A Kelly Update
Also in this Edition:
Poem – Summed
From the Archive – Church and Kingdom from Church Actually
This image is of a pebble Chrissie picked up on a beach in Cornwall. She was walking and praying, her footsteps on the sand setting up a regular, repeated rhythm. As she listened to this rhythm, these words came to her, fitted somehow to the steady beat, “Don’t lose sight of my goodness in this season of believing.” Chrissie was so struck by this phrase that she found a pebble and, once home from the beach, wrote the words on it. They have sustained us through a number of seasons of waiting. On reflection, they are an apt description of our whole faith journey! It seems that there is always something we are moving towards; something we are waiting for. Our dreams are always just beyond the horizon of our reality. They always call us further up and further in.
We have wondered at times if this is an unusual lifestyle. Is it strange, even at 65 to still be looking to the future for the fulfillment of the promises of God? The answer is that strange or not, this is a biblical lifestyle. Abraham lived and died ‘looking forward to a city whose architect and builder is God.’ (Hebrews 11:10) You don’t get much time for looking back when there is always something to look forward to.
Right now, our season of believing relates to two significant areas. The first is the church in Caen. We are living in promises we received directly and very personally over 30 years ago, that we would one day be able to settle in and serve the city of Caen. Now that we are here, we are seeing a beautiful community of faith come into being and move, step by step, towards maturity. French and non-French; locally born and expatriate; young and old, this eclectic, colourful community is a constant source of joy – yet we still dream of more. We are urgently seeking a new space to meet, and from which to serve the city. We are eager for the fruition of the many ways in which God will call this community to engage with its culture. We long to see the churches of France move from a ‘victim mentality’ – always the minority, never fully understood – to an engagement mentality – shaping culture; transforming lives; raising a beautiful sound in this most beautiful of countries. These are dreams that have a price tag attached: of time, commitment, finance. There is no such thing as short-term mission here in France – it’s the long haul or it’s nothing. Not the least of our challenges is sustaining our own financial base as we continue in this long-term commitment. We do need to build up our support base. If you want to know more, you can read our latest update here.
The second area in which we are in a season of waiting is over the future of Bethanie, our ‘blessed farmhouse’ one hour outside the city. Our plan was to hand over the running of Bethanie this year to a worship-based ministry from the USA, but they have been unable to raise the necessary funding. You can read the update to the process here. We are left in a quandary. The sale of Bethanie was agreed by our Board more than two years ago – it is part of our strategy to move into the city and invest fully in the growth and development of the church, but now we have no buyer. Our prayer is to know the wisdom and the guidance of God in the decisions we must quickly make. How do we discern the voice of God in such circumstances? Is there another buyer waiting in the wongs, who will keep Bethanie as the kingdom jewel it already is? The bible promises a voice saying ‘this is the way, walk in it’ (Isaiah 30:21) but such voices are not always easy to hear. There is noise; interference. The advice of others. Our own fears. Here though is our commitment – we won’t lose sight of God’s goodness in this season of believing.
Thanks you for your partnership with us in these areas. Please do include us in your prayers.
You’ve summed up and sorted
The hairs of my head
You mourn when the smallest
Of sparrows falls dead
The lillies are laughing
The wildflowers are fed
How much more
Do you care for me
How much more
Are you there for me
How much more
Will you prepare for me
Fresh-baked daily bread
Central to Paul’s description of the church in Ephesians 3 is the idea that while God is at work within the church, his goal is to achieve something beyond the church – so far beyond, in fact, that the very courts of heaven are affected. Taking the New Testament as a whole, it is clear that this “something” is the kingdom of God or, as described in Matthew’s gospel, the kingdom of heaven. This kingdom, essentially the condition within which the will of God is done “on earth as in heaven”, is the goal to which the church is called. As Jurgen Moltmann has written, “the mission of the church is not to spread the church but to spread the kingdom”. Understanding what the kingdom is, and how the church relates to it, will enable us to develop an understanding of mission that is colourful, robust and compelling, and frees us from the twin traps of narrow conversionism on the one hand and bland liberalism on the other.
Our problem is that we tend to interpret mission in one of these ways. In the first, mission is entirely and exclusively to do with persuading other people to become Christians. Whether we call it evangelism, outreach or faith-sharing, it has the same goal: the numerical growth of the church, as individuals make the decision to convert. Recruitment becomes the overarching purpose of the church, and when we ask what we are recruiting people to do, the answer comes back, “To recruit others!” In this model the only growth that counts is numerical growth, and the sole focus of the kingdom is the conversion of the individual: not to a life of purpose and beauty, but to a life of converting others. At best this reduces the biblical vision of the kingdom to the narrow scope of individual salvation. At worst, it turns the whole enterprise into a pyramid selling scheme: an Amway model that our friends and neighbours are quite right to steer clear of.
