Missional Community and Work
Thursday, January 18th, 2007
The picture above is of a sculpture at Launde Abbey. Yes we were there again last Sunday, no tree climbing this time though. It was another Alpha away day, and another amazing time. There are times when you just HAVE to beleive in God! ;o).
The rest of the week has proceeded fairly normally - loads of great stuff going on: last night another ‘mum’ from our kids club “JFC” said she wanted to do Alpha. She came to the History of Christmas Dinner, and was so amazed by the evening, it was great fun, she said, and i didn’t get preached at at all!! Honestly, I said, that just isn’t our style…
Yesterday I was at King’s Bible College to take my first Tutorial of the year. We are planning to work through Chalkies book “The Lost Message of Jesus” [always fun because of the controversary a small bit of it raised...]. Anyway, this week we had no directed topic planned in. So we discussed this: “Our Theology [what we think about God] should influence our Missiology [what we think about mission] which should influence our Eccleisiology [what we think about the church and do as church]. If we reverse any of these we end up on the wrong track”. It was a really good discussion, despite nearly loosing a couple of people along the way.
What do you think about that?
Anyway, on talking about missiology, we were trying to work out where mission starts. I think it is imperative that we understand the mission starts with God [missio dei] AND that mission starts with the activity of God in creation, i.e. not after the fall. Plus, i think it is important that we see people as having a mission [a purpose] in creation. For this we looked a little more in depth at Genesis 2:2-5. I remembered looking at this during our “mission month” a few years ago [remember that?]. I particularly remember the shock when I suggested that work was there before the fall!! lol! I relooked at my brief notes form then, and decided to share them with you!
Man’s mission/purpose in creation: relationship with God, relationship with each other [community] and Co-creativity with God:
Co-creativity:
Because this is not directly building into people it is harder for us to get hold of how it is mission. But it is crucial for a biblical view of work.
Work: Gen 2:2-3 - “work” as God’s work occurs 3 times. The sense of the Hebrew word is: “craftsmanship, deeds/acts; emphasising skilled labour and its benefits”. In contrast with painful toil, labour, heavy work. It is used in the OT to talk about all kinds of work.
Genesis 2:5,15 - the second time the idea of work occurs [note: before the Fall]. but it is a different Hebrew word whch means to “work, perform, serve, worship, carry out, honour”.Work started with God, he worked/created, and then put mankind in charge of his creation to work it. The implication is this: That creation only fulfils its full creative intent when mankind works in conjunction with God, to be co-creative with God, and to serve God, to worship and honour God, by working his creation to allow it to fulfil it’s potential. It means to allow the latent potential of creation to come forth through the servant leadership of the ones who are entrusted with it. [i.e. STEWARDSHIP].
This allows for creativity, work, action, business running, people serving, home-making, child rearing, church leading, justice bringing, restoration bring, healing making, order bringing, team-building, community making to all be missional when they are done in light of the coming Kingdom of God started in Jesus.
Let’s be clear - there are many work opportunities out there that that are not these things. They destroy communities, bring ill-health, are unjust, are not good stewards of the creation with which we have been entrusted.
We are fulfilling an aspect of what it means to be a missional community when we engage in those kind of activities today [debt counselling, family building, counselling, pregnancy counselling]; and also when we encourage and equip each other to live out our human mission every day. “to spur each other on to love and good works”. To help each other to keep a kingdom perspective on our lives. To help each other work through the realities of this in every days lives [that often can be so difficult].
The kingdom of God is right now working to transform lives and communities, and in fact the whole world.
We can join with God in the action of restoring creation [Romans 8:18:25]
