We asked Dave Male:
What is Christian love?
[youtube]E4hdV5CzyWE[/youtube]Length: 1 minute, 43 seconds
Watch for a new question posted each week, or view the entire interview here.
What is Christian love?
Evangelism
Why Every Church Needs a Social Media Presence
If you’re not tweeting yet . . . you might want to be
Communication has always been the linchpin for the Gospel to be successfully shared. The letters of the New Testament clearly tell us that Saint Paul would travel from town to town and from city to city to share his witness of Jesus Christ with the wider world. Upon his departure he would promise to continue to stay in contact with each community by letter, so that their commitment to one another in Christ would continue long after he had gone.
For both the early Church and for our Church today, communication is key.
We have far more communications tools at our fingertips than ever before, but the multitude of options means we may not use any of them very well. From Facebook to Twitter to YouTube — and with new social media platforms emerging every day — it is difficult to know where to start.
Two things are certain: these new forms of communication are not going away, and they are integral for a 21st Century sharing of the Gospel. Consider these statistics: Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30 years old, and over 95% of “millennials” are active on some social media platform. Social media has overtaken pornography as the #1 activity on the internet. One in five couples in North America meets first online, not in person. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s third largest, with twice the population of the United States.
Most businesses no longer ask what the return on their investment will be for investing in social media, because they realize that the return on investment will be that their business will still exist. As Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics says: “We don’t have a choice about whether we do social media; the question is how well we do it.”
The Church has always considered it a responsibility to go out and meet people where they are: to witness to the message of the Gospel to those who have yet to hear it. Social media contains one of the largest and most accessible concentrations of people that the world has ever known. Most churches would acknowledge that if a nearby area is populating quickly, it is important to establish a Christian presence in that community, and hopefully plant a church. The online community is no different. It is the number one place where the millennial generation congregates, and it is the fastest growing population in the world. This group, undoubtedly, contains a large number of people who either have never known Jesus, or who have been pushed away from the Church by his followers.
Some might argue that the Church will find itself left behind if it does not address this growing population by better utilizing these new methods of communication. I believe there is a far greater failure at risk. If the Church does not find new and innovative ways to share the Gospel with the people populating these growing online networks and communities – we will have failed to bring Christ into their lives.
From the first-century communication of the travelling evangelist Saint Paul to the social media platforms we face today, the spreading of the Gospel should never know any kind of boundary or restriction. Every single individual in a church does not need to be active in social media – we all have our reasons why we might or might not – but every church needs to have a social media strategy if we want to take seriously God’s Mission in our world.
Next Steps
Educate: Find someone in your congregation who you know is active on social media — there will be more than one. Ask the silliest of questions and don’t be afraid of the answers. Start with Facebook and then work your way to Twitter and YouTube. If you have a question that can’t be answered, Google it, chances are that someone has already asked it before. See what other churches are doing and feel free to borrow good ideas from them — there is no need to re-invent the wheel.
Equip: Create a team or appoint an individual who will manage your social media presence. Remember that they will be the church’s online voice — so ensure that parameters are established. Discuss what message you wish to send out into the world, ensuring that your new social media presence is not simply a way to better advertize your church, but a new way to proclaim the Gospel. Connect your churches website to your churches new Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube accounts (after you have created them) so that your different media sources will point to one another.
Experiment: Start tweeting, posting and sharing video clips, engaging articles, inspirational thoughts and passages of scripture as you begin to use social media as a Gospel driving platform. As you get more comfortable, engage other platforms that emerge as well (Google+, LinkedIn, etc.). This industry is incredibly fluid and will continue to change, morph and grow. There is no wrong way to do this, except to bury our heads in the sand and pretend it doesn’t exist. Proclaim the Good News of the Living God and be amazed who ends up listening.
It’s Christmas. And all bets are off.
The days of the neighbourhood dropping in for Church just because it’s Christmas are over. Here’s how your church can move into the neighbourhood instead.
For centuries, the Advent/Christmas seasons have been a time for folks to automatically come into Church, perhaps for
the only time in a year. However, in this post-Christendom, and some would argue post-Christian age, all bets are off. The days of expectation that people will naturally come into events in our churches simply because it is Christmas, are rapidly dwindling. This is not an urban, suburban, or rural issue. This is not a church size or denominational issue. This is the new normal of every local church in our increasingly secularized age.