The conversionist approach takes a vital and important element of mission, and tries to make it the whole deal. Faith formation must be part of mission. If the church is the means by which the kingdom comes, then the growth of the church, by definition, offers opportunities for the growth of the kingdom. Every life surrendered to the purposes of God is a further opportunity for his glory to be seen. But conversionism alone is not enough, just as the raw decision to follow Christ is not enough to sustain a lifelong, life-transforming faith. Beyond the decision there is discipleship, and discipleship is all about the kingdom of God.
The alternative view is that everything we do is mission. God loves us and everything we do under the benevolent dome of his love is mission. Whether or not people become Christians. Whether or not the church grows. Whether or not we see measurable, accountable change. It’s all mission because it all matters and God sees and knows it all. The kingdom fades into a mildly improved version of what we already know, and everything we already do is baptized by our “missional” intent. This is not unlike the prayer meeting where we forget to pray, gossip instead and then close by saying, “God, you have heard every word of our conversation…” As if talking becomes prayer just because we say so. But if all our words are prayers, prayer ceases to exist as any kind of meaningful exercise. And if everything is mission, mission disappears. With this approach mission loses all shape. If we can’t say that an activity is explicitly not missional, then there is nothing to be gained from saying that another activity is. Jesus, Mahatma Gandhi and the team from Extreme Home Makeover blend together into a beige-coloured stream of niceness, and there is no sense in which a biblically informed cultural engagement can be distinguished from any other.
In between these two views there is a third option, articulated in the New Testament and offered as the church’s job description. In this view, God has established the church as the community in whom his intentions will be vested. He calls that community to work and pray for a very specific goal: the coming of his kingdom. This is further defined as the condition in which God’s will is done on earth. The mission of God is for the will of God to be done, and our participation in that process is our missional calling. Anything, in this view, that moves some aspect of the created order from rebellion to obedience, from God’s will not being done to God’s will being done, is missional.
Further, Paul helps us to see this in specifically ecclesial terms. Because God has chosen to bring the kingdom by shining his wisdom through the church, we can further define our own missional participation in God’s purposes; to say that any activity in which God’s wisdom, shining through God’s people, results in God’s will being done where it wasn’t before, is a missional activity. Mission cannot simply be a mindless, undiscerning embracing of culture in all its forms: rather it is a determination, in every expression of culture and at every level of society, to see the will of God done. This model includes evangelism and faith-formation, because these activities, by definition, call for a movement from rebellion to obedience. Evangelistic mission is constructed on the notion of the will of God being done, where it has not been done before, in the life of an individual or group.
The evangelists can take their stand, alongside others in the church, as kingdom-builders, but they cannot claim to be the only ones. The kingdom also includes justice in commerce; beauty in art; an end to addiction and pornography. It leads to swords being remodelled as ploughshares, and lions meekly sleeping next to lambs. It involves the hungry being fed and the naked clothed. It includes transformation in the personal, relational, social and global dimensions. It includes every kind of life-improvement where that life-improvement comes about because the wisdom of God is poured into and through the people of God.
Mission is the will of God being done because of the light he shines through his people. To cite Eugene Peterson’s beautiful rendition of Matthew 5, we can perhaps say that mission takes place wherever God’s people bring out the God-flavours of the world; wherever the light shining through them brings out the God-colours. Mission is colour in a monochrome world. It is shape in the world of the flat. It is the declaration and delivery of the Creator’s intentions. I was once told by a good friend who is a committed Methodist, and no fan of John Calvin, that “no significant mission had taken place” in the 200 years following the European Protestant Reformation. In his view, which I respect but respectfully reject, the Calvinists didn’t make much effort to convert people, and therefore “did little or no mission”. Another friend of mine, a pastor in France, used to carry with him a map on which were marked with neat red dots the 600 separate Christian schools that the Calvinists established across France in those same 200 years. Six hundred schools, financed and staffed by passionate followers of Christ and offering a biblically based education to thousands of French children. Is it even remotely fair not to call this mission?
Makoto Fujimura, a Japanese-American artist who for many years painted just two blocks from Ground Zero in New York, is both an elder in a Protestant church-plant and a successful and highly regarded expressionist painter. Is he “missional” in the first activity, but not in the second? Is his art, acknowledged by critics as “forging a new kind of art, about hope, healing and redemption, while maintaining visual sophistication and intellectual integrity”, not also an expression of his faith? And as he and artists like him wrestle to reflect the beauty of God’s kingdom in their work, do they not, as much as the most successful of preaching evangelists, warrant the support and prayers of the church? The kingdom comes when the will of God is done. The church is truly the church when it works and prays for that to be the case. Mission is everything the people of God do to make the kingdom a present, earth-rooted reality. Church is what we call the process by which we help each other achieve that goal.
Kelly, Gerard. Church Actually: Rediscovering the brilliance of God’s plan, Oxford, Lion Hudson, 2011
