The Relational Mission

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 ...

Today I stayed sick and missed worship with my church. I tuned into a couple of religious programs hoping at least to hear God's word, but I was rather dusappointed. Even though there were many scriptures quoted, I was saddened by the fact that all of the seemed to be geared toward finding success, God's will for my life or unlocking some kind of secret to being all I can be (for God of course). I must admit that I did not last very long and watched a recording of Psych and then fell asleep. I so longed to hear about the good news of God coming, of his inbreaking of time and how he expressed love, true love, that the world so needs. Instead I got a warmed-over version of the American gospel: if you do x then good things will happen to you. I've heard enough about what I need to do. What about what God has done? What about what God is doing? What about what God will do in the future?

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'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.