Sustaining a missional lifestyle

Mission as an activity or a missional lifestyle?

Throughout my life as a fairly middle class individual, I have had the opportunity to experience different ‘mission activities’, such as social action, BESOM projects, community fairs, prayer walking and treasure hunting.  These have been stretching, uncomfortable, challenging and eye-opening experiences.  Often, they’ve involved stepping out of my comfort zone into a different culture, meeting people who live with a lot less than I feel I could live on, who have less opportunities and who often live in the less well-off parts of the city.  It is a chance to step across the boundary into something, which to be honest, is an alien experience, something I don’t encounter every day.  It does benefit me, as well as those for whom they’re organised. Perhaps it blesses missionaries who work in those areas long term, but need more hands for a particular activity, or the community. However, it can be difficult to see the lasting impact, as it is often going ‘to do’ mission and then returning to our normal life and the comfort zones in which we live.  These experiences left me for many years with the mindset that mission is a project.  Don’t get me wrong, it is important not to disengage from these opportunities, they are valuable and worthwhile, however, for me, this sort of mission is not about a sustainable missional lifestyle. 

A missional lifestyle, in order for it to be a lifestyle, has to be part of your daily life. For me, it’s about who you are where you are. It’s not avoiding challenge, but its about choosing to engage with those people God has placed in front of you at this moment. It seems to me that, at least in the past, mission was about leaving your normality, going to ‘do’ mission somewhere else.  How about relating to those people in the context where you are right now.  In many ways, I think this is a greater challenge. The people you see every day are the people who see your whole life, the good and the ugly. They see how you handle difficulty and challenge, how you communicate with others on a daily basis, how you talk about your work, your colleagues….. These are the people who you can relate to best whether it’s the challenges of being a mum or working for the NHS amidst difficult pressures and union action. In my opinion, these are the people who are close enough to you to see the difference Jesus makes in your life.  This is attractive, this is what will encourage others to know him too.  The acts of kindness or social action, I do believe, demonstrate Jesus too, but just not in a sustainable manner.

Too busy?

In this day and age many of us can often be heard commenting, life’s so busy, too busy, a bit busy….. the truth is that’s how life is. At least, the potential busyness of life doesn’t seem to get less. So, how do we engage with being missional now in the every day and the mundane, instead of when things one day are less busy? 

The truth is, if we keep mission as a project, it’ll be the first thing to go when life gets busy. If its part of who we are, where we are, on a day-to-day basis, it’s difficult to avoid!  Nevertheless, it may be that after taking part in a ‘mission activity’, you choose to incorporate this into your daily life. However, it requires an active engagement to prioritise what’s important, to be people who are focused, who know who we are meant to be, where we are meant to be and to do that wholeheartedly.

Where do you need to respond?

·         Is your life too busy to be interrupted?  Are you willing to be interrupted?

·         Are you able to recognise people of peace, those people who invite you, share food with you? Do you have time to invest in them, or do you put them in the diary in a months time?

·         Do you know Jesus in the every day, the nitty gritty of life?

·         Are you too busy meeting those who already know God, to engage with those people around you who don’t? Is there something you do anyway, like going to the gym or playing football, where you have the opportunity to get to know those who don’t yet know him?

Kirstie

Sustaining Missional Living

Our nation has changed.

Back in the 80’s a quick-fix invitation to a Christian event may have seemed like an effective missional approach.

This is no longer the case. We live amongst a generation who crave authenticity. If quick-fix solutions were ever effective, they certainly aren’t now. In our post-Christendom society we can no longer rely on people turning up at our church services because of a jazzy invitation to a jazzy event. This may occasionally happen, but it is not the norm.

I grew up in that event-orientated culture. “Evangelism” was something we “did”. It seemed unnatural, bizarre, embarrassing and completely detached from normal life. In the life of Jesus we can discover the keys to being who we are called to be, and doing all we are called to do.

What is the pattern of His life that we are called to imitate as we seek to live a sustainable missional life?

Jesus was Fully Dependent on the Father

In John 5: 19 Jesus tells his disciples “ I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself. He does only what he sees the Father doing. Whatever the Father does, the son also does. “

Jesus, in fully human and fully divine form, could do nothing by himself. He was completely dependent on His Father, imitating only what He saw His Father doing. How much more then do we, as fully human, need to depend on our Father as our source of strength and guidance for all that we do.

What might that dependence look like?

In Luke 10 Jesus sends out his disciples telling them to take “no money with you, nor a travellers bag, nor an extra pair of sandals.”

They weren’t sent with provisions, or a masterplan. They were sent out with hearts dependent on God, looking for the people of peace. When we are stripped bare of the earthy things we might depend on it is easier both to depend on Him and to see where He is at work.

