Vol 3:5 Collaboration as Making Space for the Gospel in Participating with God in Mission

This week I reflect further on Craig Van Gelder’s and Dwight J. Zscheile’s The Missional Church in Perspective: Mapping Trends and Shaping the Conversation.  To reiterate, in this book, Van Gelder and Zscheile explore how the missional conversation has unfolded since the book Missional Church was published in 1998.  The conversation has moved in different directions, many which are indeed not very missional, but reframe perspectives, in missional language, which have little to do with discerning where God is active in the world. 

On p. 144, the authors raise this question: “One key question for Christian communities today is how to pursue their prophetic vocation within society apart from the framework of Christendom.”  This question asks how we are to be missional church without the privileges of Christendom upon which we have become dependent?

Drawing on insights from Lutheran theologian Gary Simpson, in which he expresses that missional communities need to exist at the intersection of public and private life, Van Gelder and Zscheile express that “congregations should see themselves as participants in God’s wider work in the world and society.  This takes place not only through the church but also beyond it in such civil society organizations as social service institutions and charities.  Congregations need to partner, collaborate, and participate in what God is doing in the world” (p. 144). They further clarify this by stating that churches “be spaces where the questions of human flourishing in a given community are brought for critical discussion that leads to action” (p. 144) that foster the common good. 

The nature of this collaboration is different from the kind of collaboration in which churches wrap themselves in a nationalistic identity in order to seemingly have relevance within society – where often it becomes starkly clear that a Christian group is more aligned with an American agenda than a Gospel agenda.  The missional call is a call to be collaborative in society, but not as a community that loses its identity, or sells out its identity, but rather collaborates and partners as a community of character with other societal organizations as a participating with God in mission, who is already active in the world through the Spirit.

In such missional collaborations, there is a making space for the Gospel in society, rather than a selling out or a diminishing of the Gospel in order to be deemed as relevant.  Our relevance is in our participating with God as God is active in the world.  In participating with God, we need to realize that we do not partner or collaborate on our own – but rather in our collaborations, we are conduits for the continuing work of the Spirit of God in re-creating human life, societal life, so that all may be made new.

In making space for the Gospel through partnering and collaborative efforts, we will need to find new ways of expressing the Gospel narrative – it is much more than merely engaging in evangelism telling people that they need God.  I believe it is through evangelism that we make space for the Gospel, but in ways that live out the Gospel rather than only give words to the Gospel – we proclaim the Gospel by actions, as well as words.  As one of my mentors noted – Jesus words are not the only revelation we have in the Gospels, his actions are revelation as well. 

So in our partnering and collaborating as missional communities, we make space for the Gospel – we level mountains and fill in valleys, making a highway for the Lord, so that God has transformational access into people’s lives.  In partnering we reveal who we are as a new community, revealing the Gospel through our actions of advocating for justice, of healing the sick, the blind, of setting the prisoner free, of expressing the year of Jubilee for the 99%. 

Making space for the Gospel is a walking with the Spirit, for the Spirit to have unimpeded access into the lives of humanity.  Making space for the Gospel challenges missional communities to not separate themselves from the world, but to engage the world in relationship, being in and among the world as communities of character, as communities of the Gospel – who live out the Gospel in such as way that observers may express the reality of the Gospel by witnessing the way we live and act for the common good of society. 

Whereas, Christendom gave us a false sense of our privileged status, being missional leads us to be a different kind of community that seeks to love the world as God loves the world, that relates to and engages the world as God does – from a place of servanthood and humility.  As we have eyes to notice what God notices, and in noticing develop collaborative relationships, missional relationships, we partner with God in bringing about God’s redemptive purposes in the world.  Such a posture helps us live into the reality that this mission is not about us, but about God’s love for the world and what God desires and is bringing about in making all creation new.

Dare we be such missional communities of character that make space for the Gospel in the world, by partnering and collaborating with groups, organizations, peoples in whom we see God at work?

If so, we will become a new kind of Christian community in the world – in the world, re-envisioning a new way to be the world because we partner with God who has a vision of a reconciled and recreated world.

Vol 2: 32 Mission and Evangelism: Open to Seeing What God is Doing in Us

Ongoing reflections relating to Ben Campbell Johnson’s Speaking of God: Evangelism as Initial Spiritual Guidance, which focuses on reframing evangelism within a missional perspective.

We have been exploring what it means to reframe evangelism as a conversation involving giving initial spiritual guidance or direction to people with whom the Spirit connects us.  Yet, I realize that I often am more quickly ready to provide spiritual guidance to others than receiving spiritual guidance in my own life.  To be missional in evangelism, we need to be ones who are also open to have others name the way God is active within our lives. 

A missional approach to evangelism involves learning to hear what God is doing in our lives.

Spiritual conversation is a two-way street – it is not only about our talking with others, or actively listening to what is going on in others (see last week’s post); it also involves being open to listen to what God is doing in us.