It is not a time for despair. In fact, it is an exciting season of opportunity and hope for those in Christian leadership who are willing to fully engage the challenges of our day. In Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of the magisterial Prologue in John’s gospel that is read every Christmas, we get a glimpse into the missional heart of the Incarnation:
The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood. We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, generous inside and out, true from start to finish. (Jn. 1:14, The Message by Eugene Peterson)
God moves into our neighbourhood. We have an opportunity to step back and re-think all we intend, practice and believe about our engagement with Advent/Christmas and with our culture. In whatever way your Church makes decisions, I am going to suggest that we gather, and consider six fundamentals of Advent/Christmas planning, before we look at some practical applications.
Ditch the complaining about the hyper-consumerism of our culture or the lack of religious practice in our society. We follow the One who not only is the Word made flesh, but also the One who breaks the back of death, evil and our sin by his atoning work on the Cross. Our world needs the good news of the Gospel as we share our hope that is grounded in the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ — the Gospel imperative.
Who needs to be part of this conversation? How can the conversation be expanded to include those not typically in the decision-making process? Engage those who only come at Christmas. Talk to those in your community who do not attend at all. Ask your youth and young adults about their expectations and experiences of what the Church can be and do at Christmastide.
Consider every aspect of your Advent and Christmas practices. Ask yourself the simple but exceptionally difficult question—why? Why do we do what we do during Advent and Christmas? Are these events aligned with the gospel imperatives of the Incarnation?
Consider what it will mean to engage your community this Christmas, versus expecting your community to engage your church events.
Think through when your Advent and Christmas events are held. Are attendance patterns changing? Do we need to change our event times to engage more people more effectively?
Where is the best expression of the Advent and Christmas season? Would it be more beneficial to change locales, to actually ‘move into the neighbourhood’ instead of offering events at our local church building?
These six elements of re-thinking and re-framing our understanding and practices of Advent/Christmas in our churches is the hard work of Christian leadership. You will find very quickly that “Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.” (Hyman Rickover)
Historic methodologies and practices feel good to us, but do they connect the Gospel and our culture? If we have done our homework, and prayerfully thought through these six fundamentals, then we might be surprised by the need for the church’s historic gospel tradition, versus our own local traditionalism. In the context of your local community, remember theologian Jaroslav Pelikan’s famous dictum: “Traditionalism is the dead religion of the living. Tradition is the living religion of the dead.”
At St. Paul’s, as we have sought to consider these Advent/Christmas planning fundamentals, we have discovered some simple and effective things to engage and connect with the communities we serve. We are a work in progress, always trying to pray and think through what, why and how we are doing and being the Church.
Here are some things to think about for the Advent/Christmas seasons:
Advertise early and widely with the message that you want to engage with your community, not simply get them into church at this time of year.
Use social media to get the message out. Even if you have no experience or are personally wary – seek out those who regularly use Facebook or Twitter and learn. The cost of your usual advertising -—newspaper, flyers etc. – is increasing while their effectiveness is diminishing.
Undertake a prayer ministry to pray for your visitors, for your events, for gospel proclamation.
Ensure one clear theme in the music, preaching, and prayers so that your message is coherent, concise and consistent.
Through the Advent/Christmas seasons, place the incarnation in the context of the whole of salvation history. For example, a traditional Lessons and Carols service embodies the great sweep of Creation, Rebellion, Israel, Jesus, Still Being Written and The End.
In preaching, beware of the urge to bury people in scriptural volume. Do not overestimate the biblical literacy of our culture or our church communities. Just because you know the implications of the incarnation, do not assume everyone does.
Beware of the urge to find new meaning in the old text. Allow the Gospel and the text to shape your preaching.
But do preach! Please do not offer a Christmas devotional or read someone else’ thoughts. This is a prime opportunity for you to connect the biblical story with your community in an authentic and meaningful way.
Offer an evangelistic, relationship-based program that people can sign up for immediately, on the spot that will begin right after Christmas. Use Alpha or Christianity Explored. We use Christianity 101 (C101), which for us starts first thing in the New Year.
