BLOG 11.5.19. THE MONDAY MORNING MISSION FIELD
I identify with a wonderful fellowship of Christian brothers and sisters, Sunday by Sunday. I look around at all those worshiping with me, and observe lots of young families, men and women engaged in professions: architects, musicians, lawyers, environmentalists, university professors, truck drivers, home-makers, librarians, small business owners, and those, like myself who are retired. We often get encouraging reports from mission partners in southeast Asia, or Paris, or Italy, as well as agencies of humanitarian ministries locally and abroad. At the close of each Sunday service we receive the charge: “Go and serve the world as those who love our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”
If that’s not a missionary commissioning, then I never heard one. It is saying to the church that we are being sent into the Monday morning world as the incarnation of Christ’s new creation, as his missionaries in the realities, the homes and neighborhoods, the schools and workplaces of this metropolitan area. It becomes the more urgent/strategic and important as we learn that more and more persons are forsaking the church. It reminds us that our coming together for worship is that time in which all of us are equipped, encouraged, formed, and refreshed in our calling to be the sons and daughters of light in a very real mission field.
A couple of generations ago, Becky Pippert wrote a popular work entitled: Out of the Salt-Shaker, the thrust of which was that salt doesn’t accomplish anything if it stays in the salt-shaker. Likewise, if those of us who are God’s people are content to rejoice in our Sunday gatherings, but ignore our missionary calling to the Monday morning world in neo-pagan culture of North America, we become essentially ‘salt-less salt’.
It means that we need to become knowledgeable about the context of our calling. We train cross-cultural missionaries to do cultural exegesis, to learn what makes a particular context what it is, its dynamics, its assets and liabilities. Every home, every neighborhood, every workplace, every school has a culture of its own. Each has its own inhabitants, its own evidences of brokenness, its own good and its own broken (sometimes pathological) persons.
It is in the realities that God’s new creation humanity are to incarnate his love by their lives of excellence, their lives that put flesh and blood on the fruits of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5). It is in such a calling that we need wisdom in knowing how to pursue such a calling, how to listen, how to be gentle in our disposition, … but never passive in this Monday morning mission field. We’ll pursue this further in coming Blogs. We’ll look into points of contact with often resistant others that will provoke them to inquire further.
But remember, this is every believer’s calling. It is what we were made for.
_______
