Thoughts Along The Journey

Awhile back, one of my good Australian friends gave me the book, The Message of Mission, by Peskett & Ramachandra, and which I have just recently begun to read.  In the preface, the authors summarize what they consider to be one of the key elements of mission: “We must also emphasize that Christian mission leads us again and again to the foot of the cross: all Christian mission must be shaped by the cross; the cross must never be behind us, but always in front of us.  For this reason, we have drawn attention again and again to mission from the underside … and to the importance of mission out of weakness, which has been the way mission has been conducted through most of the history of the church.”  My heart resonates with that statement.  Yet I have often wondered how weakness practically works out in our lives, our ministries, and the mission to which God has called us. 

Forgive me for quoting a rather lengthy piece from Bauckham’s book, Bible and Mission which I referred to in a previous post, but I think he sets us on an interesting path towards reflecting on this question in practical terms.  It’s found in a section entitled, “To all by way of the least,” where he reflects on 1 Corinthians 1.  He writes: “In this passage and its context Paul does something rather remarkable.  In the first place, by echoing the Old Testament, he identifies a consistent divine strategy, a characteristic way in which God works, to which the origins of the church at Corinth conform.  The God who chose the first Corinthian converts is the God who chose the least significant of all the peoples (Israel) for his own (Deuteronomy 7:7).  This is Hannah’s God, who exalts the lowly and humbles the exalted (1 Samuel 2:3-8), just as he is also Mary’s God, who fills the hungry and dismisses the rich (Luke 1:51-53).  This is the God who chose the youngest of Jesse’s sons, David, the one no one had even thought to summon (1 Samuel 16:6-13).  This is the God who habitually overturns status, not in order to make the non-élite a new élite, but in order to abolish status, to establish his kingdom in which none can claim privilege over others and all gladly surrender privilege for the good of others.”

Living out of weakness (perhaps another way of talking about our value of interdependence) would at the very least call us to lay aside our self centered desires in order to work in community with others, to “gladly surrender privilege for the good of others.”  Now that would be hard.  Then again, that’s why we need Jesus.

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This past Sunday, we headed out with some of the Paris Prayer Conference participants to pray for the town where we are involved in a small house church.  We met for prayer with Christian and Florence who lead the group.  As they shared about the spiritual needs of the area, they mentioned that D-, a woman who recently started coming to the house church and was baptized just two weeks ago, had talked to them about how she could already see how the Lord was going to “expand” our group and start another in a neighboring town where she lives.  The surprised yet excited look on their faces said it all. 

Here was a woman who had been called out of darkness by our “pursuing” God, who recognizes that it was He who particularly sought her, and who testified that when she read the Gospel of John, she immediately felt that all her wanderings were over and she could finally “unpack her suitcases” as the expression goes in French.  Here was a woman, barely a year old in Jesus, who was already thinking and acting with a universal mindset and heart.  “This is mission,” as Richard Bauckham said.

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I have been reading Richard Bauckham’s book, Bible and Mission: Christian Witness in a Postmodern World.  I stumbled on the title in one of the footnotes of Christopher Wright’s seminal work, The Mission of God.  In the opening chapter, Bauckham comments about the notion of the particular and universal in the Bible and its relation to mission: “Mission takes place on the way from the particularity of God’s action in the story of Jesus to the universal coming of God’s kingdom.  It happens as particular people called by God go from here to there and live for God here and there for the sake of all people.”  Sounds a lot like what we hold to be true for ourselves about mission and our involvement. 

However, Bauckham goes on to apply this thought to how we read the Bible missionally: “The Bible is a kind of project aimed at the kingdom of God, that is, towards the achievement of God’s purposes for good in the whole of God’s creation.  This is a universal direction that takes the particular with the utmost seriousness.  Christian communities or individuals are always setting off from the particular as both the Bible and our own situation defines it and following the biblical direction towards the universal that is to be found not apart from but within other particulars.  This is mission.”  It sounds like Bauckham wants us to see that the Bible talks about the individual believer and the community of believers as always “setting off” to multiply themselves through other believers and communities.  If this is God’s universal direction, then it should greatly influence our particular efforts.

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