Put your best foot forward with preaching, liturgy, music, and hospitality. Think of the famous title of Oswald Chamber’s daily devotional book—My Utmost for His Highest. To offer your best to the Lord Jesus is to do just that, offer your best. Whether we like it or not, people are used to high quality production values and they expect your practice to be aligned with our message that the Gospel is the most important good news in the world.
Consider giving your visitors a small and inexpensive gift that explains Christmas, such as Nicky Gumbel’s “Why Christmas?”
Work to reframe your understanding of Advent as much more than a liturgical season. Be a community that truly seeks to reshape yourselves and society’s worldview from one of consumption to one of compassion. The Advent Conspiracy (adventconspiracy.org) is a brilliant resource to highlight, particularly at this time of year, that you are blessed solely to be a blessing to others.
Offer opportunities to serve at Christmastide. Perhaps you might offer a Christmas dinner to those who are alone at
this time of year. You might encourage everyone in your church to offer one hour to your local food bank or one hour to visit a nursing home. Even the smallest churches will have an impact. To engage your community means to serve your community in some capacity, particularly at this time of year.
Throw a party. If you have a children’s or family service, build a festive venue with cupcakes and balloons. Visitors and their children relate to a birthday party for Jesus. For your Christmas services, provide opportunities to build relationships (not just a coffee hour), where your faith community can genuinely engage the community by not only serving, but also simply having fun.
We live in a changing world and this time of year can be a season of challenge and over-extension. With Advent and Christmas—we have been given an opportunity to connect with our world. As Christopher Wright wrote in The Mission of God:
It is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world, as that God has a church for his mission in the world. Mission was not made for the church; the church was made for mission—God’s mission.
As church, we are made for such a time as this. We are made for God’s mission, which is to proclaim in word and deed the reality that “the Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood.
Barry Parker is rector of St.Paul’s Anglican Church, Bloor St., Toronto. Check out their website —and how St.Paul’s is presenting Christmas to their community— at www.stpaulsbloor.org
Teaching the Faith to Beginners Workshop
This is a workshop given by Jenny Andison and John Bowen at the Vital Church Planting Conference 2011.
Length: 1h:15m
Subscribe to all our Podcasts hereOnline and On Message: one way to write a church website with impact
This summer, my wife and I spent some time in the UK. One day, we checked online for churches to visit that Sunday, and found one that seemed very lively. I clicked on the “staff” page. There I found an impressive number of staff, both full and part-time, but I confess I was baffled by the list of their qualifications. Some were “OLM,” others “LLM,” some were “with PTO.” One was “retired NSM with PTO,” and another “LLM (formerly Reader) with PTO.” We did in fact worship at that church on the Sunday, and found it a wonderfully energetic and faith-full community. But my experience with the website was a sobering reminder that the first contact many people will have with our churches is online. We need to design our websites with “outsiders” in mind so that the first impression is not off-putting, and in fact, invites visitors not only to our church but to our faith.
In particular, I believe we need an explanation of the Gospel upfront on our websites. Many church websites describe their community as “family-oriented,” “inclusive,” “kid-friendly,” “a welcoming community,” and so on. Most go further and say something about faith: “knowing Christ and making him known” is popular; “followers of Jesus” and “a faith-filled family” are phrases that crop up. Smart websites have a “Frequently asked questions” section, anticipating visitors’ questions like “What’s the dress code?” and “Do I have to belong to your denomination?” But I haven’t found many church websites with a section explicitly called, “Becoming a Christian.”
The church of which I am a member, St John the Evangelist in Hamilton (see www.rockonlocke.ca), recently added a section called just that, under the tab “New here?” (OK, I confess, it’s not a coincidence: I had something to do with it.) What follows is the text of that part of the website. Naturally, you don’t have to agree with every word of it. There is not enough about some things and probably too much about others. It’s intended as a taster, a teaser, meant to intrigue and attract. It is not a systematic theology. If you don’t like it, hopefully it will inspire you to write something better. But if you do like it, you are welcome to copy it or adapt it for your own church’s website.
Becoming a Christian
The simplest way to define a Christian is as “a follower of Jesus.” That means, someone who tries to learn from Jesus Christ what he has to teach about God, about life and how to live it, and about death and how to deal with it. In a sense, a Christian is a student of Jesus the Teacher.
