professionalism of ministry that maybe we’ve taken for granted,
that the missionaries are called, equipped,
trained,
sent, and supported.
Maybe that missionary identity has a much more universal kind of impact than just that simple model.
So I think that in broad terms Michael,
and we could unpack this,
but I think for our purposes
it’s enough to say that that emphasis on doing things out there,
of sending missionaries, training missionaries, getting the Bible in people’s hands around the world,
of going out and being involved in those kind of things,
really had a lot of benefit.
That invigorated
very strong parts of the church.
It invigorated a large percentage of the church.
But as we look back now,
it also appears perhaps to have done two things that we have struggled with.
The first is that subconsciously people in congregations began to think of mission
as something that happened out there or over there.
That mission was really a word
for places like Africa and China and Nepal and wherever that happened.
And that mission
was done by professionals.
You use the word that there was essentially professional Christians
who were trained and sent.
And what that did for congregations is kind of left them with the
impression that we participate in mission when we either occasionally have one of those people
in our own congregation that we send,
or when we send money to the organizations and people that
are out there doing that.
Now, both of those things are wonderful.
It is good to send money.
It is good to send people.
But we kind of subconsciously forgot about mission as it pertains to individual Christians,
to individual churches.
This idea that mission was out there being done by professionals,
whether they were caregiving professionals like people who ran soup kitchens,
whether they were evangelists who did rallies and tried to convince people to put their trust and faith in Jesus,
whether they were preachers who took the gospel to far off tribes and distant lands,
we began to think that mission wasn’t something we do here in many cases.
And that has been a problem as we’ve identified that the church finds itself needing to unlearn those assumptions,
needing to recapture the idea that we all are missionaries in the sense that we all participate
in mission.
Wherever we go and whatever we do,
we all share that calling because that is the very
calling of Christ to take the good news with us into the world wherever and whenever we go.
This is impacted in a very interesting way by our own tradition.
So we are Presbyterians from
the Reformed tradition and we have as a group of the faith,
a family of the faith,
historically we’ve emphasized education as a significant part of our training for ministry and for leadership.
So these missionaries,
even our pastors within our church families,
tend to be very highly trained
that there’s requirements for seminary, for original languages.
Can you operate on some level
in the biblical Greek and Hebrew?
And this is an important part of our understanding of what it
means to be called to ministry.
The danger for our side of the family tree as we look at Christianity
is that there’s this temptation to think that you need to have that education to be able to do that
kind of work.
That you need to be equipped in these very substantial,
very nuanced and very,
in some ways, technical ways so that you can be a missionary.
The idea is, you know, if you can’t understand the commentary as it speaks about the aorist voice of the original language,
then you can’t be a missionary.
And that’s a fundamental misappropriation of our understanding
of what it means to be called as a believer in Jesus Christ.
Each and every person,
we even see this impulse imagery, this idea of the body of Christ,
that we each serve in different roles.
And if we don’t recognize that each role in the body is essential,
we’ll fail to understand that
every single one of us has a part that we’re called and intended to play.
So maybe yours isn’t
reading the biblical texts and teaching them in their original languages.
That may not be your
calling, but it doesn’t remove from you the substantial impact of your calling to still
be a witness to the truth of the gospel that has transformed your life.
Maybe you don’t do that
in a way you consider sophisticated.
That doesn’t mean that your voice and that what you have to say
is not substantial and in fact essential because when we understand our calling as Christians,
we recognize God sends each of us into our unique lives with the tools that only we have
that we might point others to the good news that we’ve already received.
It’s not something that requires a degree.
It doesn’t require a special blessing or christening.
It happens when we
receive the faith, we are immediately bearers of it.
And you can’t be a bearer of good news and not
share it with someone else.
Right. We’ve had in our tradition,
in the Reformed tradition,
we’re not alone in this,
but we have liked this phrase,
the priesthood of all believers.
And our Reformed ancestors used this phrase to essentially teach that there wasn’t a hierarchy.
It wasn’t the pope and the cardinal and the priest and then down at the bottom of the ladder,
the lowly church member, that instead,
all Christians are called to serve Jesus Christ.
All Christians have a mission,
have a calling.
Now, in typical Reformed language,
we formalized it up and we called them priests.