What are the things, or the areas of our life, that we depend on instead of God? (knowledge, finance, strategies, relationships etc)

How can we actively choose to give those to God?

What does it look like to stop, look and listen to the Father?

Jesus Journeyed with a Community of Missional Disciples

Throughout history God’s people have lived as tribes, households and communities. Jesus picked 12 ordinary people to intimately share his life with. He ate, slept, journeyed, and ministered with a group of people. They were sent out, and returned, together in mission. They learnt together, prayed together, healed the sick together, ate together, partied together.

We see the same model demonstrated in the early church. In Acts the early followers met publicly together, broke bread in homes, shared possessions, saw people saved, healed people, persevered under persecution - all in the context of community. We cannot live a missional life in isolation.

Who are those that we mutually encourage, hold accountable, persevere, take risks with?

Jesus' Life was His message

I love the Message version of John 1: 14 “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighbourhood.” God left the perfection of Heaven and came to our messy, broken world, in the flesh.

We can never be incarnate in the sense of being fully divine in flesh. But we are called to incarnate, to “embody” the life of Jesus in the environment we’re in. We are called to “go” to the people, to live amongst them, and be Jesus and speak his message to those around us. When we are distant, or removed, from those we are trying to reach, it is always harder to communicate the fullness of the gospel in love.

When "mission" is an “add-on” to our lives it is exhausting - an extra “thing” we can’t find time for. When it is integrated in our life, and we live amongst those we are called to reach, our life becomes our message. Jesus said in Matthew 5 “You are the salt of the earth… You are the light of the world” As followers of Jesus, that is part of our identity; we ARE the salt, and we ARE the light. We need to recognise, acknowledge, and choose to live that out.

How close are you to the people you desire to know Jesus?

How much do they see of your life? (and therefore of Jesus)

What, or who, does the message of your life speak of?

Training and supporting missional leaders - Value-added task

When previously writing on this blog, I contemplated on how to develop appropriate attitudes towards the communities we’re a part of. I identified the need for unity within community and the potential obstacles to such unity.

Zoning in on the topic of training and supporting missional (community) leaders, I’m wondering how the issue of unity relates here.

Recently, I’ve come across some pretty distinctive young adult leader-types. And...have myself the privilege of helping to lead them through a shaping time in their lives. Now, most of them are just at the start of discovering their passions, calling and leadership potential, but seeing their personalities unfold, as we get stuck in with different activities, it is clear that they are the next generation leaders in our church, our nation, potentially across Europe!! Keenly aware that it’s my job to help them discover how to grow in intimacy with God and submit their lives to him as they learn to walk out their (leadership) callings, I come up against all sorts of what feel like disunifying issues; situations where what they do or say clashes with what I and/or others think they should be doing or saying.

But: have you ever been in a situation where someone said something you found inaccurate, untrue, even offensive, but the Holy Spirit is not allowing you challenge them? Or you’ve observed somewhat unconventional, or maybe even inappropriate behaviour, vowed to bring it up as a “discipleship issue” only to find yourself unsure as to whether that’s really the right call? I frequently find myself in those kinds of scenarios, and as I’m not the type who’s afraid to challenge, I don’t think we’re talking about a case of needing to learn to be firm.

No, the lesson I think God is teaching me about how to support and train the next generation of missional leaders is about discerning his core values from my own personal ones (however legitimate and godly they may be) and allowing those I lead to rock my boat and make me feel uncomfortable about how they choose to live life, while at the same time being clear about what I sense God really wants them to take on board. It’s quite an uncomfortable place to be in, as I’m having to ask myself how sure I am of what I consider to be essentials. The oft-quoted phrase “in essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity” sounds great, but fails to bring about the spirit of being “united in love” Paul encourages in the Colossians, if we don’t know what the essentials really are.

Our goals of seeing our cities and nations transformed for the kingdom of God sound grand, but sometimes unspecific. If we’re going to see thousands of un-churched people come to be led by the missional leaders we train, the values these leaders hold on issues like sexuality, social justice, care for the elderly, developing God’s call on your life, etc. will invariably influence the kind of transformation we’re going to see. Think of the scale of people who may look to the people you train for questions relating to the very make-up of our society.

So, in order to not end in a completely dis-unified quarry ten years down the line when we’re surprised what our lack of clarity in the essentials has produced or failed to produce in the disciples we make and in those we trained them to make, I wonder whether we need to ask ourselves more rigorously how sure we are of the essentiality and biblical-ness of our values in areas we maybe haven’t so far cared to think through or study too much. In order to attain true unity (one of the building blocks of revival) and for the sake of the sustainability of the revival we all long for, will you join me in digging deeper in defining the essentials of the life we sense God is calling humanity to live, as well as training others to do the same?