The Relational Mission

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...

Thirteen men lounged around a table, ready to eat dinner. Then one stood, removed his outer clothing and wrapped a towel around his waist. While the other twelve mumbled conversation between bites, he walked to a corner of the room and filled a basin with water. He first wiped James’ feet. Matthew was next and squirmed like a 5-year-old. The next three sat in silence. Peter broke the stillness. “Lord, are you going to wash my feet? … No, you shall never wash my feet." When I meditate on the story of Jesus washing the feet of the disciples in John 13, I sit in awe and wonder. Awe at the humiliation of Jesus washing filthy feet. Wonder because I don’t get it. Then I read the punch line: “Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them.” Jesus commanded us to wash one another’s feet. Yet, below the surface, this command lacks meaning. Do we institute a church ritual of foot washing? But I don’t wear sandals. I walk little. Sidewalks and carpet protect me f...

  "But our citizenship is in heaven."—Philippians 3:20 Recently, while I was reading on my front porch, I noticed the sounds of East Indian music playing from a house four doors down the street. I overheard conversations between parents and children that I could not understand but obviously came from the second largest country in the world. This caused me to reflect further upon the reality that Jesus followers are called "foreigners and exiles" in 1 Peter. ( See previous post on this topic. ) My neighbors from half way around the world have been socialized to live in a certain way and now they are surrounded by a totally different way of life, that of Houston, Texas. For three years, I lived in Vancouver, B.C. When I arrived people told me that I would experience culture shock, that I would find it hard to connect with the way of life common to Canadians. I could not understand this. After all, we look very similar, we speak the same language and we share a ver...

Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, —1 Peter 2:11a Ever felt like you don’t belong? You know that first day of school experience where we assume that everyone else fits but you don’t. You are a foreigner, an exile, who is different from everyone else. But that experience changes. After a week or so, most of us found our place, our group of people who were like us and school became less scary. We no longer felt like foreigners because we learned the rules about what it meant to fit in. This verse challenges us though. It is not referring to how we feel. It is referring to who we are. As Jesus followers, we are foreigners. We are exiles. If we feel this way, it’s because it’s who God has made us to be. We belong to a different kingdom, and we cannot fit in . We swim upstream because we are following the leading of the Spirit. We rub against the grain of the way life is supposed to work because we are going with the grain of God’s call on our lives. We find that the ...

I grew up on a farm and if you know anything about farms, there is never NOT work to do. But every Sunday, my father would take a day of rest. We did not do farm work on Sundays. Now I assumed that this was about reverence and worship of God, but when you read the Exodus account of the Ten Commandments, the Sabbath is about work stoppage, not about worship. Walter Brueggemann states: "It is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one's life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being" ( Journey to the Common Good , 26). The Israelites had been schooled in the way of anxiety. The Sabbath was God's strategy to break what they learned and teach them a new way. As I think about life today, the word "anxious" seems appropriate. And I'm not sure that being a Christian diminishes the effects of the anxiety of our world. Too often the patterns of anxiety shape and mold us and then we...

Just then a woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak. She said to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be healed.” Jesus turned and saw her. “Take heart, daughter,” he said, “your faith has healed you.” And the woman was healed at that moment. —Matt. 9:20-22 Most often when we talk about this passage we focus on the words of Jesus to the woman about her faith. We then discuss our need to have faith like hers. I wholeheartedly agree, but I'd like to step back and experience this story a different way. The precondition to this woman reaching out to touch his cloak is that fact that Jesus was present that day. In fact, it could be argued that these stories in chapter 9 of Matthew are not really about the responses of the various individuals but about the one to whom they are responding. We so often turn stories like that of the woman with the "issue of blood" into mini-moral lessons th...

I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:14) Whenever we use the word "training" in the church world, we think about conferences, seminars, classes, webinars and written resources. All of these depend upon an expert giving us information, as if information should be classified as "training." Contrast that with training in the sport's world. Athletic training does not require athletes to sit and listen to experts. In fact it can be done with very little input or direction. When my 7th grade football coach gave us instructions about how to prepare over the summer for 8th grade football, he handed out one piece of paper and told us to go do it. Now if you walk into a bookstore, you will find hundreds of magical plans for getting in shape, but the biggest part of the training is just doing it. I wonder if we have made Christian training as difficult and complex as it seems like physical training has become. ...

