The obstacles to ‘Project Love’ are formidable. Chief among them is our obvious and nearly universal propensity to care for ourselves alone, or to care for others only if the benefit outweighs the cost. It may be too strong to say that we are wired for selfishness; but it is astounding how easy it is for us — upstanding sons and daughters, husbands and wives, workers and leaders- to turn into what Philip Roth has called ‘black holes of self-absorption’: manipulating, cheating, deceiving and exploiting others — and all with a clear conscience. That inner pull toward self-absorption and away from care for others is reinforced by a culture stripped of grace. In this market-driven and market-saturated world in which we live, it makes less and less sense to give — to impart even a tad bit more than we expect in return.
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Following Mark to the Son
In his landmark ‘political reading of Mark’s story of Jesus’ Binding the Strong Man, Ched Myers identifies three important plot lines that are found throughout Mark’s Gospel until the very end where they climactically converge in the Passion event. These plots are 1) Jesus’ creation of a new community of disciples, 2) Jesus’ relationship and mission to the crowd, and 3) Jesus’ confrontation with the powers that held the people of God in their grip. In his introduction to the commentary Sam Wells writes, “these three stories, of disciples, crowd and authorities, are interwoven in Mark’s Gospel like three strands of a rope… The three stories, in the end, constitute one story. And that story is the sending of Jesus by the Father, crystalized in the Father’s words at Jesus’ baptism ‘You are my beloved son,’ epitomized in the Father’s words at the Transfiguration, ‘this is my beloved son,’ and climaxing in the Centurion’s words at the cross, Truly, this man was God’s son!’ Jesus’ intimacy with his disciples, his mission to the crowd and his confrontation to the authorities are all dimensions of his being at the heart of God.”
Learning How to Be Foreign Missionaries at Home
“The Church is not a place to go, but a people who go.” With these words the great missiologist Harvie Conn challenged American Evangelicals to begin to think of mission whenever we think of the Church. The age of the mission field being a far away land, maybe across an ocean, has officially ended. Philip Jenkins surprised many American and European readers when in his book, The Next Christendom, he showed the extent to
which Christianity in the ‘Southern Hemisphere’ (Asia, Africa and South America) has experienced explosive growth in the last few decades. While Christianity in the global south doubles and triples in size every few years, the same faith in Europe and America is rapidly fading both in number and influence. What can we who ‘stay’ learn from our friends like Carrie Pennay who have spent time in foreign mission work about how we can be missionaries right here in Harrisburg? I can think of a few things we’ll have to get used to if we are going to be effective missionaries.
First we will have to accept that we are minorities and strangers in our culture with all of the changes in posture that requires. Serious Christian faith and ideas are not taken seriously (much less as default positions) by most Americans and certainly not by the institutions that shape our national culture. That means we need to learn how to be more gracious and provocative in our posture and presentation of Christian faith. It is not the case that we can simply say the same things and act the same way and eventually our neighbors, co-workers, classmates and civic authorities will catch on. The onus rests on us to make a compelling offering up of the beauty of Christian life to a culture that expects very little from us. Foreign missionaries do not arrive on the scene and expect that they have a receptive audience. They know that they are strangers in a strange land and that realization shapes every decision they make. It also prevents them from dividing word and deed into separate ways of expressing Christian faith.
If we truly are a shrinking tribe, we’ll have to get better at working with other Christians across traditional fault lines. It makes no sense for us to remain separate from other faithful Christians, much less to keep up some of the old tribal skirmishes. The countless empty or re-purposed church buildings in our cities are a testament to a bygone era in which every neighborhood sustained congregations from several branches of the church. If you were German you were probably Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist or maybe Roman Catholic and you could find a congregation in your neighborhood to join. British? Congregational or Episcopalian. Scotch-Irish? There would be a Presbyterian church or two to pick from. Those days are over, many or most of those magnificent buildings are empty, and the number of Christians in our city can no longer maintain so many congregations or the traditional divisions they represent. Not that we’ll all become one congregation, but to live in a climate that is cold toward faith Christians will have band together to stay warm and accomplish the work to which we have been called. Foreign missions agencies have done this for ages. They know there is too much work to be done for us not to team up.
As I already alluded, we’ll also need to become more cognizant and about who God has called us to serve and purposeful about serving them. Missionaries don’t relocate to the hovels and ghettoes of the world for a better worship experience. They don’t do what they do to make their life more cozy or simply because that’s how it has always been done. Missionaries are creative, limber and masters of service. Churches often make all their decisions with the people who are already inside in mind. But to become missionaries we will have to practice making decisions that are intentionally for the benefit of outsiders. The missionary takes his or her inspiration from the great foreign missionary policy of Jesus Christ who was “among you as a slave.” In the life and ministry of Jesus Christ we see one whose words and actions of service were inextricably entangled. The church cannot expect that we can focus on right teaching and abandon the realms of virtuous and moral life to the wider culture to embody and define. In a historic moment when the moral fabric of American culture is being tested and re-imagined, Christians cannot expect that communal and governmental programs or legislative decision making will automatically reflect Christian perspectives regarding the dignity of human life and freedom. That work is up to us to perform as the Christian Church. That means more than ever we will need to enact the Christian word in provocative faithfulness and radical, ‘eye-catching’ embodied manners.
Having re-oriented ourselves toward the service of ‘outsiders,’ many of us will need to learn how to share the joy and love of Christ with our neighbors with courage, honesty and patience, just as foreign mission workers must eventually learn the language and customs of the people they have come to love and serve. It’s called translation and missionaries are always engaged in this work. The thing about translation work is that the newcomer to the language does not get to be the one to determine how well he or she has learned it. That is up to the people we are seeking to communicate with. Learning a new language requires relationships of trust and a lot of time and work. Learning to speak about your faith in a dialect that can be understood by your neighbors is an important Christian skill that can’t be neglected. You may not know how to talk about your faith in ways that don’t terrify you or feel contrived or which don’t sound that way to others. But bearing witness is not something only preachers or foreign mission workers do. We all need to learn how to share the Good news about Jesus and now in a culture that increasingly has little or no good category for such things. Missionaries have always been doing this in all kinds of places and beautiful ways. We have a lot to learn from them as we now learn to translate the gospel into 21st century American life. May God give us the faith,hope and love to follow his call, ‘going’ as we stay.
Read, see and hear more:
Evangelism: Preaching Grace and Doing Justice, Harvie Conn, 1982
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