Category Archives: mission
I consider that the life of the Christian should exhibit a dispersive nature. Anywhere that we go is a place that we are sent intentionally. Sentness forms our identity. Below are some thoughts on that.
A visual narrative of Reality Boston’s 1st prayer tour
I just got back from a prayer tour for Reality Boston. The tour was represented by Reality’s from L.A., Stockton, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Carpinteria, and Ventura. Below are the blog posts narrating the trip through words, videos, and imagery. Enjoy!
Boston Prayer Tour || Introduction
Boston Prayer Tour || Day 1 (Video)
Boston Prayer Tour || Tim Chaddick on prayer tours (video)
Boston Prayer Tour || Day 2 (Video)
Boston Prayer Tour || Day 3 (Video)
Breathe in the city; exhale in prayer.
Color outside the lines
I have a few memories of coloring books from childhood–remember those?–if you went to Sunday school, they were often thickly stenciled images of Jesus holding lambs or a dozen children on his lap with a blue sash and a lackluster smile. But I didn’t care what it was; my job was to color it in! And oh did I. I spent way too much time getting the shades and tones “just right,” and making sure the crayons didn’t bleed into the borders of Jesus’ head, for fear that the he might turn out looking like a Smurf. I would get frustrated when one of my friends would grab a random crayon (like Razzmatazz), and begin coloring Jesus’ face with it, only to choose a different, also unnatural color, for his hands. Grr. Of course, this was further compounded by the kid’s blatant disregard for…
Coloring outside the lines!!
Yeah, that’s right—he kept scribbling outside of the bold black lines of Jesus’ face. Imagine my horror. Sometimes I would correct said person to remind them that the proper goal of art is to color within the lines. Later, I would get a taste of my own medicine, but instead of coloring books…it would come in the form of mission…
Mission in the church is often privatized.
We sometimes fall into the error of thinking that mission happens solely at the hands of a corporate entity. The New Testament shows a church that is both scattered and gathered; at some points in the week, we gather together as the church in a visible congregation, while other times, we are the church scattered and dispersed throughout neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces.
Because of the mega-church culture birthed out of the 1980′s, we have the “gathered” element of church down, but have forgotten what it means or looks like to be scattered. The easy reaction, then, to mission, is to relegate it all to a group of professional clergy, and the building where we meat as a gathered congregation.
Some churchgoers love the idea of mission, but still expect it to happen within the walls of the church building.
We evidence this by the large number of programs we depend on throughout the week for our quota of mission and evangelism. Programs are not bad, per se, but neither are they everything, and are certainly not the full spectrum of the church’s calling as a light to the world. And yet, our initial convictions when the local church lacks activity in the community, is to start a program: small group night, single’s night, homeless ministry night, street-witnessing night, etc. Instead of taking the responsibility (as the scattered church), we place it back on an impersonal institution (which is not the church). We are elevating programs to the highest level of mission, when Jesus relegated his highest levels of mission to small communities of ordinary people.
Church programs are our coloring line!
Think about this: if the entire church body looks to the clergy to get mission done, we are drastically limiting the influence and power of available church goers. We are taking 30, or 300, or 3000–however many members worship at our church–and bottlenecking a potential grassroots movement to the small capacity of the church staff! In doing so, we stifle a movement and relegate the exciting call of following Jesus to a few “anointed” people and their programs.
We’ve got to view mission as something that is much more broad than what the church staff, or selected leaders, are capable of launching and overseeing. We need to understand mission as a personal responsibility that happens within community, during the ordinary course of our daily lives. We must not depend on clergy, but on each other in the body of Christ.
I doubt that Jesus intended to change the world through weekly programs. But he seemed to spend a lot of time with his twelve disciples, doing life together.
Will the Kingdom of God expand only through official church programs, or might it allow the imaginations of the “laity” to run wild with missional zeal?
For crying out loud, let’s color outside the lines.
The Sheltered Christian Stakeout
Gabe Lyons posted a discussion with Margaret Feinberg about the tendency for Christians to become “sheltered.” I found the following quote more true than I am comfortable with…
Christians get pretty easily offended. When we find ourselves when we are confronted with the fallen world, or things that we might not agree with, we tend to react by withdrawing or pulling away and being offended by it. And it seems that Jesus’ approach or even Paul’s approach, as we read the scriptures is that he was provoked. He was provoked to engage. He didn’t run from it, but more or less tried to get involved in the conversation and listen and better help articulate what the gospel means in the middle of a fallen world.
How do we find the balance between being in the world (John 17:15-16), and being unstained by the world? (James 1:27)
The Kony groundswell
I am not involved with Invisible Children (IC), but I must say that their ability to influence swells of Millennials toward a cause is fascinating.
Their latest video hit 62 million views in a week, and has an ambitious goal: to make a tyrant famous. You’ll just have to watch it for yourself, if you haven’t already.
If IC can mobilize Millennials like this, what the heck aren’t we doing?
