Hello friends and welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
It is a joy to be with you here today once again as we get to
transition into a fun part of this series.
We realize that for some weeks
we’ve been talking about this idea of missional and as we’ve had these conversations,
it’s clear that it’s time to bring in conversation partners who have very
different vantages that they can help flesh out exactly where we should go as we as churches seek to live into this missional identity.
So we begin now two weeks in the row where we get to have conversations and this week
we’re thrilled to get to have a conversation with Amghad B’Blawi who is the
director of really the executive for missional work here in Prospect Hill
presbytery and actually a group of other presbytery’s North Central and Des Moines here in Northwest,
Iowa and as we have now
turned to his leadership in our region,
and he’s begun to dig in on these issues,
we’ve realized how important it is to have a structural
understanding of what it means to be missional and to support congregations as they do that effort.
So, Amghad, welcome to the podcast.
We are thrilled to have you here.
And if you would maybe introduce yourself and help us see how you come into this current
leadership role as it involves this topic.
Well, thank you, Mike and Michael and Clint.
I actually grew up in the Presbyterian Church in Egypt in Senate of the Nile,
which was started by presbytery and mission is from the United States and Scotland in the middle of the 19th century.
So I consider myself a product of presbytery and mission.
I came to the States in the mid 80s with my parents.
We immigrated as a family.
Eventually made my way to follow a theological seminary and did my theological education there.
At that time, I didn’t think I would be interested in mission.
But somehow God led me to work at the Presbyterian Church’s national offices in world mission.
My responsibilities were in the Middle East and Europe office.
And that’s really when I
deepened my understanding of what mission is,
what God’s mission and our role in that is.
When I left the national offices,
I first worked in grace presbytery in Texas for two years as associate general presbyter.
And then God led me to Iowa.
So that’s how I ended up here now.
And you bring with that such a broad spectrum of experiences on God.
That’s not just a congregation.
It really you’ve seen it from very different advantages.
How would you say that your understanding of what
missional and mission means has changed over those experiences?
You’re right.
When I traveled and visited with partner churches in other parts of the world,
and I actually represented the Presbyterian Church and I counted 19 countries.
So I visited with church partners in 19 countries.
And I saw the church at work in very difficult situations and war zones among refugees
and then in congregations like here in Iowa.
And that made me really think about what is God’s
what is our role as a church in God’s mission?
What is God calling us to do?
So I realized that the way we think about mission,
most often on the congregational level, is very limited.
And I can speak that more later on in our conversation.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so I’m curious then maybe the starting place there is a little bit of a foundation
of how you’ve come to understand that mission historically.
How do you locate where we stand today on God contextually in light of our history?
Great. So you probably know that the word mission does not appear anywhere in the New Testament
or in the Old Testament for that matter,
but the concept is there.
The understanding is there,
but the word mission is not in the New Testament.
The New Testament terminology is sending.
So in John chapter 20 and Acts chapter one,
Jesus tells his disciples,
“As the Father has sent me,
so I send you.” That’s in John 20.
In Acts one, Jesus says to his disciples,
“When you receive the Holy Spirit,
you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you,
and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem,
in all of Judea,
Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
So this is the New Testament basis for mission,
that Christ sends his disciples,
sends that church into the world to be his witnesses.
And that’s where we get the understanding that it’s really not our work that we’re doing.
When we’re talking about mission,
we’re not talking about something we do,
but it is something that God is already doing in the world,
and we are God’s instruments in that work.
The early church functioned with that understanding.
So the early church went into different countries and started to spread the gospel, spread Christianity,
in word and in deed.
I want to emphasize it was not just evangelism,
but they lived a lifestyle that reflected their faith in Jesus Christ.
And that continued to be the understanding of mission for many centuries after that.
The Reformation helped us,
especially with the idea of priesthood of all believers.
It wasn’t just for ministers or professional missionaries, if you will,
but every disciple, every Christian is a priest,
every Christian is a missionary,
is sent to be a witness for Christ.