So much of the ministry of Jesus happened in the ordinary stuff of life, eating, walking, sharing life with friends. In Matthew's Gospel, he records his own initiation to life with Jesus: As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” —Matthew 9:9-13 I wonder what Jesus saw in Matthew that would make him a good choice to be a part of the twelve. I wonder if Matthew wondered the same thing. After all, he was at his place of work,...

When we talk about being missional, at the same time we need to talk about being relational. If we don't we turn God's mission into an act of violence where we try to accomplish something for God. People, usually called unbelievers or the lost, become objects of our monologue. We turn ourselves into Gospel agents of aggression, trying to get something done for God. I've been down that road far too many times—although we didn't use the word "misssional"—and I've no desire to go back. The Apostle Paul wrote: "make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others." (Philippians 2:2-3) The way we love one another determines how we will be on mission. In our modernistic mindset we tend to divide outreach from community....

To be "missional" is to be sent. The church is sent. The people of God are sent to be a sign, witness and foretaste of God's coming Kingdom in the midst of the world. We are sent to put on display God's beauty in the midst of violence. If we are going to do this God's way, then we must actually understand how God sends. Philippians 2 reveals some insight into this. Jesus Christ:     6 Who, being in very nature God,        did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;     7 rather, he made himself nothing       by taking the very nature of a servant,       being made in human likeness.    8 And being found in appearance as a man,       he humbled himself       by becoming obedient to death—          even death on a cross! God reveals God's missional nature in the sending of Jesus Christ. God'...

"My judgment is that the cultural temptation to triumphalism that has beset the church was powerfully reinforced by the scholastic catechism tradition that took God as 'omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent.' Thus, self-sufficient selves in communion with an all-managing God has no room for lament, and that theological premise is now powerfully replicated in so-called praise hymns, in which 'never is heard a discouraging word." (Walter Brueggemann, Disruptive Grace , 180). I quote this with some trepidation, knowing that I risk being misunderstood. But I'll risk it anyway. The point is that we have a limited ability to practice "lament" according the biblical tradition because we believe in an all-controlling, triumphalistic God. And because he is managing everything from on high, any attempt to cry out to God in lament does no good. In other words, God intended for human trafficking to happen. Or he intended for people in our neighborhoods to be...

Recently, I realized that this marks the fourth time that I have moved to Houston and the third time that I have lived in this specific area of West Houston. It hit me how I need to reengage this local environment, to pay attention to the specific life of this neighborhood. This is a challenge because life in modern society is not usually lived locally. With the web, Twitter, global news, franchise restaurants, etc., life is anything but local. While reflecting on this, I've been reading a book by Wendell Berry. In it he wrote, "Because they [early Americans] belonged to no place, it was almost inevitable that they should behave violently toward the places they came to. We still have not, in any meaningful way, arrived in America. And in spite of our great reservoir of facts and methods, in comparison to the deep earthly wisdom of established peoples we still know but little." (The Art of the Commonplace, 11) This is a reflection on how the early Americans treated t...

Once while sitting in a pediatric doctor's waiting room, I read an article that a baby will have his or her diaper changed an average 3700 times. This means that by the time all four of our kids are out of diapers, we will have changed about 15000 wet and stinky, mushy wads of fiber. Ugh! In a sermon I preached a few weeks ago, I spoke on Making a Difference .  I was making the point about how our everyday, mundane choices make a difference, that we can advance the Kingdom of God in what we might assume as insignificant. I was trying to confront the myth that only the big choices make a difference. While I was preaching I said something like, "My attitude while changing a diaper makes a difference." This statement was not in my notes. It just came out of my mouth and I almost had to stop myself while preaching and think more about what I was saying. I can choose to have a complaining attitude while serving my children or I can use this act as a prompter to pray for them...

Saint John of the Cross said "Mission is putting love where love is not." I write about this in my forthcoming book Missional Small Groups. But here I want to reflect on a different angle. If love is central to mission then must we actually experience a God of love? Without such an experience how can we put love anywhere? Agape love, the Apostle John tells us in his first epistle, is revealed through Jesus on the cross, through self giving so that others might live. But there is a problem. I've probably listened to about 30,000 sermons in my 40 years on earth and many different themes stand out to me. But I don't recall much ever really being said about God's overwhelming love. I recall a lot more talk about what I needed to do to line my life up with God or how I needed to be faithful. I just don't remember much about encountering the God who loves. The themes that stand out seem to focus on the things that I need to do. And I don't think I'm uniq...