But what we meant was that all Christians are missionaries,
all Christians are pastors.
The things we spoke about in the last podcast,
and if you haven’t
watched that one, it may be helpful to just pause here and come back after you’ve seen that one.
We talked about outreach and evangelism,
social justice and discipleship and forgiveness.
These are things that, yes, the church is called to pursue in its mission,
but these are also things
that should be markers of every Christian life.
Now, are you going to go to Guatemala
to stand on a corner and offer people for spiritual law tracts?
I suggest you probably aren’t.
But as you live out the gospel,
you are an evangelist.
You do share the good news of Jesus Christ.
Sometimes you’ll do that verbally.
Sometimes you’ll say, “I’ll be praying for
you.” Or, “Would you like to go with me to church?” Sometimes you will simply do that by the way you live,
by the things you do,
and by the things that you don’t do,
and you will have an impact.
You will enact outreach and compassion ministry as you see needs and respond to them,
as you live a generous life, as you practice stewardship.
As we do those things,
we participate in God’s mission.
And when we do that,
we make no mistakes.
We are missionaries,
not the professional,
organized,
way off in another country kind,
but the day-to-day living out the gospel of Jesus Christ kind.
And the church thrives on that.
That gave the church life in its earliest forms.
And it was that sense that we are always called to be participants in the mission of God
that allowed the church to thrive in times of persecution and struggle and that really
created for the church its initial identity of who it understood itself to be and who people
understood themselves to be in Jesus Christ.
So make no mistake about how you imagine a thing
should be impacts how you live into that thing.
And I have a very practical example of this.
So my spouse has grown up in a musical family.
She’s done music her entire life.
In fact,
she plays more instruments actually than I can number right off the bat.
And she spent a lot
of time and effort.
She’s done piano lessons her almost her entire life.
She’s played an orchestra.
She’s done all these things.
And she is even now in her quote unquote real life,
she’s a teacher.
She teaches other people music and it still happens.
She’s been doing this now for the
better part of 30 years of her life.
She’s been a musician.
She still says to me,
I don’t feel like I’m a musician.
I’m waiting someday to wake up and to make it as a musician.
And what’s interesting about that is what she has preconceived as to what a musician is,
she hasn’t yet arrived.
But the reality is all of the trappings of life,
all of the things that it takes to be a musician, she’s doing,
and yet she doesn’t consider that true for her.
The question that I have for you is,
what do you think a missionary should be?
What do you imagine a missionary needs to be?
Because what you allow to define your imagination of what the missionary task of the church is,
will inevitably define whether you consider that to be a part of your own identity or not.
And what I would put to you is in all of these categories that we’re going to look through here is that
fundamentally we must reorient away from outsourcing that idea that ministry happens when they do that,
when the missionary does that,
or the evangelist does that,
to what does it look like when I do mission?
What is it for me to be an evangelist in my life?
What we’re asking is for us to,
for a moment, suspend some of the definitions that we may take for granted and to allow into
the conversation this creative possibility that maybe you too are a priest to use this language,
and maybe you too have been given a missionary calling and you don’t need to leave your city,
your job, and your family to do it.
And if we can enter into that for just a moment together,
I assure you that it is an unbelievable transformation of our sense of faith and
identity because every one of our lives will be impacted,
every aspect of our life will be
impacted by this reality if we’re willing to allow that transformation to happen.
Right.
There are no professional Christians.
We are all amateurs and we are all called
to participate in this,
what we call the mission of God.
We said it last week,
the “Miseo Day,” the thing that God wants for the world,
the calling that God invites people to let claim their lives.
And as those who live under that calling,
we participate in it,
we resonate with it to whatever extent that we can.
But we don’t have to be good enough,
we don’t have to be
a pro, we don’t have to be certified,
we don’t have to do those things.
We simply have to seek
to follow Jesus Christ,
and as we do,
we will inevitably come to share those things that Christ
thinks are important, those things to which we’ve been called, caring for others,
sharing the good news.
We have talked about those things repeatedly,
and those are the markers of what it means to be
faithful.
And I think one of the opportunities that we have,
in fact, part of why we’re doing
this series right now,
is that the church is in a moment where it’s trying to reconsider these ideas of mission,
to move away from the idea that there are professional missionaries and recapture
that early church idea that every Christian participates in God’s mission.