Fast forward to North America,
when settlers from Europe and elsewhere came to the United States,
the priority was to establish home mission,
what they called home mission at that time,
which was to establish churches for every city and town in the United States.
And that’s how we have a lot of churches throughout the United States.
Perhaps one of the most famous missionaries, home missionaries,
is Sheldon Jackson.
Sheldon Jackson is credited for starting more than 100 churches in North America and Alaska.
And there’s a monument for Sheldon Jackson in Sioux City.
And that’s where Prospect Hill
Prison gets its name because Sheldon Jackson stood on that hill and looked westward.
And he said, “This is our mission.
This is where we’re going next to establish churches.”
So, home mission also included Native Americans and Africans who were brought to the United States as slaves.
So, evangelizing and working with Native Americans and Africans
was part of home mission.
It wasn’t until the beginning of the 19th century that foreign mission
became important also for churches in North America.
So, that’s a very brief history of
mission.
In the 20th century, though,
a few things happened that are key to our understanding of mission.
One is that we emphasize that it’s not the church’s mission,
but it is God’s mission.
Two, the beginning of mission organizations.
Until about the middle of the 20th century,
mission was done primarily by churches,
by denominations.
But in the middle 20th century,
we see numerous mission organizations started.
And with that, we see a variety of understandings of what mission is.
Some of that understanding is good and theologically sound,
and others is less so. God, as we’ve had this conversation,
we have touched upon the struggle with the word “missional”
in that it is a very broad and widely used term that lacks a kind of succinct definition.
And so, I’m curious, as you do your work with churches,
either conceptually or literally,
how is it that
you think of “missional”?
What is the sort of nutshell definition that you would give
if someone asks you what it means to be “missional,” particularly as a congregation Well, fortunately, I don’t have to write my own definition,
because really good definitions have been written.
The Book of Order of the Presbyterian Church says that the church is a community of witness,
pointing beyond itself through word and work to the good news of God’s transforming
grace in Christ Jesus its Lord.
I think that is an excellent understanding of what mission is,
that the church is a community of witness pointing beyond itself to Jesus Christ its Lord.
The Book of Order also says that the church is sent by Christ to be his faithful evangelist,
again, in word and in deed.
The church is to make disciples of all nations.
The church is to share
a life of worship with the world and to participate in God’s mission in all aspects of caring for the
marginalized people to be Christ to the world in both word and deed Absolutely So that’s how I understand mission Great.
Wonderful.
What are the practical markers then for congregations?
When you serve congregations at this point scattered throughout the northern tier of Iowa,
how do you evaluate the missional nature of a church?
In other words,
what are the particulars you might
see in a congregation that not only understands itself to be missional,
but is practicing a missional existence?
What does it look like in real terms for you and your experience? I see a lot of churches busy,
very busy, doing mission.
Most churches nowadays have a mission committee,
and I would suggest that the entire church is the mission committee.
But there’s not enough attention on who we are as Christ’s people,
our identity as disciples of Christ.
That’s the most important thing about doing mission versus being missional.
It’s a mindset.
Many churches lose sight of the fact that it is not our mission,
again, that it is God’s mission.
Also,
there is a tendency to separate the proclamation aspect of the gospel,
evangelism, if you will,
from doing works of mercy,
like the food pantries and feeding the hungry and
New Testament does not make a distinction between proclamation,
evangelism,
and
works of mercy,
as Matthew 25 would say,
as you have done on to the list of these.
I want to distinguish between mission and benevolence.
Again,
many churches focus heavily on collecting money for the poor or for certain projects.
It is a mindset.
It is who we are.
It’s our identity as Christ’s disciples.
That’s where I would love to see our churches understand mission.
Yeah,
because would you say that churches can very easily get fixated on the idea of
the concrete programs that we run?
We get fixated on the budget dollars that we’re able to give to a
particular organization or maybe an annual kind of trip that we take,
maybe within our region or
even outside of our region.
These things become markers for us of,
are we doing
missional work?
