Vol 2:13 Mundane Mission: Living Missionally from Day to Day

The idea of missional has been around for a number of years, long enough for people to “cookie-cutter” their own ideas into what missional means. A whole group of people who are getting what it means to be missional also express that it is best expressed in edgy environments. It seems to me that being engaged in missional ministry has also taken on an aura of “coolness” – but what about those who are not “cool,” is there any hope for them being missional? Is there room for the mundane in being missional?

Years ago Lewis Smedes wrote a book entitled Mere Morality: What God Expects from Ordinary People. In it he expressed that it is about morality for the ordinary person – “life on the plains” (viii). Is there such a thing as being missional for the ordinary person? I think there is.

Now this does not mean that God’s mission is mundane – God’s mission is about making all creation new; it is about reconciling humanity to God and to one another; it is about removing the injustices of racism, oppression, poverty; it is about healing and setting free those who are ill, alienated, imprisoned – whether physically, emotionally, mentally, economically, and spiritually. There is nothing mundane about what God is doing redemptively in the world to make all things new.

But what is mundane about God’s mission is that it happens in the ordinariness of the everyday. The place where the Spirit of God is active in enacting God’s mission, of inviting God’s people into partnership with God in God’s mission are places like grocery stores, at gas stations, in our homes, at our places of work – wherever we find ourselves living out our lives. Often we think we are in mission when we are doing something special for God – like serving homeless persons at a soup kitchen, or stocking shelves at a food pantry, or hanging out with people different from us in a bar or café. Such ministries are indeed missional, if we are engaged in them because this is where we see God sending us. But these missional endeavors happen only on Wednesday nights at 7 pm or Friday nights from midnight to the early hours of Saturday, they are not the stuff of our daily living in which we are raising our kids, driving them wherever, loving and being loved by our spouses, working hard to make ends meet.

So what do we do with the rest of our time? Is not being missional a 24/7 calling? Indeed, it is! It’s in our comings and goings of our daily lives that we discover the myriad ways God is active in the world. As we ask God to help us notice what God is noticing, as we ask the Spirit to make us sensitive to the people around us, as we ask to live out the compassion of Jesus in the midst of daily living, we begin to see that God is active all around us. It is in the ordinariness of life that we have the opportunity to be less than ordinary in bringing the presence of Christ, in being sign, foretaste and instrument of God’s present and coming reign.

I believe being missional in the ordinariness of life – being missionally mundane, if you will, begins with a seeking to be aware of God’s presence and God’s activity in the minutiae of our days – maybe we will discover in having eyes to see what God sees that no day can ever be ordinary again.