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In our polarised world we would do well to consider the nature of plants that both reach towards the light while digging down into the earth to extract nutrient rich water. Rather than either/or there is much need to hold in tension the myriad different aspects of the people of God’s participation in the mission of God.
You’ve got to start somewhere and little steps can achieve great things. But can we achieve God’s mission? Is it a project we are ‘tasked’ to finish? What if God’s mission was eternal? How would that alter our perspective? Step by step we are called to obey and follow, but not necessarily to accomplish God’s mission.
It can be easy to use slick ‘visionary’ hype to motivate people and resources toward achieving a goal. Often a well defined method accompanies the emotional appeal as the means to achieve the goal. Proverbs 19:2 warns that zeal without accompanying knowledge, applying a method without understanding, can lead to sin.
We have become accustomed to applying dramatic rhetoric to motivate people to engage in missions. I return to “Reaching The Unreached” and “Finishing The Task” as phrases that are overdue for reassessment.
For some time now, missions has been wrestling with a shift from a 230 year-old era to a new one. We are moving from a colonial to a communal impulse. A new context is revealing new learning for new effectiveness in missions.
The objective of missions determines how missions is conducted. When we view the objective as engaging unreached people groups it gives rise certain strategies to achieve. It’s time to realign our missions objective with Scripture.
The media is making much of former Christian leaders (supposedly) abandoning their faith. Properly understood, a direct result of our faith is the incorporation into a collective. Western autonomy undermines this. How might we reclaim it?
In the face of great demand for great leaders, many leadership books have been and are being written. They focus on many things, even servanthood, but tend to overlook one major prerequisite for leadership: great following.
Indigenous people are making a stand around the sacred nature of land in the face of commercial development. For the first time in NZ’s history, representatives of the ‘settler church’ are rallying in solidarity. This is important to note for missions.
The core missionary responsibility of the people of God is to transmit the news of what God has done in Christ to the whole world. Rather than a fully formed commodity, we need to understand that what is transmitted is the seed of a reality story…
One of the persisting myths in theology and missiology over the past century & a half resides in an assumed belief that indigenous ways of knowing are rooted in a construct called “animism”. For the sake of the gospel it’s time to put that to rest.
Following on from last month’s post, we have more instances of extremist violence and pushback on some local Christian oratory in the public space. Here, I reflect on reactions to imposing our beliefs on others.