Some don’t do it
while others fund it.
We are all in it together in different ways,
with different callings, in different aspects.
But each of us,
as we live out our faith,
share this missionary work
in what we say and do in our own context.
And I think as the church pursues that understanding with new energy,
it will open for us a great deal of opportunity,
it will challenge us,
and I think it will ultimately strengthen us greatly as we seek to be a faithful church.
And congregations.
Clint, to push back on this,
if you disagree with this,
I wonder if sometimes we’ve over-emphasized
the proclamation aspect of mission.
And in doing so,
we’ve given this impression that if you don’t
have a silver tongue,
if you’re not comfortable getting in front of people,
even small groups of people, and sharing something about your faith,
having the words to say it,
that you’re not participating in mission.
I think if that’s true,
if you would grant me that,
then the way forward is to have a much more open-handed acceptance of the reality that we as individuals
are called not just to what we say.
The formation of our words happens in worship as we pray together,
as we read scripture together,
as we encounter the engagement and the education of the church.
Those words will come to some level,
but fundamentally our outreach,
our service, our calling as individuals to go out into the world and to do the work of Christ.
And this is incredibly practical, the opportunities that you have to serve at the food bank or to serve
at the food line or to make sure that a family that’s underserved in the community finds an
advocate in you, that you can show up and that you can be a person who uses your skill set.
You’re an accountant.
You help people who need accounting help.
It’s as unique as you are as an individual.
Whatever your skill set may be,
your outreach will reflect the gifts,
talents that God has given to
you.
And as that becomes part of your life identity,
I’m a person who serves.
I give more than I receive,
that I am someone who has been given to in Christ and so therefore I seek
to give to others.
Those actions not only create opportunities to speak,
that’s sort of emphasized
sometimes by different church families,
those actions unto themselves have value because they
demonstrate to the world the truth of our identity.
Fundamentally,
in Jesus Christ,
we’ve been transformed.
In Jesus Christ, we’ve been given a gift.
And so what can we do?
We model that as image bearers of God.
We model that life of giving to others,
of service for our
fellow human.
And when we do that,
we’re enacting this kind of missionary task on an individual
level.
I suspect, Michael, that even a good number of the people who might be listening could affirm this.
I think it is rare that the most impactful people in our life
had exercised that impact by preaching to us or at us.
The best sermons are seen, they’re observed,
they’re watched.
And I bet for most of us,
as we think about our fathers and
mothers in the faith,
our mentors, the people who showed us what it looked like to follow Jesus,
it was less how they did proclamation and more how they lived out their faith in tangible ways,
how they cared for others,
how they took time for people,
how they supported others,
how they gave God credit,
how they practiced stewardship.
I think ultimately those are the
markers that proclaim Jesus probably far more than sermons and lectures.
Now, as people who preach,
we clearly hope that that helps as well.
But I think for most of us,
the most powerful sermons
we’ve encountered were lived out in real ways by real people.
And I think that’s a beautiful and
powerful reminder,
maybe even a little frightening,
of the power of living out the faith,
of being genuine, of being authentic, of pursuing our faith in real ways.
We have that opportunity.
You don’t think of it.
You think often of faith being coming to church.
But the truth is,
the impact you have is often not in this place,
not even through this place.
This is a sort of
training ground.
This is a kind of outpost where we frame ourselves and we get ready to go out and
do this work, which is not only completely but by and large outside of this building.
And churches have far too often thought that mission is a thing that happens here.
And I would say,
yes, that’s true, but it’s not exclusively true.
There is mission that we do together at First Presbyterian Church.
And then as each of us go from here,
we all have the mission of our own lives as well.
So let’s make sure that we’re all on the same page here, right?
The question that we’re asking
today is, are you a missionary?
And I think that especially in the Presbyterian family,
a lot of us are comfortable with the idea that I support missionary work.
And we often think of
that as a financial support or prayer support,
or maybe even relational support.
Maybe you’ve built a relationship with a missionary.
All of this is good.
And we’re affirming that this is a
good part of the Christian life.
But to answer the question,
are you a missionary requires taking that next step.
And I think one of the really interesting turns here is around this word
authentic.
