After taking a week off for the 4th of July, this past Sunday we jumped into the 3rd of 5 labs this summer, looking at another foundational piece of mercyview.
It was great again to gather with friends, to pray for one another and the birth of mercyview, to look at Scripture, to dialogue, and of course, eat good food (this week, it was Oklahoma Caviar!).
Our prayer is that by the end of the summer, the DNA of mercyview is clear and God will call together a group of men and women who have an overwhelming desire to plant the Gospel in the city of Tulsa.
For those who have missed a lab or are “peeking over the fence” via the blog, here is the content from the previous labs:
–Lab #1: The Gospel: The Center of Everything [download synopsis here]
–Lab #2, Salt and Light: An Alternative City Within a City, For the City [download synopsis here]
In Lab #3, we talked about what it means to live “sent.” Specifically, we talked about being a missional people, sent as missionaries to be witnesses. We broke it down like this:
1. Sent
2. Sent as missionaries [1]
3. Sent as missionaries to be witnesses [2]
Introduction
–When we talk about being “sent,” we are talking about the “in the world” part of the “in the world but not of the world” concept taken from Romans 12:4.
Sent
[John 17:15-19]
–Jesus prayed for His people to be in the world, living as a city within a city, and living sent. In John 17:15-19, we see Jesus pray three things in His high priestly prayer:
1. Don’t take them out of the world
2. Keep them from the evil one + sanctify them in the truth
3. Send them into the world
–The word “missional” captures the heart of how we do the “in the world” part of Xian community – is the adjectival form of the word “mission”
–Most believers readily grasp the idea of Jesus being sent to the world. The fact that Jesus was the “sent one” is one of the most fundamental identifications of Jesus, called the missio Dei. The issue is to realize that as Jesus was “sent”, His prayer is that we would also be “sent.”
–The concept of a missional church is recognition that God is a sending God and we, the church and individual believers, are to live sent. Our sent and sending identity is connected ontologically with the very existence of the church.
–Why be “missional?” Alan Hirsch says:
When the church is in mission, it is the true church. The church itself is not only a product of that mission but is obligated and destined to extend it by whatever means possible. The mission of God flows directly through every believer and every community of faith that adheres to Jesus. To obstruct this is to block God’s purposes in and through his people.
–Research indicates that the vast majority of church activities and groups, even in a healthy church, are aimed at the insiders and fail to address the missional issues facing the church in any situation. If evangelizing and discipling the nations lie at the heart of the church’s purpose in the world, then it is mission, and not ministry or fellowship, which is the true organizing principle of the church.
Sent as Missionaries
[Philippians 2:1-8]
–The old adage was this: If you preached to believers, you were called a “pastor.” If you preached to non-Christians in your own culture, you were an “evangelist.” If you needed a passport to get there, you were a “missionary.” This is not helpful…
–“…all Christians are missionaries or they are not Christians. The only kind of Christian there is, is missionary.” (Theodore Gill)
–”What kind of missionary would go to a foreign city, find a place to live, find a source of income, find where to buy food, maybe find a hobby and a wife, and then kick back and enjoy his surroundings, never befriending the locals? We wouldn’t call him a missionary – we’d call him a resident.” (Winfield Bevins)
–Two ways in which we are to be missionaries:
1) Incarnationally
Jesus had to be God to be able to lift us out of our sin, but had to be fully human to create the right conditions for such redemption to take place. It is from inside the human condition and experience that God fulfills his own requirements for the salvation of the human race.
Three theological themes of the incarnation:
a. Identification: The incarnation embodies an act of profound identification with the entire human race. In an act of unspeakable humility, God actually takes upon himself all the conditions, even the limitations, the struggles, and doubts of humanity. To identify incarnationally with a people will mean that we must try to enter into something of the cultural life of a “people”; to seek to understand their perspectives, the hurt, their real existence, in such a way as to genuinely reflect the act of identification that God made with us in Jesus.
b. Locality: The coming of God among us was in Jesus constituted a “dwelling” among us (John 1:14) and geography itself took on a sacred meaning. Jesus became Jesus of what? Nazareth. Geography matters! If you want to incarnate the Gospel in a particular setting, you will have to think about living in that setting.
c. Sending impulse: Incarnational mission implies a sending impulse rather than one of “extraction.” God is a missionary – he sent his Son into our world, into our lives, into human history. Incarnation implies some form of sending in order to be able to radically incarnate the various contexts in which we live. It extraction from culture vs. insertion into culture.