How do we expect to be aware and sensitive to how God is at work in others if we are not aware and sensitive to how God is active in us?  In sharing or naming where God is active in others, the conversation will inevitably turn to others asking how God is active in us.  Will we be able to respond?

Engaging in evangelism through a missional perspective is not only about “doing evangelism” as if it is a task in which we “do something” in the presence of others, no, it is about being open to the good news of God in our lives as well – or perhaps first and foremost: transforming us, shaping us, challenging us, empowering and equipping us, sending us to participate with God in God’s mission. 

Our lives are a laboratory for exploring how God is active in the world – we discover God active as God is active in us.  In naming or giving words to God’s activity in us, we begin to share our story that is being shaped by God’s Story.  God’s Story gives us a vocabulary, a framework for shaping our story.  We find the Exodus event describing desert wanderings in our own lives in which we discover God, disobey God, and rediscover God.  The parable of the Prodigal, gives words and meaning to the times we run from God in our lives.  Reading the psalms gives prayers and praises to times of despair and rejoicing in our lives.

As we learn to listen, see, hear what God is doing in us – as we learn to share this story of God’s Story in our lives, we become persons who become more adept to seeing, hearing, noticing how God is at work in the lives of others with whom we live among day to day.

Listening, being aware of God being active in us, is not an act of selfishness, but rather an act of awareness that equips and enables us to be aware and help others be aware of how God is active in them.

Missional evangelism then is a communal activity – requiring our being open to God’s activity in us, as we seek to be aware and lead others to be open to God’s activity in them.  This is how we walk together opening up our lives to the re-creating and re-storying activity of God in our lives and in the world.

May we develop our awareness of God working in us – to give us eyes to see and ears to hear God at work in the all of humanity.

Vol 2:31 Mission and Evangelism: Learning to Listen

Today’s reflection continues with Ben Campbell Johnson’s Speaking of God: Evangelism as Initial Spiritual Guidance focusing on reframing of evangelism within a missional perspective.

We have been taught that evangelism is about sharing the Gospel – and indeed it is, but too often, we misunderstand that sharing involves first and foremost the ability to listen.  To speak without listening is not to share the Gospel at all, but it is to perhaps pontificate, speaking not to the heart of a person, but merely putting the message of the good news out there.

A missional approach to evangelism involves learning to listen.

If we believe that God is at work in the world and that in being led by the Spirit of God to participate with what God is doing, then we can also believe that the Spirit leads us into conversations which have the possibility of developing into relationships. 

The first insight in learning to listen, according to Campbell Johnson, is realizing that the outcome of evangelism is not ours to worry about – “the power and outcome belong to God; we offer ourselves  as willing participants in God’s intention for the moment” (p. 71).  To be able to listen, requires us first to be listening to where God is leading us, with whom he is connecting us, so that we can be in a place with another to discover what God is doing in them and how we might name God’s activity in their lives.

Campbell Johnson, then describes three other characteristics of learning to listen.

First, one must learn to become an empathetic learner.  “To listen to another, [one] must lay aside their personal agenda” (p. 71).  This is to notice the person as God notices the person.  If our encounter is no accident, but a connection that the Spirit of God has led us into, then given attention to the other.  Hear what they are expressing; give attention to them; focus on their life experience.  Campbell Johnson states that this is the basis for genuine dialogue.

Second, one must learn to listen with one’s whole person – with eyes, ears, and heart.  Campbell Johnson states that with our eyes we observe the nonverbal cues of the person we are engaging in dialogue.  What does their posture, their facial expression say about what is being expressed in dialogue?  We are also to listen with our ears – not only the words, but their tone, their inflection, the context of the words – which enable us to gain an understanding of what the other is expressing. 

Finally, one must learn to listen through Gospel filters.  “These filters enable us to hear the narrative of another in the context of biblical truth” (p. 71).  In what ways does the person talk about their story with or apart from God?  We are seeking to become aware of how God is at work in this person’s life.  As we listen to them through a rubric of the Gospel, we will be able to name or address their longing for God, their longing for purpose, for direction; their struggle with alienation, brokenness, etc. 

In listening through Gospel filters we are being shaped by the Gospel in learning to listen for cues that God is trying to get us to see – cues which enable us to speak into a person’s life with the shalom presence of Jesus Christ – but not with a pre-rehearsed spiel, but rather to point out the touches of grace by which God is touching them.  In learning to listen, we discover how to express the Gospel in terms of the good news which is already being accomplished in their lives.  The Gospel, when it is more fully expressed in response for explanation – cf. the Ethiopian court official in Acts 8, finds a place of rootedness, finds a place in which the hearer is able to give assent because the Gospel is uncovering the brokenness in their lives and the healing that comes through Jesus Christ.

Francis Assisi’s observation, “Wherever you go preach the Gospel, and if necessary use words” is appropriate to developing the art of listening in being missional in evangelism.

May you have ears to hear what God is saying, and eyes to see what God is doing, as well as to see what God sees.