And, you know, we could actually have a whole podcast session where we talked about
that word.
Cause there’s some nuances in there.
I think that we would agree that that authentic
gets a little dicey,
but hear me out here as Christians,
we are called to be the kind of
people who live our faith in such a way that it is a true reflection of who we are and our identity.
That means that we’re honest when we miss the mark because we will miss the mark as humans
who live with a sinful nature.
We will not always get it right.
Being authentic to use that term
means that we allow ourselves to be seen and that we’re humble enough and courageous enough to make
it clear when we don’t make the mark that we’re called to as Christians.
That said,
a real temptation of the Christian faith and maybe religion writ large is to get ourselves focused
on one particular thing and miss the most important thing.
There’s a story told.
It may be true.
I honestly cannot tell you if this story is true or not,
but the story is told that at Princeton Seminary,
researchers were doing a project and every day at Princeton Seminary,
there’s a chapel service.
So what these researchers supposedly did was have someone that they put in makeup and ragged clothes
and they laid right beside the path that a preacher would need to take to get to the chapel
at Princeton Seminary and that these researchers then wanted to count how many of these preachers
would stop to help a person who had obviously been beaten,
had been robbed, had been hurt, and how many of them would push past because they needed to get to the chapel.
As the story goes,
there was something like one or two out of 14 or 18 at some extravagant number of people that just
went right by these people.
So the vast majority went to go preach and only a couple stopped to
help this person who’d been wounded.
Now, whether this is true or not,
you can easily see the
parallel to Jesus as parable,
right, of the Good Samaritan.
What I think is striking about that
story in a modern lens is that fundamentally we miss that you can go and literally preach about
evangelism, say we need to go share the good news of Jesus Christ with others,
and we can do that
right after we walked past someone who clearly needed us to pause.
That’s the kind of schism
of authenticity that kills the modern church.
So if you give to mission,
if you pray for missionaries,
but you fail to recognize your own calling to your own community and people in your family
and your own friends and the people around you who are clearly suffering and need help,
you’re missing the call that you have to be a missionary.
When our earliest ancestors began to talk about what we call church,
they used this combination
of words in Greek that means “called out,” and essentially what they meant is that Christians
were people who were called out of the world.
They left their pagan faith,
they left anything that wasn’t true, and they came to Jesus Christ.
But once they were called out,
the early church had the second step.
They were then sent out.
We gather in church so that we are ready to go out
and live our faith,
to practice our mission,
to pursue our calling.
And the truth is,
that is all our mission.
So, Michael, you mentioned this while we were talking about
this and getting ready.
We have these great signs out in the parking lot.
They face
in toward the church,
and so as you leave the parking lot,
they say, and there are other
versions of this in other churches,
now entering the mission field.
Well,
that’s wonderful.
That’s a great promise.
It’s a great reminder of the promise that we have mission to do.
We have work to do outside of the church.
The thing that’s interesting is that no one has ever considered
putting it on the other side so that as you drive into church,
you also see the words
now entering the mission field,
as if somehow the church isn’t the mission field.
Well, the early Christians didn’t understand that.
They understood it all to be mission.
Worship is our mission.
Educating people,
kids,
children. Baptizing is our mission.
Singing is our mission.
Studying scripture and praying together is our mission.
Fellowship is our mission,
and that’s our mission here,
and then as we leave,
we find other mission out in the world.
And so, there is this reconnection that has to happen as we talk mission in the church.
We have to
get back to this idea that it’s not out there somewhere,
that it’s in us,
that it’s in
congregations, that it’s in communities,
and that yes, it is in the entire world.
And as we do that, we’re going to have a better understanding and I would hope a better practice of this idea
of joining God in God’s mission.
So, I think one thing that really complicates this conversation
is the cultural moment in which we live,
because it seems to me,
and you know, Clint, I’d be interested once again if you push back on this,
that we live in a moment
where people seem very confident about what is exactly the right thing to do in every circumstance.
And there seems to be a lot of dialectical tension.
It’s either this or that.
There’s very little sort of creative scope.
And where this becomes difficult is we find
ourselves as Christians engaged in thoroughly secular conversations.
And we talked a little bit
about the church’s role in social justice,
this idea of being engaged in a culture,
being engaged even in a country,
and having a call and a witness to the good news of Jesus Christ,
this idea that the kingdom of God is at hand.