If that is a Christian, then what is the church? Again, at its simplest, church is when followers of Jesus get together. Why do they get together? To learn more about how to follow Jesus, to pray together, and to encourage one another in their faith. In a sense, the church is the school of Jesus. And, in most churches, they also break bread and drink wine together (variously called the Mass, Communion, Eucharist, or Lord’s Supper) as Jesus told his followers to do. They also get together because one of the things Jesus taught was that God is interested not just in individuals living good lives, but in people learning to live as a diverse and harmonious community.
Another way to think of a Christian is as someone who has responded to the Good News—or Gospel—that Jesus taught. What is that Good News? It is about something he called “the Kingdom of God”—the state of affairs where things are done in the way the Creator intended. Jesus said that this Kingdom came into the world in a special way when God sent him into the world—in effect, that he was the King of this Kingdom
So what is the Good News of “the Kingdom”? That God in love has not given up on our world, with all its hurt and folly and wars. Rather, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, God is at work to put things to rights, to shape a world where all pain and self-centeredness is done away with. And God invites human beings everywhere to be part of this new thing he is doing in the world.
How do you become part of God’s work, part of God’s “kingdom”? That’s where becoming a follower of Jesus comes in. Why? Because it’s from Jesus that we learn most clearly what it means to work with God in this project of restoring the world. Jesus demonstrated the Kingdom himself—by the way he lived, but also by his brutal execution for our sins and by his miraculous coming back to life three days later—and he taught others how to walk that same road. And that’s why, if we want to work with the Creator in this amazing global restoration project, the best way to do it is in the school of Jesus.
How do you become a follower of Jesus, then? Jesus used two old-fashioned-sounding words to describe it: “repent” and “believe.” “Repent” means to turn away from one thing, and “believe” means to turn towards something else: a 180 degree change, as if we set off walking west and then turned right around and start heading east. Another word for turning around like this is conversion. For some people, that turning around is sudden, but for others it takes a long time.
So what does that journey in a new direction look like? As you might expect, it means a complete change of view. (After all, if you were heading west, you would have been walking towards the sunset; now, facing east, you’re heading towards the sunrise.) Before, it meant living my life as though it belonged to me. Now I realise that it is a gift from the Creator. Before, it meant setting the priorities of my life according to what I thought was important. Now it means learning what God’s priorities for my life are. Before, I could be as selfish as I wanted to be. Now I am learning to serve God and others. The changes are huge.
Does that sound difficult? Well, yes, Jesus never said it would be easy: he was very clear that in some ways it would feel like a death, and any experienced Christian will tell you that following him is often difficult. But the good news is that in following Jesus, you are actually learning to follow the Creator’s way, which means you’re learning to live your life with the grain of the universe, not against it. And in the end that means experiencing what Jesus called “life in all its fullness”—becoming the person that you were created to be, and doing what you were made to do—and in the company of the God who made you and who loves you.
If this sounds intriguing, come check us out one of these Sundays. As you can tell, becoming a Christian is a big thing—in fact, the biggest decision you could ever make—and nobody wants you to rush into it. Come see what church (this followers-of-Jesus-getting-together event) is like. How do they experience Christian faith? How do they handle the difficulties? What are the joys? How do they keep going? How do they experience the love of God? Listen in on their praying, their singing, their teaching, their conversation. They will welcome your eavesdropping!
And if, after a time, you decide that this is indeed what you want, talk to the minister about baptism. If being a Christian is being a student in the school of Jesus, getting baptized is the way you register in the school. It’s a public ceremony (you can’t be a private Christian) and involves you stating your desire to be a follower of Jesus. And the whole Christian community (your fellow students) is there to cheer you on, promising to support and encourage you in your new life.
Perhaps you were baptized as a baby, but have never really done anything about it. In that case, if you decide you want to be a follower of Jesus, there is something called “Re-affirmation of Baptismal Vows,” where you are not baptized again (that’s not necessary), but you take the promises that were made on your behalf as a baby and make them your own as a thoughtful adult choice. And that can be just as meaningful as baptism itself.
Do email us or phone if you would like more information. And, wherever you are at in your spiritual journey, we look forward to meeting you one of these Sundays.