When we conceive of mission as a task or as a program,
we begin to start
thinking about that as something that, by definition,
we’re either doing in a very
time-limited sense or we’re exporting outside of our walls.
What I hear you describing is
that this is far more of a theological identity on offer to the church than it is particularly
like a policy or a handbook that you could give to a church and say,
“Run these programs and that
will make you missional.” Am I understanding you right?
Exactly,
Michael.
Thank you for putting
it this way.
I couldn’t have put it in better way,
but yes, I agree with you 100%.
Again,
it is who we are as Christ’s disciples,
as witnesses of Christ in whatever circumstances we
find ourselves or in whatever situation or location we find ourselves.
It’s the fact that we
represent Christ and we’re Christ’s ambassadors,
as Paul says, that we are Christ’s ambassadors
to the world and in the world.
God, that creates a very interesting and I think maybe even
not uncommon scenario in which a congregation may be doing mission without understanding itself
as missional.
If a congregation finds itself in that place,
what are the steps that bridge the
gap?
What are the markers for a church of moving from the idea of mission as fill in the blank to
church as missional, church as the identity of the people who participate in the mission of God?
As you think about this constantly, I would imagine,
what are for you the guideposts of
getting to that expanded idea,
that expanded conception of what it means to be missional?
The word disciple, as you know, simply means a student,
a follower and we are continuously
disciples at Christ’s feet.
I would suggest that those involved in the witness of the church,
which should be all of us,
we also should be constantly involved in studying the scripture,
deepening our own spiritual walk with Christ.
This is the only way we can move from doing and being
busy and in this case,
what we’re giving witness to is ourselves,
really, versus we ourselves being changed into the likeness of Christ and we ourselves constantly being discipled
and therefore the witness we give is not to who we are,
but who we are in Christ Jesus and
our witness then is to Christ himself.
I would suggest that continuous study and being discipled ourselves.
So you conceive of that Amghad as having a deep theological,
educational component, am I hearing you right?
Yes, yes, yes, yes,
the way we perceive ourselves as disciples,
constantly being discipled.
So what’s your sense then,
Amghad, of the state of the church,
if you were going to give,
like we have the state of the union,
if you’re going to give a state
of a Presbyterian missional identity in the average congregation,
what do you find?
What factors or what things would you point to as signs of how we’re doing in that missional identity?
I think actually the church in North America and that goes to mainline denominations,
including Presbyterians and evangelicals,
non-denominational and Catholics and otherwise.
So the church in North
America as a whole,
I think, is in a real transition period.
The church was very missional
up until about the 20th century and then from the middle of the 20th century until now,
our capacity to do mission,
to do mission has decreased significantly.
One, because our understanding of mission has become muddled and two,
our capacity to send mission co-workers
overseas or to be more active in changing people’s lives,
our resources have decreased significantly.
So right now,
churches that are busy doing mission,
finding that their impact is really minimal.
And I think this is probably a good place where God wants us to rethink
and rediscover what the mission is.
It’s not a happy place to be,
but unfortunately, I think this is where we are right now.
So is there a sense on God where I hear you saying that
as we identified mission with the particular things that we were capable of doing and especially in
times of growth and financial success,
we had this belief that we were doing more and more mission,
but now in a period of decline and in a season in which we’ve lost influence in finance and membership,
that therefore we also are able to do less of those things that we defined as mission.
So therefore,
do I hear you right in you saying that now we’re sort of in a season where we have
to reckon with that reality,
that mission isn’t just what you do,
because what we’re doing is less.
We have to come to understand ourselves as missionaries so that therefore our lives themselves
represent the task that we’re called to.
Am I kind of hearing you right there?
Yes,
exactly, Michael.
Yes. The church in the 19th century was a lot more missional,
if you will, than now.
And I think that is because the church was just mission-minded a lot more than now.
The church’s understanding in the 19th century of mission,
and I’m speaking of the church in North America,
the church’s understanding of mission was more biblical and theologically sound than now.