How is that reflected in our presence?
Well,
this becomes, I think, very, very tricky for Christians who are seeking to faithfully and humbly
follow in Jesus’s way,
living in a time that seems to be so pressured to find one
or the opposite response.
It’s either ones or zeros.
It’s binary in a really fundamental way.
And the problem with that kind of thinking is we as Christians fail to recognize that Jesus
was powerful enough and gracious enough to reconcile all to God.
This idea that we
create camps and tribes and we sort of align Democrat and Republican or conservative and
progressive.
However you want to label these things,
it becomes tricky for Christians to recognize
that fundamentally our king,
the one who we serve,
lives outside of the frameworks that humans have
created.
It lives outside of the dialectical tensions that we take for granted.
And so as we
seek to be bearers of this good news,
to be those who live in the kingdom of God,
we also have to,
I think, take a step back and say,
well,
we have to be more nuanced when we look around the world
that we live in to see that God wants to shed love and grace into every corner of the world.
The people who we are tempted to craft into enemies that our individual calling to be bearers
of the justice of God to the world will require us to be resistant to that idea of turning the
opposing idea or opposing strategy into a force that needs fought.
And I think that’s a very
turbulent sort of difficult place to live right now as Christians.
Yeah, I think that we could,
you know, look historically, we could even look regionally.
Historically,
and I think globally,
our mission as Christians is practiced amidst
difficult circumstances.
One of the things that is very interesting as you look through
the history of the church is that when the church was healthy,
when the church did well,
it was often during difficult times.
And it was particularly true if the church stood out
as different from the world.
So in times of oppression,
instead of cowering in fear,
the church stood up and said,
we follow Jesus Christ.
In times of sickness,
the church stepped out to say, instead of isolating and being afraid of one another,
how can we help one another?
And in those moments that there were difficult circumstances,
and the church lived up to being the church,
it saw tremendous blessing.
It was a tremendous witness for what it means
to follow Jesus Christ.
And I think in the moment we have,
we are given an opportunity.
How do we live past the patterns and the faults of the world around us?
What difference does it
make in how we portray ourselves in social media and in conversations and with our family and with
our loved ones and with those we don’t agree with?
What difference does it make that we follow Jesus in those moments?
And if we can make that our focus in the midst of so many other things that
are clamoring for our attention,
then I think we are well on the way to serving out and filling
out this, fulfilling this mission component, this mission calling.
And in those moments,
we do become missionaries,
because a missionary is really nothing other than a person
who is seeking to do God’s work,
seeking to share God’s blessing.
And as we do that,
the short answer is absolutely yes,
you are a missionary.
Each of us are missionary
in that broad sense.
And I think it’s in that broad sense that we best understand the word
and how our ancestors in the faith intended it. One of the questions that we have to ask ourselves as Christians is,
how are we intentionally
preparing ourselves to be bearers of the good news that we’ve received?
How are we actively
practicing the honing of our understanding of that gift?
And then therefore,
and subsequently, how then we might be able to offer it to other people.
The problem I think that sometimes
happen is that we begin to conceive of church as a place that fundamentally exists to build us up,
to encourage us to be a place of friendships and maybe even social connection.
And we go there,
I think even with good intention that I go to that place and my spiritual tank gets filled up.
But you’ll know this,
I mean, anybody who is attuned to what it takes to build up a new set of skills,
it takes work to get better at a thing.
It takes work, whether that’s going to be
some physical activity or it’s something that you need to,
maybe it’s chess,
a thing that you need to hone your mind to be able to learn to do,
whatever it is, it requires determination and effort and ultimately intention.
And to be disciples
of Jesus Christ, to be those as individuals who do this missionary task,
we have to be the kind of
people who conceive of going to church and fellowshiping with other believers as leading
us down the road with purpose.
And you know, I think sometimes we don’t think of church and
we don’t think of education.
We don’t think of our faith in that way.
We think of it as
maybe a place of comfort and solace,
but we don’t consider it as a place that needs
to be honed and intentionally pursued,
that we might move forward in our ability to be the
missionaries we’re called to be.
Yeah, I think sometimes even we go so far as to think that
religion is a kind of private matter and we should all keep it to ourselves.
