The Relational Mission

"In the beginning God ..." (Gen 1:1) The Bible opens with God as the subject who acts in the course of history. God creates. God talks. God walks. God interjects. God intervenes. God protects. God leads. God corrects. God disciplines. God comes. God heals. God turns water into wine. God teaches. God eats. God raises another from the dead. God loves. God dies. God rises. God ascends. God empowers. God works. God, God, God. The Bible starts out with God as the subject. With the turning of each page, we read how the story unfolds with God as the primary actor. If we don't get this about the Bible's way of talking about God, it would be like watching Hamlet without a Hamlet, Forest Gump without anyone actually playing Forest Gump, or reading a DC Justice League comic without Superman. The story would be totally different in its very nature.  A different kind of story is exactly that many have experienced. When we go to church, God far too often not at the center. I...

Jesus replied, "My Father is still working, and I am working too." John 5:17 God is already at work. He has been working while I have slept. While I rest, God loves. God loves and works in love in order to restore all of creation. God is moving in love to offer love. Today begins with the love of God which has been at work and continues to work.  It does not begin with me. God's mission flows out of God's being. God does love because God is love. God's actions align with God's being. God's being is love. God's actions are love. And this love looks like Jesus hanging on the cross. God works in the world with cruciform love. God's mission in the world does not begin with me or with the church. How could anything like cruciform love begin with me? I would never opt for that. I would never have enough wisdom or creativity to love people like that. God's mission of cruciform love begins, continues and ends with the love and work of God. To fa...

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. —1 John 4:7-8 How would you describe God if a friend asked you to do so? What words would you use to explain what God is like? Well actually the words at your disposal comprise a very long list. Let's consider a few. First, the classic attributes of God that theologians have analyzed for centuries provide some guidance. They include such smart-sounding words as: • Eternal (God has no beginning or end; He has always existed • Transcendent (God is above and beyond the limits of our world • Omnipotent (God is all-powerful • Omniscient (God is all-knowing • Omni-present (God’s is present everywhere • Holy (God is absolutely unique and perfect) Or we can use some words that are a little more popular, and say that God is: good, trustworthy, generous, faithful, glorious, worthy, beautiful, ...

When Shawna was pregnant with our first child, we had many friends repeat the exact same words to us: “Everything is going to change.” We had been married for almost five years, and we had become accustomed to life as DINKs (double income no kids). Now that we have four between 11 and 5, we  now know all about the life change that kids can bring. One of the first things that changed with the advent of our son was our sleep patterns. No longer was sleep a luxury that we could. We had a little baby in our house that required feeding every three hours, and he let us know about it. During that first month, I was up after his feeding at about 2 a.m. I was tired, but he had the hiccups and could not sleep. My sleep habits were in shock. My body cried out for rest, but there was something within me that kept my body awake. It was something bigger than the physical need for sleep. This was my son, and he required care. As I walked around in the dark, a part of a verse resonat...

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. —Eph 3:17-19  The summer after I graduated from Texas A & M, I was helping my dad on a construction job. He was purchasing a piece of machinery that would dig holes in solid rock. The salesman spent some time with us as we tested out the machine. During our conversation, he asked what I did. After I told him that I had just graduated from college, he responded, “Oh, no experience. There is nothing like experience.” Luckily, I’m not the type that is easily offended by direct words. And I knew that I was green. I knew that I needed experience, but I was not afraid of being young either. I just did not realize that graduating with honors and all of the knowledge floating around in my ...

Long before "missional" became a popular theme, Lesslie Newbigin wrote the following in 1963, identifying the "missional" nature of God's people: "The Western world has had to be recognized once again as a mission field, and the churches have been compelled in a new way to define their nature and mission as parts of a divine society distinct from the wider society of nations in which they live, and all these factors have contributed to the developments in the field of theology in the direction of a missionary understanding of the nature of the Church itself. The truth that the Church is itself something sent into the world, the continuation of Christ's mission from the Father, something which is not so much an institution as an expedition sent to the ends of the earth in Christ's name, has been grasped with new vividness" ( Trinitarian Doctrine for Today's Mission , 12) I have something like six shelves of books that in some way r...