Now it’s just the activities that we do.
And I’m speaking, of course, in general terms.
That’s not true of every congregation generalizing.
I’ve got one of the scenarios,
it seems, that
whole background may have created is part of the struggle I think we have experienced with the word
missional.
In other words,
in a period of decline,
the idea of missional can easily be understood to be
the next thing that is supposed to fix the church or a kind of answer to the malaise that we’re in,
the struggles that we’re having.
So how do we talk about this idea of
recovering,
of rediscovering missional, of returning to something that we used to be
but in a new context and probably therefore practiced in new ways,
but how do we connect the current conversation,
how do we move it away from a kind of rescue idea and back to this identity,
this rediscovery of who we are kind of idea?
Honestly, Clint, I do not have
the magic answer to that question.
I see God at work in the church in a variety of ways.
But in our reformed understanding,
in our reformed theology,
we believe that the church is
reformed and constantly and always being reformed by God’s work.
So reformed always being reformed.
And Paul in Romans chapter 12,
when he urges the Romans or the church in Rome
to not be conformed by the patterns of this world,
but to be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
So this is the only way I think where the church is going to rediscover its identity and rediscover its role
in God’s mission in the world.
It’s a process of renewal that we should never stop doing and
a process of discernment that churches should be doing all the time.
And Amgod, I know to some extent this is an impossible question to answer, but again,
as a person tasked with some thinking and working within that sphere,
what do you imagine it might look like to return to that understanding or to
recreate to embrace that understanding in congregations in the near future?
What will you look to to see evidence that we are moving that direction?
That’s an excellent question,
my client.
I have not thought about that question.
The one thing that comes to my mind is something I mentioned earlier,
and that is disciples who have a deeper understanding of the faith,
who are more grounded in scripture,
who spend time studying and being disciples.
We spend very little time being Christians,
if you will, you know,
we spend very little time
studying the scripture, praying,
deepening our own lives as
followers.
We probably spend a lot more time doing mission.
So maybe in the future when
we have more mature disciples,
if I may put it this way, more mature disciples
who have deeper faith and deeper understanding.
But that’s an excellent question that I haven’t given much thought before.
In some ways, Amgod, it’s striking to me because I think when you start a conversation
about being missional,
I think the first thing that we are tempted to land on is the stuff that
we should do.
In other words,
what program should we start?
What ministry do we need to support?
What committee do we need to get going on this?
Do we need to make a new committee?
And what’s striking in your comments is how little interest you have in talking about
that first step of let’s do stuff,
which is I think the thing that most of us would be tempted to start with.
But instead, you keep coming back to this idea of prayer,
of scripture,
of education.
And, you know, in many ways, it’s very Presbyterian.
It’s very Reformed, this idea that we do use our faculty of thinking and believe that the Spirit of God works through
that and that we submit in that process.
But yet,
ironically, I hear you saying that we haven’t
lived into that identity.
So in some ways,
we sort of missed some of the charism or gifts that we’ve
generally had as Presbyterians.
We’ve always valued education.
We’ve always believed that that
renewing of the mind was important.
And yet I hear you saying that we’ve got some reclaiming to do there.
How is it that you think we find ourselves in that situation?
Is it sloppy thinking?
Is it that we’ve not been reading the right books or that we stopped reading books?
I mean,
how do we find ourselves in this situation if congregations and congregants want to begin
making a path out of this situation?
Well, let me share with you how my own thinking
changed and my own understanding of mission.
The process, I guess, that God led me through
in thinking what mission is.
Perhaps more than anything else,
my experience with the church in
Syria between 2011 and 2016.
I visited Syria four times during the war.
The war hasn’t ended, but
when Syria was really,
every corner of Syria basically wasn’t fighting.
So I went to,
on behalf of the Presbyterian Church,
I went to visit the Presbyterian Church in Syria.
And needless to say,
I saw hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people.
And then I saw refugees outside of Syria also when I went to neighboring countries like
Lebanon.