***
The first step to revising your own church’s website just might be to check out the sites of other churches. What works? What doesn’t? Learn from the mistakes of others and be inspired by the ingenuity of those who do it well. And, in particular, let’s take the opportunity of this first contact with new people to say something about the Gospel
Missional on Purpose: And on paper!
Learn how one Saskatoon congregation put missional into writing
Joining God in his mission is a great adventure with so many blessings. But it’s also a lot of hard work. As a church leader, I’m continually amazed at how easily and quickly I can get pulled back into complacency and comfort. It’s true for me personally and it’s true for the Church. It’s that human nature thing that Paul talks about in Romans 7: it’s hard to keep doing the things we know that God has called us to do.
Missional partnerships have been an important part of helping us stay focused as a church. Here, I’m defining missional as simply the posture and intentionality to be the sent Church, joining God in his desire to bring His blessing to the families and nations of the earth.
At Forest Grove Community Church in Saskatoon, we are involved in missions work in a variety of ways. We’ve found that taking the time to clearly articulate the parameters of a missional partnership (in writing) has reaped tremendous benefits. We’ve currently established two in this way, and we are discerning a third one. One is locally with an inner city ministry in Saskatoon called The Bridge (you can read about this in the book, Going Missional: Conversations with 13 Canadian Churches who Have Embraced Missional Life). The other is with a ministry to the indigenous people of the jungles of Panama. We’ve had over 70 members of our congregation participate in this second one, in seven years of sending teams down to Panama.
Here are a few of the benefits — and power — of a clearly articulated missional partnership:
It sharpens your focus. As churches and pastors we can feel pulled in so many different directions. Partnerships help us keep focused and make a true difference in a few areas, rather than feeling frustrated and ineffective in many. It also helps define who exactly the partnership is with and what is the overall purpose we’re trying to accomplish.
It reveals our perspectives, biases and blind spots. North American churches have lots to offer, but we have so much more to learn. When I first went to Linda (director at the Bridge), I said that people in our church truly have a heart and desire to help those in our city who are vulnerable, marginalized and struggling with the many faces of poverty — but we don’t know how. I told her that we needed The Bridge’s help to know how to live our faith. Their ministry (and clients) have helped us so much to see Jesus. Written and wrestled into each of our partnership agreements is a commitment to bless each other — and what this two-way partnership will look like.
It helps our people engage. When we take the time to clearly define the partnership and our mutual commitments to each other, we become family and we get to truly know each other. This helps people see how to live out their faith and where their gifts might be used. Some people will finally step out and try it because so many others have paved the way first.
It makes us evaluate effectiveness. In our written agreements, we’ve defined effectiveness and also put a term-limit on our agreement. Each of our partnerships is up for review every three years. That makes us evaluate (together with our partners) what’s working, what’s not, and whether or not it makes sense to continue. Churches can be great at starting ministries; we’re not so great at evaluating and at times stopping them.
Jesus seemed to wonderfully combine spontaneous ministry — so much happened “as he walked along,” see John 9 — together with great intentionality, whether sending out “the 12” or “the 72.” We will always need both. Being missional requires a posture of spontaneity and an intentionality to truly be effective. Missional partnerships allow for both in a powerful way.
Bruce Enns is lead pastor of Forest Grove Community Church in Saskatoon, Sask.
Time for a Game Change
We need to revise the rules of a game which seems to be played out with one active pulpit, before an audience of passive pews. Here’s one way forward
As Canadians wrestle with a shrinking Church and a growing recognition that the God of all ages is not limited to high ceilings, wooden pews, or even Sunday morning, we are beginning to grasp the magnitude of the task ahead. It is huge, and will require more than young priests and ministers eager to enter traditional parishes. We face a revolution in how we do ministry, plant churches, communicate a message, and create community.
Mission Shaped Ministry (MSM) was developed as an advanced training course for teams of lay people planting Fresh Expressions of Church in Great Britain. I wish I could say MSM is a magic formula, creating new churches to replace those that have reached the end of their lifespan.
Instead, it challenges the Church to rethink itself on at least three levels.