And you know, there’s this old story about two neighbors who would meet out in the yard while they were working on things.
And on one Monday or Tuesday,
they met out there and the talk was,
“How was your weekend?”
And one neighbor said, “It was amazing.
I went to church for the first time.” Someone
invited me to church and I went and it was incredible.
And I think it might be life-changing.
I’d never heard about Jesus before and went on and on and then said,
“If you’d be interested,
I’d love to take you next week.” And the other neighbor said,
“Oh no, I go to church.
I’ve been Christian for 40 years.” And when he heard that,
the first neighbor said,
“Oh,
I didn’t know that.”
And Presbyterians have probably lived on the “I didn’t know that” side of the fence.
I mean, we’re a little nervous about being too outspoken.
And again, I’m not suggesting that that’s the way to do evangelism.
I’m thinking of the meaning of that story though,
that if our faith is entirely personal,
if our faith is entirely encapsulated and not visible
to others in some real way,
then it’s not possible for us to be living out our missionary, our missional calling.
There are aspects of who we are in Jesus Christ that have to spill
out from our behaviors,
our words,
our practices.
It should be observable.
It should be noticeable.
And again, I am not talking about handing out tracts and asking people if they know where they
go when they die.
That is not it.
I’m saying that the nature of faith is sharing.
It is living that out in a way that has an impact,
not just for yourself,
but for others as well.
And Jesus says, “You don’t light a lamp and then put a basket over it.” It shows people can
see its light.
And hopefully that’s true in each of us.
That’s a struggle that takes work.
It’s a constant effort to improve ourselves in those areas,
but it is our calling.
It is the thing
God has invited us to do.
And I think that therein lies the sort of motivation for this
podcast and these conversations.
And I think they’re exciting.
If we receive them as invitation
and not as pressure,
then I think we can become pretty excited about it.
So I don’t know if you were able to join us for the previous conversation.
We’ve really been following the same path,
going through some of these same themes that we had talked about last week,
but we’re doing it from that lens of what it means as an individual believer
to experience them and for them to fashion our identity as missionaries.
So we talked about outreach,
talked a little bit about evangelism, social justice,
about discipleship and formation for ministry.
The thing that we talked about last in our last conversation was forgiveness.
And this is an interesting topic.
It’s a really interesting place to land here at the end of a
conversation about individuals, because I think often we conceive of forgiveness as the chief
good news of the gospel for us individually.
I think we often think of forgiveness as its
benefit brings to our own lives.
And so it felt maybe awkward in the conversation about community
and the church’s calling to be bearers of forgiveness.
That might have felt awkward.
In some ways, it seems like this might be more natural that for us,
forgiveness is an essential
part of our individual identity.
But let me put it to you this way.
If you don’t live in the full
awareness and sort of reformation of the good news of the forgiveness of Jesus Christ,
then you will never be able to share that with another person.
And this is encouraging,
yes,
I would say challenging even more so,
because to receive forgiveness will require of all of us the
recognition and acceptance of how much we need forgiving from the deep woundedness and brokenness
of our own lives becomes for us the canvas upon which the goodness of Christ can be written.
And then out of that,
we are able to point others to the source of the same goodness that we found.
And so, friends, I want to encourage you that as we seek to be missionaries,
we set apart on very difficult tasks.
We go forward on very difficult ground, because
as we make our way forward,
we will inevitably find the parts of ourselves that keep us from
sharing the good news with others.
Our pride,
our vanity,
our selfishness, our anger,
our addictions, whatever these things would be,
these things will get in between us and the sharing of
the good news of Christ.
And so, we must receive for ourselves forgiveness first,
and then Jesus Christ will transform,
renew, and equip us that we might be able to do that work outside.
I think that’s a helpful idea,
Michael, and to some extent,
I think one could speak of all of those things—outreach, evangelism,
justice,
discipleship,
forgiveness,
grace,
good news,
joy,
peace, kind of—whatever we receive from Christ,
whatever benefit there is that we access
from God through our faith and through our discipleship in Jesus Christ,
our following of Jesus.
The Christian life is to be a funnel and not a jar.
We don’t simply collect those things
and put them on display.
That’s good.
We should be observed as Christian,
but more so, they are passed through.