I saw Syrian refugees in Iraq and Iraqi refugees in Syria.
So I saw so much suffering.
And I saw the small churches in Syria,
Presbyterian churches and Orthodox churches as well.
But my primary involvement was the Presbyterian churches.
So these were small churches with very, very little means,
meager financial means.
So several questions came to mind then.
How can these churches meet the needs?
And I was thinking of physical needs.
Well, they can’t.
And then my thinking also about the churches in North America.
To be honest,
when I came back
every time to the United States,
Presbyterian churches here were not even aware of the sister churches in Syria.
But even if the churches here were aware of the need there and sent
a lot of money,
if they had sent millions of dollars,
which was not the case,
but even if they had done that,
that would have been a drop in the bucket.
So then I asked myself,
if the mission of the church is to collect funds and send them,
or to rescue people from
difficult situations,
well, God has not given us the resources to do that.
So that really was the beginning of my own thinking about,
well,
what are we called to do?
A similar situation I encountered when I invited a pastor,
a Presbyterian pastor from Iraq,
to speak here in Presbyterian churches at the invitation of some churches here in Michigan, to be exact.
So the Iraqi pastor in Michigan was having a conversation with a Presbyterian elder,
a dear friend of mine.
So the elder asked the Iraqi pastor,
what can we do to help?
So the Iraqi pastor said the only way to combat violence and ISIS,
what became later on known as the Islamic State,
was wreaking havoc in Iraq at that time.
And of course, the affiliates and all of them.
So the Iraqi pastor said,
you cannot combat terrorism or violence without changing
people’s hearts and minds.
So they need Jesus.
Well,
the Presbyterian elder here felt like,
no,
I don’t think that’s our role,
because the Presbyterian elder was allergic to evangelism.
So he said, well, why can’t we just provide finances for churches and other
NGOs,
nonprofits, to provide relief and perhaps sending funds.
When people are not hungry,
they will not be violent anymore.
And I wasn’t convinced that
that pouring money into Iraq would solve the problem of terrorism and violence.
But then when I started looking at the New Testament,
what we’re called to do is not to fix every problem in the world,
because it is way beyond
our ability to do that.
What we are called to do is to, one,
recognize our limitations and God’s sovereignty, that the world belonged to God and God is in control.
And our task, then, is to be witnesses to who Christ is,
to God’s love for the world that was manifested in Jesus Christ.
And that witness we carry out in both proclamation and action and word and indeed.
So I don’t know if that answers your question,
but that’s been my experience.
Actually, it doesn’t answer my question.
It spurs 50,000 more on God.
I got to confess to you,
this is one of the reasons I was so excited for this conversation with you,
is I know how
very geographically limited my advantage is.
Some of that comes when you’re in a congregation.
I don’t think that’s just pastoral leadership.
I think that’s being in a church.
You focus on that particular flock and the mission and work that you do there.
So what I have to confess to
you, I have not thought of before,
is the vantage from which the momentous reality of the brokenness
of the world would shape one’s understanding of a missional identity.
Because what I hear you saying,
and I’m ashamed to admit I’d never thought of before,
with the problems of the world so vast
that very clearly we can’t solve them.
There’s no rational or reasonable argument to be made
that we could financially or politically somehow come up with the power to fix these problems.
That ultimately,
I hear you saying it’s driven you to reflect deeper on,
so if we can’t solve the problem,
then what are we called to do?
And I hear you saying that the answer you’ve been
wrestling with is it’s nothing to do with what we do but who we become.
And I hear in that perspective
I’ve got a real challenge that maybe I haven’t allowed the momentousness of those world problems
to impress upon me because maybe I have been sheltered by my own local context to not see
them as you have.
Yet that only emphasizes the importance of this identity that we talk about.
But really it drives us quicker and further down that road because it’s not only a requirement in our local places,
but it has something to say with what it means to be a Christian in the coming days.
So that’s not a question I don’t think other than just to reflect on your statement.
I think there’s far more here than what I saw when you look at this from an international global kind of lens.