How we lead: We have come to think of the Church in terms of pastor and laity — one doing the skilled work and the other supporting in many ways. But Fresh Expressions of Church are as much the formation of ministry teams as the reformation of professional leaders. Thinking back to the Acts of the Apostles or the Pauline Epistles, new ministries were always the work of what I think of as the apostolic AND: Paul and Silas and Barnabbas and Titus and Phoebe and Priscilla and Aquila and Epaphras and Mary and Andronicus and Junia and many more cited by name. The next generation of church leaders will have complementary ands in every leadership team.
How we finance ministry: As much as I appreciate collecting a salary for doing the things I love – and would likely continue doing even if I won the lottery tomorrow — my income comes from the accumulated wealth of generations. People older than myself, for the most part, have paid the mortgage on buildings we could no longer afford to purchase. In the future, I suspect much ministry will be conducted by teams of lay persons; supported, encouraged and blessed by clergy but not restricted by the availability of the ordained and salaried. We can no more afford to launch only churches build by professional church workers than could the early church — or any of the other church planting movements of history. Unless we are willing to send out mendicants with bowls to beg for their supper, Fresh Expressions of Church will often be the work of those who earn their salary and mingle with the working population as others do. Instead of numbing themselves in front of the computer, console, or TV, dedicated Christ-followers will create new Christian communities through networks of relationships inaccessible to parish focused ministers.
Role of pastors: There must be a shift from pastor centred mission to multi-faceted team. The British MSM was designed to aid groups of eager lay people in need of seasoned advice, theology, and structure and to temper a spontaneous church planting. Guiding an unruly outbreak of enthusiastic lay ministry does not seem to be a significant problem in the Canadian Church. But we cannot forget that the early Church was largely a movement of lay persons mentored by followers of Jesus, tied to the teaching of the apostles, but not to buildings or methodologies.
The difference between a laity that cares beyond its friendship networks and one that is ingrown appears to lie in one of the eight measureable quality characteristics of Natural Church Development (NCD). Passionate Spirituality is the ability to apply one’s love for God, one’s knowledge of scripture, one’s experience of the transforming power of God to everyday life and relationships at home, in community and at work. It is that extra “something” that pushes past loving fellowship and a crowded agenda of work and leisure to a life that follows in the footsteps of Jesus — and of the 12 — and the 72, and 500 and so on through to those who mentored the ministries of which each of us are a part.
Does the world need another course to learn how to plant a church or fresh expression of Church? If it does, MSM is a pretty good one.
But I think we must strive for more than more than deepened knowledge. We need to recruit young people and active retirees and persons whose circumstances allow them to live simply in order to serve God’s mission in the world. We need priests and pastors ready to rethink tried and steady patterns of ministry that support a passive laity.
We need to revise the rules of a game which can be played out with one active pulpit, before an audience of passive pews. MSM is a team sport. Gather a gang of two or three or ten, and see what you can do. I can safely say that God is on your side.
Liturgical and Missional: Do I Have to Choose?
I don’t know if you have ever had the experience of knowing what you should have said — only when the opportunity to say it has long past. It seems to happen to me frequently — and perhaps more often as I get older. On this occasion it was during lunch. My friend and I were talking about the need (as I saw it) for churches to be missional, and what that might mean. Then, my friend waved his fork in my general direction and said, “Of course, you need to remember that some of us are more liturgical than missional.” I instinctively felt there was something wrong with that way of putting things. But on the spur of the moment I couldn’t put my finger on it, and the conversation moved on to other things. My friend paid for lunch, and we went our separate ways.
That evening, his comment came back to me: “More liturgical than missional.” I’d heard that kind of comment before, but the distinction had never been put quite so baldly. Why did it bother me so much? The answer came that Sunday, during Eucharistic Prayer #4 in the Book of Alternative Services, sometimes called the “Star Wars” prayer because of its reference to “the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home.” Personally I love it, perhaps because it puts the Christian story in such a vast and beautiful context: it is (literally) awesome.
Then comes the reminder of what went wrong in our universe: “We turn against you, and betray your trust, and we turn against one another.” It is our failure to love God and neighbour. And then the comforting words, “Again and again you call us to return.” Thank God, God does not give up on us. “Through the prophets and sages you reveal your righteous law.” God’s rescue began almost as soon as sin entered our world. But then, “In the fullness of time you sent your Son, born of a woman, to be our Saviour.” Jesus, the climax of God’s mission to our world.
