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“If you pee in the water you’ll never reach your goals” will make perfect sense when you read the explanation of this modern-day whakataukī! In an era of great fluidity and ambiguity, we need to prioritise what will help us reach our ‘New Creation’ destination. Spoiler alert: it has everything to do with relationships.
Until very recently it seems, Western Christianity has been solely focused on ‘the dark side of the moon’-a pathological perspective of humanity. We should have no illusions about sin’s devastating effects, but neither should we lose sight of our inherent goodness. Missions needs a shift in perspective towards wellbeing.
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.
When leading a community, it is not only advisable to listen to the community but listening should be considered as nourishment to the leader. As the world becomes more resistant to impositional approaches, the attitude of Christ should guide the Christian leader forward.
2020 has kicked off with some troublesome signs of the times. The Biblical narrative encourages us not to be afraid of the proverbial waves in the tempest. Rather, we should wait and expect the Master to call for calm.
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…