Yes, and speaking of identity,
I’d like to say something about again the church in North America.
When we are faced with global problems that affect us here in the United States, for example,
conflict situations and poverty elsewhere such as Latin America,
Central America,
that drives people to come to the United States as undocumented immigrants.
When I talk with people or when I hear people in our churches talk about it,
I hear Republicans and Democrats.
I hear people who think in terms of progressives versus conservatives.
And honestly,
I don’t know if there is a solution that the church can bring
to the problem of undocumented immigration.
But the question of identity is do we think
about these issues?
Do we think about our context,
about our world as Americans,
as Republicans,
as Democrats,
as Russians,
or as Christians,
as followers of Jesus?
Our mindset,
if we have renewed minds as Paul says,
how we see the world and how we think of
ourselves as Christ’s ambassadors in the world,
that will determine our reaction to and our
response to whatever situation we are faced with,
whether it is local poverty,
or whether it’s international violence,
whether it’s racism or immigration.
So identity,
who are we in Christ?
Um, God, what I hear you saying there,
maybe in a sense,
has a lot to say about a congregation’s
efforts to seek discernment.
In other words, the admission that the church cannot do everything,
but that the church must do some things,
lead it to a place where it has to
humbly and genuinely seek what is God’s call for this place,
for this moment, for these people in this time.
Is it to reach out to those in Syria?
Is it our food pantry?
To be able to connect with
some pieces of the work of God in the community and world to which the congregation feels
compelled.
And what I think is important in that is that it adds a sense of discernment to the
mission conversation that is sometimes,
in my experience, lacking.
In other words,
it’s a very different conversation than we have X number of dollars,
how much will we send everyone?
It is a more deep and profound spiritual struggle to say,
what is the thing God is calling us to right now?
And as we’re seeking to become the people God calls us to be,
where does that overlap the need
of the world, the community,
and the globe in this moment?
And to what is God asking us right now?
And I think that that’s a missing component in much of the mission conversation of my own experience.
I’m sorry, did I miss a question?
No, no.
It’s a comment.
I agree with you.
No, I guess I’m just reflecting on
the difference between a congregation doing tasks and a more process-oriented model of discovery in
which we seek the thing that is ours in the moment.
You know, it strikes me in the New Testament, for instance,
that the early church was in some ways drastically unconcerned with the larger situations
of government and political reality and culture,
but deeply concerned about slaves and victims and violence.
And it seems to me that they simply dug in where they felt they could make a difference,
because that was the opportunity they had.
They couldn’t change the reality of their world,
but they could change the reality of some of the people in their world.
And that’s a far more
difficult way to practice mission,
but I think a far more biblical one.
Yes,
yes. So the early church, of course,
was small in number,
was weak in that
they were a few disciples from different nations and they did not have any political clout or
military power behind them or anything like that,
and was for the most part poor without
much resources.
But that early church was able to actually carry the gospel to the ends of the earth,
you know,
one city at a time.
And thank God for the early church,
because that’s how the faith was handed down to us.
I do, if I may, want to go back to something I said earlier,
and that the word mission is not in the New Testament.
And I’d like to explain a little bit more.
The word mission,
the meaning of the word mission has changed.
So when I realized that the
word mission is something that we are constantly using in churches,
but it’s not in the New
Testament, I had to find out how we ended up using it.
So I looked at the etymology of the word.
And I realized that it goes back to the 16th century,
when Jesuit missionaries were sent
to different parts of the world.
So the Jesuit monks were sent to Latin America,
for example, in the 16th century.
And that’s when the word miss you was used.
And at that time,
it meant sending.
The act of sending was the word miss you.
Of course, that predates the English language,
but from that word miss you comes mission.
Related words are missive as message.
So my point is that the word miss you is very much a New Testament word.
The act of sending,
as I said, as the Father has sent me,
so I send you.
And the early church sent Paul and Barnabas,
when they were set apart,
when God said to the,
when the Holy Spirit said to the church in Acts 13,
set apart Paul and Barnabas for me for the work that I have for them.