“You cannot become a part of the organic life of a given community if you are not present in it and experience its cultural rhythms, its life, its geography. We too need to practice the missional discipline of presence and identification with any of the people and groups we hope to engage with.” (Alan Hirsch)
Two objectives of incarnation:
a. Real connection: This objective here is for not-yet-Xians to see that Jesus is “for” the unreached people group. Particularly in the Missional Communities, we want to introduce people to the network of relationships that make up that believing community so they can see Christian community in action. People are often attracted to the Christian community before they are attracted to the Christian message.
b. Real demonstration: This objective is to demonstrate that Jesus is “with” the unreached people group. Being thoroughly loving and gracious within the community will transform attitudes toward Christ. In a sense, the incarnational community has to completely reframe the unreached people group’s perceptions about Jesus and the church.
“…the only hermeneutic of the gospel, is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it.” (Leslie Newbigin)
2) Contextually
Perhaps the most important text on the subject of ‘contextualization’ is 1 Cor 1:22-25 — Paul offered Christ’s salvation in a way the culture could relate to (offering true power to the Jew and true wisdom to the Greek) and which connected to ‘baseline’ cultural narratives. And yet, at the same time, it confronted each culture’s central idolatry (calling Jews to repent of works-righteousness and Greeks of intellectual hubris) with the meaning of the cross.
Contextualization can be defined as the dynamic process where the never-changing message of the Gospel interfaces with specific, relative human situations. Because the Gospel is always God good news, it cannot be defined w/o reference to the human context.
“Contextualization is not ‘giving people what they want’ but rather it is giving God’s answers (which they may not want!) to questions they are asking and in forms that they can comprehend.” (Tim Keller)
How we contextualize:
a. Speak in the common language: avoid “tribal” language, “we-them” language, and inspirational talk and speak as if not-yet-Xians were there.
b. Enter and re-tell the culture’s stories with the gospel
c. Create Xian community that is counter-cultural and counter-intuitive: embody a ‘counter-culture,’ showing the world how radically different a Xian society is with regard to sex, money, and power.
Sent as Missionaries to be Witnesses
[Acts 1:1-9]
–There are two sides to the missional coin – in other words, there are two primary ways that every Christian can become missional.
1) The first is by sharing a verbal witness. This is more commonly known evangelism. This is when you share the gospel message with your words.
Once we firmly trust and believe in Jesus as Lord and Savior, we must make his name known to the entire world. This is also called the Great Commission.
Many people want a form of evangelism they can compartmentalize in their schedule, switch off, and go home from but Jesus calls us to a lifestyle of love (1 Thessalonians 2:8).
“We can identify forms of evangelism that involve sharing the Gospel without sharing our lives, as well sharing our lives without ever having the courage to share God’s word. Paul’s ministry involved both: sharing his life and sharing the word of God.” (Steve Timmis/Tim Chester)
What does evangelism in the post-Christendom era look like?
Three steps in sharing our faith via the enter-challenge-re-establish approach.
a. Enter the framework: uncover “belief positions” and “themes of relevance”
b. Challenge the framework: show tension between their theme and their belief
c. Re-establish the framework: relate a brief presentation of the gospel to their theme
2) The second way we can fulfill the mission of God is called the social witness.
God is concerned about the needy, destitute, hurting, poor, and orphans of the world. The word of the Lord tells us that we are commissioned to care for those around us who cannot care for themselves.
In the abstract- evangelism is more important than social justice, not because the soul is more important than the body, but the eternal is more important than the temporary. However, practically —if you don’t care for the needs of people, why will they listen to you? The reality is that the more we do justice the more effective our evangelism will be.
Justice can precede evangelism. It creates plausibility for the gospel proclamation, and in reality it often draws non-yet-Xians in. This then leads them into Xian community and leads to a great openness to evangelism.
Conclusion
“Every heart with Christ, a missionary; every heart without Christ, a mission field.”
Dick Hillis
==================
[1] Adapted from Alan Hirsch/Michael Frost: The Shaping of Things To Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church, “The Incarnational Approach” (Chapter 3) and “The Contextualized Church (Chapter 5).
[2] Adapted from “Contextual and Missional” by Tim Keller from London Church Planting Consultation, 2008-2009
