missional ...transformation

“Being church” is first and foremost about nurturing the understanding that this is how things really are – even if the way we behave and the way the world looks to us often suggests something else. Church isn’t primarily about projects, meetings, fine buildings, grand ideas and great deeds. There’s nothing wrong with such things – if they really do embody God’s unconditional love. But if they are simply about our need to boast, to be needed, to neurotically “do something”, then they risk missing the point catastrophically. The point of the kind of community we call “church” is to develop the type of worship, common life and shared purpose that will continue to sustains us in living out Christ’s sacrificial love in every aspect of life, even when the going gets tough.

Hope in the triumph of a good able to achieve real change, to turn our grasping world inside out, is not a matter of individual aspiration or wish-fulfilment. It requires a community of character – people trained, through prayerfulness, through human service and through genuine mutuality (what we rather piously call “fellowship”), to go on enduring, in spite of everything. Such endurance becomes possible not via the superhuman efforts of a few spiritual athletes, but through the recognition of us plain, ordinary people that we are empowered by a promise and a possibility that goes way beyond our own capacities – one residing nowhere less than in the heart of God.

“The world is overcome not through destruction, but through reconciliation. Not ideals, nor programmes, nor conscience, nor duty, nor responsibility, nor virtue, but only God's perfect love can encounter reality and overcome it. Nor is it some universal idea of love, but rather the love of God in Jesus Christ, a love genuinely lived, that does this.” Bonhoeffer's Meditations on the Cross

A love genuinely lived by a people joined to Christ for the sake of the world. That is the church and its mission in a simple phrase.

Thanks to Simon Barrow @ Ekklesia

Comments

[Kudzu Fire]

peace. love. sometimes forbearance