So the church then sent
both of them after fasting and prayer,
they sent them on what we now call the first missionary journey.
So that is the root understanding of mission is sending.
Now over the last 6 centuries,
the meaning of the word changed.
So when we talk about mission today,
we’re not thinking about sending.
But the concept, the New Testament concept,
again,
is that Christ
sends his disciples into the world as his witnesses,
as his ambassadors.
So, Amdha, this spurs for me a thought and I’d be curious for you to check me on this.
This is my experience and I’d love for you to say if this resonates with your experience or maybe it doesn’t
and that would be really generative.
I’m curious,
I didn’t grow up Presbyterian,
so I grew up a Pentecostal.
And you know, for me,
one of the realities of being in the Presbyterian fellowship
is there’s a significant amount of resources that Presbyterians have historically had and
sort of assume that they have disposal of as they seek to do mission.
And then on top of that,
we have these general assemblies where we gather and we have these conversations often regarding
issues in the world and we’ll make statements,
public statements about, well, Presbyterians think this or we denounce this or we support this.
And you know,
in the midst of reflecting on these
things, it struck me that Presbyterians,
we do have the assumption that we have resources to
give and things to say and yet the sending work that I hear you talking about seems lacking in so many ways.
So we have resource in both sort of cultural capital as well as maybe even financial
resource and yet in many ways,
we now struggle to do some of that sending work that’s essential to the Christian gospel.
And I wonder,
you know, why is that?
And that’s not a question,
that’s not a leading question.
It’s something I reflect on.
Why is it that we have this amount of resource
given in so many different ways and yet we struggle to identify ourselves as the sent ones?
You know,
has that been your experience or you know,
what would you say in response to that,
so our stated clerk,
Reverend Jay Herbert Nelson has been pushing the same question,
you know, has been raising it in every meeting I have just about that he has and trying to remind
the church of why we exist.
Do we need general assembly so that we make political statements or
argue among ourselves about issues that we disagree on?
And I’m grateful that he’s been raising this question.
When Presbyterians started to form presbyteries here in the United States,
so our first presbyteries was in Philadelphia in 1776,
the reason congregations came together,
ministers and elders came together to form that first presbyteries was mission,
was our witness in the world.
So they came together for mutual support,
for worship together, because we believe that the church of Jesus Christ is not just the local congregation,
but all of the church,
but they also came together to strategize how they’re going to
be Christ’s witness here in this new world and how they’re going to do home mission,
you know, establishing new churches and evangelizing Native Americans and Africans and so on.
So that was the reason for the first presbyteries and synods and general assemblies.
It’s our witness in the world.
Now over the years,
unfortunately, we lost sight of that.
Now,
I would also say that sometimes what we refer to as statements is important.
Not all statements that we make are worth making,
and not all statements,
I would say, are witness statements, but some are.
I’ll give an example of that.
In 1933,
in Nazi Germany,
so that’s a few years before World War II,
when Adolf Hitler was trying to get the church in Germany to support his agenda,
some elements of the church,
some church leaders went along,
but other elements of the church opposed the interference of the Nazi regime and Nazi ideology in the church.
So those that opposed the interference of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party
in the church came up with a statement.
We know this statement now as the Barman Declaration,
and it’s a very important theological declaration that sets apart the church
from the behavior and priorities and ideologies of the Nazi regime.
So I would argue that sometimes our witness is to speak truth to power,
but sometimes the statements we make come out of, unfortunately,
a political position rather than
a position of trying to be Christ’s ambassadors in the world.
Very interesting.
Michael and I are people primarily that live
our experience of church at a congregational level with some occasional overlaps to the lived, worked,
and thought,
cooperated,
witnessed within congregational levels,
now presbyter level,
GA level, all the way to an international level.
I’m curious,
what role
does a denomination,
say presbyterian,
play in helping congregations
seek and become missional in their identity,
and what ways might they be a hindrance?