What's the source of our identity? What is the root of our being? What is the ultimate being of our life? What is the ultimate cause of our being? These are questions that are raised by the philosophical discipline called ontology. Rene Descartes asked these questions and came up with cogito ergo sum which is Latin for "I think, therefore I am." He determined that his ability to reason is the source of his being. As I've reflected on how we do life today, I think there are many other options that lie at the source of our being. While most of us don't think about these things in what we might call an ontological way, we all live according to a certain ontology. For instance,  I feel, therefore I am. I have fun, therefore I am. I work, therefore I am. I have power, therefore I am. I make money, therefore I am. I possess, therefore I am. I'm sure we could add to this list. For those of us who follow Jesus, we might add something like, "I love, ther...

"Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy." If we are truly following Jesus, we will be growing in mercy. This means that we will be offering sacrificial, other-oriented love to those around us who do not deserve it. Think about it this way: Imagine neighbors, family members, co-workers, and friends in your life. Think about them all in one large room. Now in your mind, put them into groups. Group 1: Those who can benefit you. Those who have something to offer you. And most likely they offer something to society. Group 2: Those you consider your equal. They are friends you like to hang out with. Your relationship with them is not really about what they have to offer you. They are just friends. Group 3: Those you know but you don't particularly like, for whatever reason. Maybe it's a neighbor who annoys you. Maybe it's a friend who drains you when you spend time with them. Or a family member who is a downer. Group 4: Those you know who seem ...

"The love of God revealed in Jesus Christ is his total unconditional self-giving to mankind, love in which he does not withhold himself from loving to the utmost or cut short its full movement, and it is upon that love that our hope of redemption and resurrection is grounded. It is the love of the eternally self-affirming and self-giving God, and so the love he pours out freely upon us through the Holy Spirit is love that affirms itself as love against all that is not love or resists his love. ... He does not hold back his love from the sinner, for he cannot cease to be the God who loves and loves unreservedly and unconditionally." (T. F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God , 246). What do you do with a quote like this? It's one of those statements that all Christians who have any knowledge of the Bible affirm, but most of us have little clue regarding its actually meaning. In other words, we affirm it with our minds, but with our experience we opt for something muc...

We settle for works of mission instead of God's mission. We replace doing things that look like mission for participating in the deep things that God is doing in our world. We are a people of action. We want to become "externally-focused." We want to see "movement" growth happen. We want "exponential." Don't get me wrong. I think our intentions are good. We want to see people get saved, the church grow and the world changed. We want to see love shared. We believe that God's mission expands as we do "small things with great love." And I agree with all of this. But we overlook at deeper truth. Too often the church is trying to share love that it has not it's encountered and experienced. I'd like to draw from the words of Kierkegaard in his great book Works of Love : "Love's hidden life is in the innermost being, unfathomable, and then in turn is in an unfathomable connectedness with all existence. Just as the quiet la...

More than anything else, my view of God's love has been transformed by the experience of being a father. Being a father is by far the hardest thing I've ever done, but it is also the most rewarding. It is wild to experience such deep things for my kids. It blows my mind how I willingly give my life up for theirs in little ways every day. While waiting for pediatric check up, I read that the average child will have their diaper changed about 3700 times. This means that Shawna and I will have changed about 15000 diapers before it is said and done. Before our first child was born, I honestly never changed a diaper. But these kids belong to me. They are mind and I am theirs. All kids are special, but mine are different, at least to me. I wonder if this is how God sees me? Since becoming a father--I'm still quite a novice at this--I've recorded experiences with my children that have revealed to me the truth about God's love. I have used the following words of Jesus as ...

I'm writing curriculum tonight for a 7-week series we are doing at our church called Scandalous Love. It is a focus on the radical, free gift love that God has for us. I often wonder if this kind of radical love is something that we think we need to outgrow. It seems as if we feel the need to grow up and be independent of love, to become self-sufficient as Christians. When I was a new Christian, I knew that I needed to experience the love of God on a daily basis. But over the years, the direct knowledge of this love seems to wain. And this seems to be a quite common pattern. But what if a sign Christian maturity is the growing knowledge of this love that cannot be measured.