Oct
25
Missions, messiness and love
Filed Under Christian Living, Missions, The Church
We’re in the final day of First Presbyterian Church’s 51st World Mission Conference. We have certainly felt anew the welcome of God and the call of God in being a part of his beautiful and hilarious mission. You ought to download Steve Malone’s sermons at fpckosciusko.org (or better yet, get your free iTunes subscription to all FPC sermons for automatic download onto your computer! Instructions are on the FPC website too.).
I can’t help but think about how messy it all is: church planting in another culture or in the U.S., campus ministry, mercy ministry, training pastors, pastoring a congregation. Even putting together a missions conference gets messy! The Church is never an engine that one can build, then pull the cord and watch it run. Things are always going wrong. Plans are frustrated. Goals aren’t met. People fail to deliver what they promise. Committees don’t work efficiently. Roofs leak. Relationships are fragile.
Once upon a time such realities frustrated me. I usually felt guilty because I couldn’t make things work. If only I were better informed or a better motivator or better organized, then I could crack the whip and get everything to work. But God has taught me over the years through pastoral experience and through mission trips to Japan, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Russia and Mexico that messiness is always part of the picture. More than that, messiness is the setting for the love of Jesus to shine at its brightest. Read this from Eugene Peterson in Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places:
A primary task of the community of Jesus is to maintain this lifelong cultivation of love in all the messiness of its families, neighborhoods, congregations, and missions. Life is intricate, demanding, glorious, deeply human, and God-honouring, but–and here’s the thing–never a finished product, never an accomplishment, always flawed in some degree or other. So why define our identity in terms that can never be satisfied? There are so many easier ways to give meaning and significance to our human condition: giving assent to a creed or keeping a prescribed moral code are the most common in congregations….Belief and behavior are essential, but as the defining mark of the Christian they lack one thing–relationship. They are both prone to abstractions or programs. Abstractions (learning right belief) are good; programs (learning right behavior) are good; but it is also possible to master the abstractions and carry out the programs impersonally. In fact, it is far easier if done impersonally.
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