Unregulated Behaviour

In his letters Paul gives out various instructions and advice to the growing churches - coping with the practicalities of messy real life. Yet he also has in mind a better way: living by the Spirit. Allowing the Spirit to develop God's own nature in us will transcend and surpass any list of instructions, making rules and formulations redundant.

Galatians 5 gives us a list of nine:

Love - the overflowing of yourself for one another 

Joy – a delight in life that comes from God irrespective of circumstances

Peace – a calmness, again from God irrespective of circumstances

Patience – waiting in expectant hope

Kindness – offering a better way, a new opportunity, even if not deserved

Goodness – generosity, an outpouring from God in your life

Faithfulness – sticking with it, even in the difficulty and the bad

Gentleness – a quiet, considerate humility

Self-control – strength in control, able to master competing forces on your life

Note how each of these flows from God. Furthermore many of these flow out to other people. They will all inevitably affect our relationships with others. As such they are all key attributes for mission, whether actively by the way we behave towards others, or passively by what people will observe in our lives. 

Do You 'Go to Church'?

Hebrews 10:25 has that much quoted 'let us not give up meeting together'. This is often connected with Sunday worship, and reasonably so. It forms a biblical exhortation to 'go to church'.

But what is 'going to church' all about? What are the underlying reasons to do so (and to not give up doing so). Two great posts by David Fitch stir thinking helpfully. A couple of years ago he posted 6 Reasons Not To Go, and now he posts Two Reasons, the first of which is effectively a summary of those original six negative reasons.

I recommend you read these posts! He correctly points out that the language of 'going to church' itself is unhelpful, since after all 'church' is the collective of disciples rather than a place to visit or event to attend. However, within the collective there will be gatherings or meetings - hopefully the kind of which the Hebrews author doesn't want us to give up on.

Note the Hebrews passage also has a clear missional aspect: v24 'spur one another on to love and good deeds'. I'm sure the author must have had an outward motive here. Fitch picks this up: in 'going' to the gathering in order to 'submit' (reason no. 2) a believer is shaped by the Spirit to cooperate with God and His mission.

Fitch doesn't explore (at least in these postings) how the gathering itself may be missional, nor does he really argue one way or the other about frequency (other than an implied cultural assumption of weekly on Sunday). Can we learn to go and 'submit' in a way that is accessible and helpful for non-believers as well (in the hope that they will one day 'submit')? On the question of frequency should this submission be one expression of a life of submission (perhaps expressed in different ways at different frequencies)?

Have fun trying to answer these, but first ask yourself "Do you 'Go to Church"?, and "If so, why?".

Youthwork = Cross-Cultural Mission

At a seminar we held on 'Youth Culture' last night, our guest speaker proposed that we should view our youth work as cross-cultural mission. I think he hit the nail on the head.

Our young people have never known life not surrounded by mobile phones, laptops, ubiquitous Internet, Internet retailing, and numerous other things that we simply did not have in our generation. It is therefore no wonder that they see the world and relate to it differently than we do. Their assumption-base, and the feeds into their assumptions are quite different to ours.

Cross-cultural mission is where we go to people who think differently, have been brought up with different assumptions, and thus live differently to us. That is our youth!

The crucial point is to then realise that church for them may turn out looking quite different to how it looks to us. The best cross cultural mission examples are where missionaries have engaged the culture, led people to Christ within that culture (bringing challenges to the culture where necessary), and then allowed the new believers to develop patterns of worship that make sense in that culture. I.e. they allowed the gospel to flourish within the culture so that the Spirit could start his transforming work on that culture.

This will mess with our heads, because the youth are on our doorsteps (and some even in our existing churches!) rather than elsewhere in another country.

In other words the potential gospel flourish and creative work of Spirit which may develop culturally-sensitive patterns of worship may actually need to happen within our existing churches!

This should not be a surprise: for God to transform the outside world we need to let Him start with us.

Broken and then Re-formed

Having previously talked about a high point in the kingly line of Israel, if you read on to 2 Kings 25 you of course find that it then all goes down hill. By the time you get to the end of the book it is worse than desperate. Complete devastation, the end of the road. It could hardly be more broken.

The prophets could have said 'told you so' time and time again. This outcome was no surprise - it had been predicted, and could be seen coming a long way off.

Total system failure and breakage, making the 'blue screen of death' look like a mere blip in comparison. Yet while computer users simply switch off and start all over again in such circumstances, God has a different way. He uses the circumstances as part of His even bigger plans. The prophets wrote about this too, although they couldn't live long enough to see how it became reality.

Check out Micah 5:3-4. An abandoned Israel until the time of a new birth, someone who will stand and shepherd the flock in the Lord's strength. It amazes me how God can exercise redemptive purposes even in such abject failure.

None of us in our right minds wants to be heading towards a 2 Kings 25 scenario. But God's purposes will move on - with us or without us.