The Mission of God

For those of you who may not have known this, I recently began working on my Doctor of Ministry degree. The program is in Congregational Mission and Leadership. And I must say that I am pretty excited about it. Needless to say, you can expect to get a few blogs on ideas that have crossed my mind as I have been doing reading and course work. Thus the blog for today.

I read a great book The Ministry of the Missional Church by Craig Van Gelder. The premise for this book is that the Church being the church is not and should not be separate from the church being about the mission of God in the world. In other words you cannot separate church from mission, because in order for the church to be church, the church needs to be about mission. That is the premise. So what is the mission of God?

It is simply that God is seeking to bring back, to reconcile to himself, all of creation. Cool, huh? And so the church needs to think and operate according to this. How does_______ (fill in the blank) participate, contribute, is a part of the mission of God? This is not to say that whatever you filled the blank in with is necessarily bad, but I think that it provides us with a different framework for how we think about the things that are done as a church.

Have you ever had the feeling that the point of church was survival? We have to keep on keeping on. Or maybe perhaps that the activity of the church was limited to a local congregation? What this "mission of God" kind of thinking does is to challenge the local congregation to think a little more big picture. In other words, God has placed us in the very specific community that we are in, because he is about reconciliation, and we are to be about the work of reconciliation in this place. It isn't about merely surviving or feeling stuck in a location. But it is about being part of something that is bigger that we are, and being able to make a real, genuine difference. It is about thriving and living and experiencing life the way that it was meant to be lived.

This is such a very exciting topic. But at the same time is is very simple. It is the will of God that all people be saved. It is the mission of God to reconcile those people to himself. It is through the church that God works to bring that about. What an amazing and awesome privilege we have to be a part of that. Not even the angels get to partake of this great honor. God's blessings to you this week and always. I look forward to your comments and responses.

Sincerely,
Pastor CJ