Millennials: The Generation of Promise. Pt.3
Myth #1 – College will automatically get you a dream job
A while back, I pointed out how the relentless pampering of an older generation has cultured Millennials. Soon after, we mulled over the lack of opportunities to spend our inherited greatness. Now we have a group of young people who feel that they’ve wasted their potential. An environment of coddling with no opportunities is a cruel trick.
But not as cruel as the trick you play on yourself by going to college.
Higher ed is what they tell every Millennial to do after graduating high school, yet no one explains how this is going to help. As far as we know, it’s a magical band-aid.
Sooner of later, you find yourself disappointed for toiling those four years, expecting a significant job, with benefits, and a $40K annual return, yet only experiencing cold-calls and shoulder shrugs. It turns out, that college degree is not as magical as you thought.
The one thing I would tell college students before they packed their bags for school… Read the rest of this entry
J.R. Daniel Kirk on withdrawal and isolation from the world
I’m reading through a book by J.R. Daniel Kirk, called Jesus have I loved, but Paul?, which seeks to harmonize what some see as discrepancies between Jesus’ mission and Paul’s. One of them is Jesus’ love for outsiders, and Paul’s supposed judgment of them. But after Kirk corrects this faulty understanding (e.g., Matt. 18; 1 Cor. 5), he then shows how we’ve lived out a different lifestyle than the intended mission of Paul to outsiders.
This sentence stands out, in particular,
Too often modern church concerns for purity entail a withdrawal from the world around us, creating an isolated community that stands in perpetual judgment of the world. (Kirk, p. 109)
Think of the rhythms and spaces that intersect your life outside of your Christian community. How do we take on the life Jesus and Paul lived while on mission among outsiders, without being judgmental of the world we live in? What does this look like with your athletic team? With your co-workers? With your agnostic friends? With the sexually promiscuous couple you met in class? With the binge drinkers next door?
Millennials: The Promising Generation
Millennials want to make a difference because they are pampered and sheltered.
When generational experts, Neil Howe and William Strauss, wrote their defining book on Millennials, they highlighted our generation’s pros and cons, namely, that we had a desire to achieve greatness, and our parent’s generation was the driving force behind this.
We are the result of a domino effect.
Some mothers will recall the tragic crime in September 1982, when “a cyanide-tainted Tylenol triggered an October wave of parental panic over trick-or-treating” (Howe and Strauss, 43). On its heels was a “national hysteria over the sexual abuse of toddlers,” an immediate distaste for classic 80′s horror flicks victimizing children, replaced with a flood of sitcoms portraying kids as the heroes. While parents filtered the family television, American school teachers experienced a newfound pressure to raise better kids in the classroom. And the trend continued.
Our generation is almost entirely conditioned for greatness
By the time we reached grade school, we had already adopted a skip in our step (or perhaps a leap in our step). And why not? We were being preened to take over the world by an earlier generation that wanted to leave a better legacy. We evolved from the latchkey kids of our ancestors to kids inheriting all the keys on the latch.
Millennials are unlike any generation that has gone before. And because of this, there is an overwhelming pressure to succeed. Unfortunately, the opportunities available to an aspiring millennial are underwhelming enough to damper the passion of the most resolute college grad. Our parents didn’t just leave us with a different outlook on life, they left us with a different life. Look no farther than a broken economy, steep living prices, and a job famine. It’s as if someone taught us how to fish in the middle of the Sahara. The world’s greatest generation, pampered with hopeful expectations, and sheltered from the grim truth of everything our parents never wanted us to experience. How do we handle this? Can we take advantage of the momentum we’ve been given?
What do you do when someone promises so much and gives back so little?
Setting Yourself Up For Failure
Go with me on this for a few minutes…
Billy Graham has preached the gospel to 2.2 billion people [1]. According to his staff, 3.2 million people have responded to his gospel message. Gnarly numbers, right?
Now imagine that God’s calling on Billy Graham was to preach the gospel to 4 billion people. What would that do to his numbers? Wouldn’t that mean that he was unfaithful with his calling?
Now imagine that God put you where you are, to work the job that you have, and cultivate the relationships you are in for the glory of God. And let’s say that God had a calling on you to preach the gospel to that one person you’re always eating lunch with in the cafeteria. Let’s also imagine you did, and the person got saved. That would mean you were faithful to God’s calling on your life. Oh, and it would mean something else…
You were more faithful than Billy Graham!
You see, hidden in much of the Millennial’s drive for significance is the mistaken assumption that our lives must be remarkable in order to fulfill our calling. We like to see change, and we love to be instruments of change, so it make sense that our litmus test for success is how much we are able to accomplish.
Does God have the same standard we have for ourselves? Are they even related?
To think that God has been waiting centuries for you to come along and shake things up, or that he was loosing sleep until Billy Graham showed up is a bit anthropocentric. God does not think more highly of charismatic leaders than stay-at-home mothers. And if we live with expectations like that, we are weighing significance much differently than God, who once noted that “If you are faithful in little things, you will be faithful in large ones” (Luke 16:10). He wasn’t trying to motivate Millennials to climb over life’s stepping stones to get to better things; he was accentuating loyalty.
