Merry Christmas

The Christmas Season is a wonderful time to contemplate and reflect on God's ultimate act of outreach: the incarnation. Christmas is a time when we celebrate God's act of definitively identifying with us, entering into our world in order to bring healing, restoration, and reconciliation. May we celebrate our relationships this year with family, friends and God. May we find reconciliation and restoration and may we also bring these to others.

Misery, Happiness and Mission, Oh My!

How do we think about mission/outreach? Is it a program? Is it information? Is it relationships? Is it something else? Are we responsible? Are we called? Are we all called? Do we stay? Do we go? Where do we go? How do we go? How do we stay? 

There are a lot of questions and perspectives on mission and outreach. I have more questions than answers. But I will share some thoughts and things I have heard that make sense to me.

God is on mission. This is the foundation of my understanding of mission and outreach - that God is on a mission to restore all of creation, to restore goodness, to renew everything and that God is reaching out to all people to both be restored and live renewed lives, through the power of Jesus. 

God is on mission and we are called to join. My understanding is that part, perhaps event the main part, of being made in the image of God is a vocational call to represent God – to live and enact his will, his will for renewal, restoration, and reconciliation.

So yes, I believe we are all called to participate in God’s global mission and work of restoration and reconciliation.

Do we stay or go and how? I want to go. I have some Bible training, I have some video training, and I am willing to go. That what mission agencies want, right? That’s enough, right? Where do I sign up, right? I have a passionate relationship with North America. I am both reviled and seduced by our culture and society. I want to go or perhaps more accurately, I want to run away. Problem.

In my first year Intro to Missions class, Professor Bryan Born told us to pray for missions, to cultivate love and passion for other cultures, to long desperately to go, that way if God called us to stay we would be sure we weren’t just chickening out. (He didn’t phrase it quite like that) It’s not a perfect statement but it’s a challenge to comfortable Christians who claim the calling of pew sitting donors…

There is a sense in Christians sometimes, including myself, that the more horrible the idea seems, the more likely it is that it’s God’s will. If we do not want to go to Africa, God will call us to Africa. If we want to go to Africa, God will call us to stay. If we don’t want to be a pastor, we will be. If we want to be a pastor, we won’t be. Sometimes we are even afraid to verbalize our fears or thoughts as if a statement like, “I never want to go to Africa” guarantees us a one way ticket.  There is a suspicious idea in the subtext of our thoughts and speech that suggests that God wants us to be miserable. 

So how do we understand this? We can’t say God wants us to be miserable… I don’t think we can say God wants us to be happy either… I think I would be comfortable saying God desires our lives to be full, to be fulfilling… But full or fulfilling are not simple to define. Also, our ability to determine misery, happiness, or fullness prior to an experience is also open to question… Often things we do to make us happy make us miserable. 

This is my one thought on the paradoxical reality of finding oneself called where one did not intend or want to be. God’s strength is most visible in our weakness. Ambition is often a problematic part of the human condition because more often than not it is selfish and proud. I think that God’s call on our lives is explicitly a call out of selfish ambition and that often this call lived out by going places we did not think we wanted to be because it is in those places that God’s redemption is most profound, on our lives and in the lives of others. And that is what the mission is all about. Again the questions are: Will I become weak? And will I trust God?

Christmas Evangelism

Photo by Victoria Pickering

Christmas is often a time of festive and overt evangelism: Cards, Church pageants, Christmas Carols, a life size nativity on the corner of Clearbrook and South Fraser Way...

Christmas is considered an opportunity by many Christians to put Jesus out there into the community as publicly as possible. Given the religious nature of the holiday there is, either perceived or real, a greater openness to talking about Jesus, coming to church and discussing spirituality in the larger community.  I am curious to what degree is there actually an increased openness in the average person and to what degree is it rather that because we feel a sense of permission we encounter the openness of people that was perhaps there all along...

Seasons in Life...

Sometimes we talk about seasons in life. We acknowledge that different times are for and are characterized by different things. The TREK program with MBMSI breaks itself down into 4 sections. An initial time of training when students learn and also learn to learn/follow. During this time the focus is primarily inward. The second phase of TREK is mission. During this phase there is an expectation of output. One is not just a disciple (learner) but one is to be engaged in “making disciples” (teaching/helping others to learn and follow). The final phase of the program is debrief which is again a time of input and learning but is followed by students returning home with a prepared expectation of output through service and involvement.

Input. Output. Input. Output. – Disciple. Disciple making disciples. Disciple. Disciple making disciples.

This seems like an excellent model and a very realistic approach to both life and ministry. There is recognition of the ebb and flow of life as well as the requirement of receiving in order to give. So my question is how long is too long to be in a particular season? Trek runs: 3 Months training, 7 months mission, 2 weeks debrief. I think we can think of examples of people who have been in either input or output mode for too long – pastors who have burned out, people who bounce from conference to conference, book to book, class to class and yet do not seem to be doing anything. Students interested in perpetually learning and ongoing schooling and study but who appear neither changed by their learning nor moved to action, service and the sharing of that which they have received.We are called to give away what we have received.

I can easily look back and see different seasons of input and output, in a variety of settings and contexts. Clearly in my life and in the daily grind of all of life there is a weekly, daily or even hourly ebb and flow despite a broader sweep of a time mostly characterized by a particular posture. I have been reticent at the idea of moving directly into more school next year as I feel a certain amount of tug or need to process the stuff I have learned through a season of output. This is occurring currently as I am interning at South Abbotsford as well as walking alongside others in various situations. Perhaps the tension I experience is that it currently only minimally is invested into the community toward what could be considered “outreach”.

What season are you in right now? input or output? And when do you see the transition occurring? Should Sunday morning “service” be a time of input or output? How long is too long to be in particular mode?