They should go from our lives into the lives of others.
As we have been forgiven, we forgive.
As we have received grace,
we offer grace.
As we have been cared for,
we care with compassion for others.
And so, the Christian life then becomes a conduit
in which the things that God gives us,
the goodness that God provides for each of us,
then we carry—that’s essentially what missionary—we then carry that goodness
to others wherever we are,
whoever they are, and that’s our goal.
That’s what we seek to do.
And as we seek to do it,
we do it not only in the context of church together and congregation and
worldwide church, but we each do that as individuals.
And I think that’s the part of it most of us have
given less thought to,
and it’s a wonderful opportunity as we consider it.
Yeah, and one thing to note here that we’ve mentioned,
but we’ve not explicitly said,
is that each of us does have in our unique set of gifts and talents some form of vocation,
some form of calling that we do in the world.
And to whatever extent that may be a job or
career, if you have a title or a position,
whether that be grand or not,
that is an opportunity for you to live out God’s calling in the world.
But you could be a person who doesn’t
have any formal worldly title.
You still have work that you do,
and as you do that work,
Christians especially among some of the churches’ conversations about how we’re missionaries has
pointed out that in the work that we do,
we demonstrate that sort of human version of God’s
perfect work.
As we see God who does the creation of the entire world with by the Word,
we as humans, as these sort of under stewards,
we do work as well in human limited ways.
That work becomes a
reflection of God’s kingdom as well.
So there are all of these different ways of understanding our missionary identity.
You don’t start with all of them at once.
You start with one and you learn to
walk and then you make your way forward and then you learn to run and then you switch to the next
one.
You have to learn to crawl again.
It’s a process of learning and relearning this identity
that we have in Christ and it changes as we change our mission field,
adapts as the world changes.
This is an amazingly complex and deep thing,
and instead of being overwhelmed by it,
I hope that we might be invigorated by it.
It’s a new opportunity for the church to really trust God
to work through us as individuals living and serving and learning and growing as Christ
followers in the world.
This is a beautiful gift,
though yes, it’s a challenging one for all of us.
I would imagine that maybe many of you,
most of you perhaps,
have not thought of yourself
as a mission worker or a missionary,
but the reality is in Jesus Christ,
we all share that title.
And as we do,
we pursue what it means for each of us.
In broad terms, yes, we all share mission.
In specific terms, we each have a unique way of implementing that mission in our own life of faith.
And church is the place where we bring that together and we seek to hear that word from God
that calls us forward into whatever missions that might be.
And so as we work together,
I think it is a helpful model to think through the ways in which you are called to participate,
to be a participant, not an observer,
not a supporter,
not even an encourager,
but an actual participant in what God wants to do in the world.
That is the understanding that the first Christians
carried for one another and for self.
And I think if we can allow ourselves to rediscover that,
we will be encouraged and challenged by it in wonderful ways.
So as this series goes on,
we’ve got some exciting conversations to come.
So make sure that if you
are not current with us,
that you go back,
you listen to those conversations,
get all the way
caught up with us.
For those of you who here at First Press are going to be joining us for these conversations surrounding mission,
that’s going to be kicking off this very Sunday.
So we hope that you’ll begin participating with that during the Christian Ed Hour.
And if you would like to
host a group, that you would let us know that.
I also want to let you know,
in the spirit of transparency,
that you should never talk about stories that you didn’t research ahead.
I’m going to put in the description of this video,
wherever you’re watching it,
a link to a survey of this
research project that I referenced.
Apparently, it was a real thing.
And my numbers were hopelessly
wrong.
So if you want to see what the numbers actually were,
go check that out,
learn about what was behind that study.
But that said,
we’re glad that you would take some time to join us for
the conversation, that you might even be willing to do a very sort of dangerous thing and ask yourself the question,
what is my identity?
And have I allowed my faith to transform who I believe myself to be?
And ultimately to grapple with this question,
do I consider myself a missionary?
Because that very question has the power to change our lives.
Absolutely. We are grateful that you continue to think through these things with us.
We have probably more questions than answers,
but we believe there’s something valuable in thinking
through these things together and being challenged together by them.
So thank you for being a part
of that journey.
We look forward to continuing it with you,
and we are grateful for each one of you that listens.