Did I forget to do a blog last week?! Only just realised.
Last week I had been away again, this time on a residential training conference for Mission Community leaders. Mission Communities (MCs) being the county-wide strategy here for developing networks of churches, the better to reach every man, woman child with the good news of Jesus Christ. It was a very useful week, in lots of ways. There was a significant degree of hope in the room, notwithstanding that none of us really knows what a MC will look like! There is no blueprint: it's up to each group to work it out for themselves. One key feature common to all, however, will be the necessity of far greater and deeper collaboration between ordained and lay people to 'be' church where they are. These old divisions must dissolve, in favour of a full-blown New Testament view of diverse ministries of many kinds.
After two weeks of several nights away, it's been good to be home-based again. However, there was still an 'away-day', also with MCs in mind. This time it was our own MC: we have a steering group of a dozen people charged with working out what our network of 14 churches, in town and country, will look like. We did an exercise together, 'building' a MC out of various blocks. What would be the components of our MC? Examples were: a variety of ministries, creative new acts of worship, engaged and engaging youth church, and a dedicated social life!
In the course of our discussion, we found ourselves again asking 'what do we mean by mission?' I don't know how many times I have been in a group trying to agree a suitable definition! Rather than spend the rest of the day trying to do so again, I found myself impromptu coming up with a simple one: God beyond the walls. Would that serve as a suitable container within which to put the concept? 'Walls' of course refers to the physical building of church (how often does 'mission' become 'getting people in' rather than getting Christians out?!); but the word also refers to the psychological, spiritual and social walls we tend to put up, differentiating ourselves from others 'not like us.' Jesus spent so much of his time, his mission, reaching out to 'others.' And we need to go wherever the Spirit of God takes us to share his love, grace and mercy.
Tomorrow's reading from Mark 2 shows just what Jesus was like: forgiving people their sins, preaching to crowds of people whom the Pharisees regarded as 'riff-raff' (the Message translation), eating with tax collectors and 'sinners', calling such people to discipleship. His mission was beyond the walls both of synagogue and social/religious convention.
McLaren concludes, With Jesus, faith is where it all begins. When you believe, you make it real.
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