God wants faithful servants, not superstars.
There is enough of the latter invested in his Son, Jesus Christ. If he so chooses you to be the next Billy, than by the grace of God, you are who you are (1 Cor. 15:10), but stop idolizing what others have told you is “radical.”
Of course, all of those previous situations were hypothetical; I have no way of knowing the specifics of what God called you or Billy Graham to accomplish; I’m pretty sure Billy Graham has been faithful, and at the very least, beloved by all who call on the name of Jesus.
But the point still stands.
We make too much out of our own accomplishments.We keep score, and God does not. The problem with scorekeeping is that our identities get wrapped up in the excentric nature of a particular calling, to such extent that Millennials may become depressed if they are not doing something as remarkable as “everyone else.” The solution to this is to remind ourselves that nothing we do is extraordinary; we are “unworthy slaves” doing what we ought, in the presence of an extraordinary God (Luke 17:10). He can save 3.2 million people through Billy Graham, Billy Jean, and he could have chosen anyone to do this because he is the one actually saving.
What God wants are a few faithful men and women, vessels in the hands of a master craftsman.
Why you should write a personal mission statement
Last week I railed about the mess of New Year’s resolutions that are motivated only by a longing for self-worth.
Assuming it sunk in, I want to back up the drama horse a bit and balance that chariot. See, the LACK of structure or goals can have the same effect. It goes something like this…
Well, since Jesus loves me, I’m not going to be proactive.
Well, since my wife loves me, I don’t have to vacuum the carpets anymore.
Well, since my boyfriend loves me, I don’t have to tell him I appreciate him.
Well, since Y3K is coming eventually, I don’t have to create a budget.
You get the point. It’s still good to plan, and even New Year’s resolutions can be fine, if they flow out of your identity as an image-bearer of God instead of sucking on your identity.
But instead of making New Years resolutions, I prefer to make personal mission statements.
Ever make one of those?
Remember those nice corporate buildings in the 90′s that always sported those engraved plaques in their foyers with a pithy statement expressing why you should care about them?
Those were mission statements.
A mission statement is a short description of an objective to which you are called.
Business do these a lot, and some are really good…
“Finding the very best ingredients raised with respect for the animals, the environment and the farmers.” – Chipotle
Simple, clear, and driven. They know what their goal is, and whether or not they’re reaching that goal.
Other mission statements, well, not so much…
Guided by relentless focus on our five imperatives, we will constantly strive to implement the critical initiatives required to achieve our vision. In doing this, we will deliver operational excellence in every corner of the Company and meet or exceed our commitments to the many constituencies we serve. All of our long-term strategies and short-term actions will be molded by a set of core values that are shared by each and every associate. – Albertsons Read the rest of this entry
Is Tim Tebow a missional millennial?
In case you haven’t already heard of Tim Tebow, the outspoken Millennial turned Broncos star quarterback, I’ll catch you up in three hundred words. Whether it is changing the improbability of winning, making a decision to wait until marriage, or having an ability to inspire a team, Tebow keeps upsetting odds and showing up rivals.
But…it’s his faith in Jesus Christ, not excessive success, that has created the most buzz. 
Tebow is well known for giving credit to Jesus for his football victories. He is constantly crediting his “Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,” while ending interviews with “God bless.” During a 2009 BCS game, he inscribed “John 3:16″ on his eye-lids with black ink, eventually provoking the NCAA to create “The Tebow Rule” forbidding inked messaged on football players eyelids.
He prays publicly too!
Praying has been done by football professionals long before Tebow existed, and is nearly cliche, but what makes him controversial is the saturation. Tebow will actually get down on one knee while the rest of the stadium is doing something completely different in order to speak to God. This eventually sparked a phenomena called “Tebowing,” and has resulted in a bunch of satirical blogs showing people “Tebowing” in random places.
People either love Tebow or hate him.
Christians love him for his outspoken willingness to use his platform for the Gospel. What type of platform, you say? How about the 94 million people who Google searched “John 3:16″ after his eyelid stunt during the 2009 championship game. That’ll preach.
Of course, some oppose Tim Tebow’s antics, not for reasons of faith, but for the way he wears his faith on his sleeve. While his Christianity has meaning, I do believe saturating a worthwhile platform with pithy sayings can have more of a door-to-door salesmen effect on most unchurched people. You can see this tension develop in a SNL skit that came out recently… (warning: some distasteful jokes)
What do you think? Is he being effective on mission, or is he doing more harm than good? Is he taking himself too seriously? Or do critics need to chill?
I suspect that both critics and evangelical supporters are taking themselves too seriously.
He’s a football player and a Christian, so let him live out both. Critics should spend less time tearing apart an upstanding player amidst all the scandals than normally plague sports. And Evangelical Christians should rely less on celebrities to see the Kingdom of God expand, and look at ways we can be on mission!