In other words,
how does our larger structure potentially help us,
and how does it potentially not help us?
Before we think in terms of helping or hindering,
I think the belonging to the larger body of Christ is not an option for Christians.
It is very much a part of how Christ,
how God designed the church.
The body of Christ
is not the local congregation only,
but the body of Christ is the universal church.
Therefore,
if we want to be Christ’s followers,
we are, whether we like it or not,
part of that body of Christ.
Not only the presbyterian church,
we are part of the universal church.
That includes believers in the Catholic tradition,
in the Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox tradition,
in the Methodist tradition,
in the Lutheran tradition, and so on.
So I like to think of myself as an ecumenical Christian who happened to be a presbyterian.
Now, I do love the presbyterian church.
I was born and grew up in a presbyterian church.
I find my theological home in the reformed thinking,
but I know that I belong first and
foremost to the body of Christ.
Because the body of Christ is made of human beings,
we are not perfect.
Sometimes, like a family, we quarrel and we are our own worst enemies
in terms of accomplishing God’s mission and doing the work that is before us.
I’m sorry, I did not answer your specific question,
Clint.
But how a denomination can help us, I would say,
is that first and foremost,
make us more aware of our place in God’s work.
Make us aware of our place in the
universal body of Christ.
And two is that it helps us,
also belonging to a larger body,
to a denomination,
helps us see the role of the church beyond our own limited context.
Had I not been to Syria,
I would have never seen that aspect of God’s work in other countries.
Had I not been to Russia,
I would have never understood what it would be like to be
a Baptist Christian under the Stalin regime,
where
Baptist ministers were routinely rounded
up and sent to Siberia.
Perhaps the most violent persecution of the church in history was
in the Soviet Union.
So belonging to the larger body of the larger church makes us
become more aware of God’s work really in the world.
So that’s what I would say.
Now, the Hendrix is Armenian.
I think I don’t need to identify them.
You know,
Amdad, I feel like we could continue this conversation for another hour,
and then we would only scratch just slightly below the surface of this content.
And I’m so grateful that you would take this time to come and have a conversation with us offering
what is such a rich,
broad experience.
And, you know, we do pride ourselves on being a connectional church,
and we look at our founding sort of guiding documents as Presbyterians,
and in many ways they convict us because of how much we fail to live out the breadth of our
understanding of what the church is.
And so the fact that you would come,
you would share that
insight with us.
And I think in many ways,
not only encourage us,
but challenge us to see
how much more necessary this missional identity is than just what it looks like in your congregation.
That this is a clarion call for us to identify ourselves in a larger body of Christ,
for this is the conversation which is necessary for,
as you said, the Western church.
But I imagine
the future of the international body of Christ will live in our ability to live into this identity as missional witnesses.
So that’s just a way of saying,
“Amr, thank you so much for enlightening
this conversation and this larger conversation.” For those of you who are joining us for this series,
we do hope you’re going to join us for the next conversation where Dr.
Darryl Guder will be with us,
and we’ll be engaging this missional conversation from an academic,
but even more than
that, a very faithful,
thoughtful man of God who’s been thinking of what it means to be missional
for a long time.
So Amr, in many ways,
broadens our vision, and I think Dr.
Guder will help us deepen it.
And Amr, I just want to say thank you for being with us today.
Thank you so much,
Michael and Clint, for giving me this opportunity.
I’ve enjoyed the conversation very much.
I’m God.
We’re grateful for your time,
grateful to have you in the Presbyterian,
and blessed to have your leadership as congregations in our part of the world, have these conversations,
and pursue these ideas.
Well friends, that brings us to the end of our conversation today.
We want to encourage you,
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If you have questions,
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Put them in the comments.
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We would love for you to continue
to be a sustained part of these conversations where we seek to deepen our faith and to become
more missional in our own identity as individuals,
as congregations, and as Christians bound together
in the body of Christ.
Thank you for being with us.
We will see you next week as we continue on
this conversation about mission musings.
Until then,
be blessed.