Missio Dei is a Latin phrase that simply means "the mission of God." Many today have recognized that mission is not the mission of the church or even specific churches but it is actually God's mission in the world. Alan Roxburgh and I write about this in our book, but we are not the first emphasize this. Theologians like Karl Barth and Lesslie Newbigin wrote about this decades ago. Recently I've been wrestling again with questions about the nature of God and how I envision God. It suddenly hit me a few days ago that the kind of God often talked about in churches is not the kind of God that has much love for the world. This God (or god) emphasizes rules, control and is really very concerned about how much glory we give him. I've seen so many people in churches who carry the weight of trying to get things right that they posses very little joy, only trickle of hope and even less love. The God they envision is not the beautiful God of accepting, forgiving and rest...

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. --Gen 1:1 When I think back to the church of my childhood, it is very clear to me what the central mission was of our life as a church. We aimed to get people to attend church services and get them to walk the aisle. After all the measure of good church depended upon whether people responded to the alter call. That was my Southern Baptist experience, but the same measure is applied to many other traditions with slightly different twists. The mission of the church is usually attached to getting people to attend a worship service and respond in some way to that service. My imagination about church, God's life and the Gospel was shaped as a kid by this view of mission. Three times per week I sat and listened to services that pointed to a climactic end when we hoped that what we did would prove legit because someone would respond. In my more sarcastic days I might say something like: did we assume that God created the world ...

During the time of Jesus the temple faith possessed all the right forms, liturgies and rituals but those things became ends in and of themselves. The temple religion was practiced in order to sustain and reinforce the temple religion. We don't read any stories about Second Temple Judiasm that come anywhere close to resembling those of the first temple or the Tabernacle where the presence of God was manifest and revealed. It seems as though they had all the forms without the ultimate goal of those forms. I think this is an easy trap for us today in the modern church. The questions about church, how to make the church work, how to keep the church running, how to make the church relevant, how the church can grow, or even how the church can be more biblical can lead us down a similar path. It's as if we think that when we find the magical church pill all will suddenly be well with the world. Over the last 40 years trend after trend promises to make the church what God originally ...

In the beginning God … --Genesis 1:1 The Bible begins with God. If we want to get inside what the Bible means, we must begin with a basic understanding that God is the primary actor in the Biblical narrative. He is the one initiates the story. He is main character of the story. And he is the producer of the story as the one who holds together the various other actors who seem to never quite get what God is doing in his story. As I reflect on my years of reading the Bible, I realize how I failed to see this basic, foundational point about the Bible. I read the Bible as “God’s love letter to me” as if I was the central focus of the story. When I was in college, I began in Genesis and worked my way through the Bible on a daily basis and I would stop and journal my impressions and reactions to what I read. Recently, I looked at what I wrote and I must confess that almost every journal entry was about what I was doing for God, what God wanted me to do or what God was calling me to do. W...

I don't remember much from my high school physics class, but there was one thing I remember quite well: everything tends toward chaos. Anything left to itself will gradually move toward disorder. This is illustrated in the movie "I Am Legend." In this movie, we observe New York City after almost the entire population has been killed by a virus. There was no one there to bring creative order to the city, and as a result grass grew through the streets, buildings were collapsing, and all the systems developed to sustain life fell apart. On a more relevant level I see this reality in my closet, when I walk in my office or with my children almost every day. We have to vacuum our carpets everyday. Disorder happens even when no one does anything. Order, I have found actually requires a great deal of consentrated creativity. We see this illustrated in the opening of the creation story. We see in verse 2 that the earth was a waste and a void. Chaos reigned. Darkness ruled. Bu...

I sent the manuscript for Missional Small Groups back to the editor today. It feels good to have it out of my hands. But I have a problem. Within the hour I started working on my next book. It was like an inner compulsion was propelling me to start writing. Actually I have already written about 25% of it written. It will be a book on Luke 14-15 that demonstrates how the parables of these two chapters reveal the missional nature of Jesus. I am discovering that my story of Jesus and the fact that the evangelical point of view of Jesus is not one that is missional in nature. Actually it is a story that reveals an unreal Jesus that we have to try to become like. It is a Jesus who asks us to travel to him, a distant Jesus who came to appease a distant angry Father. The evangelical Jesus of my history is one who stands on the stage, tells about Jesus dying on the cross because we are such idiots and God has to do something to reveal his glory and power. Of course this Jesus tells this with...