What was that word? “Mission!” The fancy term theologians use for it is the missio dei — the mission of God to redeem our sinful and hurting world. And there it was at the heart of the Eucharist!
I quickly flipped through the other prayers of consecration. There it was again:
When we turned away from you in sin, you did not cease to care for us, but opened a path of salvation for all people. (#1)
Jesus . . . lived and died as one of us, to reconcile us to you, the God and Father of all (#2)
[I]n these last days you sent [Jesus your Son] to be incarnate from the Virgin Mary, to be the Saviour and redeemer of the world (#3)
In Jesus, your Son, you bring healing to our world and gather us into one great family. (#5)
In your mercy you came to our help, so that in seeking you we might find you. Again and again you called us into covenant with you . . . (#6)
At the heart of every one of the prayers of consecration is the same simple message, though phrased in different ways: God in love reaches out to a sinful and hurting world, and as the culmination of that reaching out sends Jesus into the world to redeem humankind. The verbs are revealing: send, give up, open, bring, come, call, reconcile. They are words of movement, change and hope —words of mission.
The Christian God, these prayers remind us, is a missionary. They never tire of telling the story of what this missionary God has done in sending Jesus. Today’s emphasis on “being missional” is not just the latest flavor of the religious month. It is reminder of that mission which begins in the heart of God and which swoops down to redeem a rebellious world. And the Eucharistic liturgy, it seems, is first and foremost a celebration of mission. That’s why we can’t separate the two quite as easily as my friend wished.
But then a second thing hit me: the Church where we celebrate the mission of God in the Eucharist would not exist, were it not for that mission. The story of God’s mission, which we retell at every Eucharist, is not the story of some far-off reality or an alien people; neither is it an abstract theory for theologians to argue over. The story of God’s mission is the story of every church, however remote or ageing or small, where the celebration takes place. The only reason any church exists is because it is the fruit of God’s reaching out in Jesus Christ. This is why the prayers are full of “we,” “us” and “our.” If there had been no missio dei, there would be no Church. If there were no missionary God, there would be no Eucharist. The very word Eucharist — thanksgiving — is precisely because God has reached out to save us. This is the story — the only story — which constitutes the Church and its worship. It is most truly, for the Church, “the greatest story ever told.” This is why it comes at the climax of Christianity’s most distinctive act of worship.
This means that liturgy is in one way centripetal: it is the sacrament which speaks of God’s mission to “to gather us into one great family” at the cross and at the table. God reaches out his hands to us in mission: we are drawn to respond in repentance, faith and thanksgiving.
But this is not the end. Liturgy is also centrifugal. As the Eucharist came to an end, it became clear. We say together:
Gracious God, we thank you for feeding us with the body and blood of your Son Jesus Christ. May we, who share his body, live his risen life; we, who drink his cup, bring life to others; we, whom the Spirit lights, give light to the world.
If worshippers are mysteriously united with Jesus in the bread and wine, there are practical consequences to that unity. If we are one with Christ, we are one with him in his work in the world. And what is that work? To “live his risen life,” “to bring life to others,” and to “give light to the world”: not a bad summary of Christ’s missionary work —which he now shares with those who have eaten and drunk at his table.
The Eucharist is not an escape from the wicked world. It is a drawing apart from the world for a time, in order to be sacramentally reminded that “God so loved the world”— and then sent us out to serve God there.
The downward swoop of God’s grace catches us up into its onward flow. John Stott has said: “People need two conversions: one from the world to Christ, and the other with Christ into the world.” And at the hinge between those two movements stands the Eucharist, to which we are drawn by the mission of God, and from which we are sent for the mission of God.
Liturgy without mission is like the Dead Sea. Rivers run into it, but there is no outlet. No life can survive in it. Mission without liturgy is like a flash flood, powerful but quickly over, not fed by permanent springs — and equally unable to sustain life.
Liturgy and mission together, however, are symbiotic, as God intended, life-giving first to the people of God, and then through them in the power of the Spirit to the world.
I think I need to call my friend and schedule another lunch. This time it will be my turn to pay.
