“God sent His Son into the world, not to judge the world, but to save the world through Him.” -John 3:17
“Just as You sent Me into the world, I am sending them into the world.” -Jesus praying in John 17:18
For us, everything begins and ends with the person of Jesus- the Sent One who then sends us.
Our fundamental identity as a community is not only gathered, but sent. Gathering is a necessary prelude to being sent. Why did Jesus spend so much time with the disciples prior to sending them? To teach and equip them. To change them and to prepare them. It’s in the context of being gathered around the person of Jesus, of leaning into and learning from Him together that we are changed, sharpened, refined and made ready... The problem with the whole church thing is, we rarely seem to get past the gathered part.
At the end of the day (that’s for you Dustin), the whole purpose of Evergreen is not to gather on Sundays in a pub. We come together to do that which we can’t do as individuals (worship together, pray together, be in community), but our purpose as community is not just coming together- it’s going. A community following the Sent One is by definition a sent community. We say we are a “missional community” and that means we are a “missionary” community. A people who follow the God who left- who left comfort and privilege and went to live among those whom He wished to love and save.
“So the Word became human and lived among us...”John 1:14
Of course, there’s more than a sentness to Jesus. There’s an alongsideness as well. In other words, Immanuel, God With Us, came to be with us. Not against us. Not over us. But with us.
But for too much of the Church, the countercultural claims of the Gospel get lost in a people who don’t see the alongsideness of Jesus, who don’t follow His incarnational and serving example, and who then don’t see the power of the Gospel working itself out in their communities in the way they dream of it doing so.
The real power of the countercultral Gospel is found when it comes from along side, from someone who is with someone else and speaking out of a friendship, not the adversarial relationship (or worse, the unconcerned, practical apathy towards those around us) we in the Church too often cultivate.
Until we see our primary identity wrapped up in sentness AND in alongsideness, we may be countercultural, but we’ll just be speaking to ourselves.
When we truly grasp who Jesus was and what He did, it propels us out into mission and it changes how we live as a people structure our community. In that order. (This is something we’ll talk about over the next couple of weeks...)
And more: it’s in holding up the person of Jesus and following Him in mission that we find our meaning- as individuals and as a community. And that purposeful, meaning-filled, Christ-centered communal life is about the most attractive thing a church community could ever do.
A little harder to propose to the “Evangelism Committee,” but infinitely more effective and satisfying...
Bob, your post reminded me of a great quote from "A Sense of Mission" by Albert Curry Winn:
The doctrine of the church which we have found in John seems to me to call for some revisions of our conventional ecclesiology.
The time-honored notae ecclesiae, the marks of the church, are preaching of the word and the administration of the sacraments. Says Calvin: "Wherever we find the word of God purely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there, it is not to be doubted, is a Church of God."
[However] if we are on the right track in these studies, then surely the preeminent mark of the church is engagement in mission to the world.
If mission defines who Christ is, and if Christ sends us as he was sent, then mission defines who we are. We can preach the word and celebrate the sacraments in all solemnity, propriety, and purity, but if we are doing nothing to speak the words of God and to do the works of God in the world, if we have no concern for liberation, justice, compassion, and peace, can we claim the name of church? I think not.
Posted by: brad brisco | October 22, 2008 at 01:08 AM