Introduction
Last week I said that the mission of God is to
reconcile the world to himself. We have messed up God’s good world, and God
wants to fix it. God works ceaselessly to mend the broken relationships that
flow from human sin. This is our joy and our hope in all the trouble that
surrounds us.
What then is the mission of God’s People? What do we
who call ourselves Christians do? We cannot save the world: Only God can do
that. We cannot renew the whole of creation: Only God can do that. So, what do
we do? We participate in God’s mission by living into God’s desire to reconcile
the world to himself. As the text from 2 Corinthians 5 reminds us: In Christ,
God is reconciling the world to himself, and God has given you and me the
ministry and message of reconciliation.
This morning, I want to look at the mission of the
church, the mission of God’s people, and consider those things that we do in
response to God’s great act of redemption.
Holistic Mission
Consider the key statement that serves as the
foundation of the Great Commission: “All authority in heaven and on earth has
been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples.” That all-encompassing
authority echoes the basic Jewish prayer, which you can still hear if you go to
the synagogue: Baruch attah Adonai Elohenu, Melech ha olam. Blessed are
you, Lord our God, King of the universe. When Jesus claims ultimate authority,
he is claiming to be the king of the universe, the Eternal King. Our mission as
his followers, then, is “holistic”. That is, it includes everything in life.
There is no part of our lives outside of God’s mission, and there is no part of
our lives outside the mission of the church.
Six years ago, I heard Christopher Wright lecture on
the nature of mission. Wright has written a magisterial work titled “The
Mission of God”, with a companion volume, “The Mission of God’s People”. He was
the speaker for a gathering of the Evangelical Missiological Society, meeting
in February 2016 at Ambrose University. He made the point that, if all
authority has been given to Jesus, then our mission as followers of Jesus must
encompass everything in this world.
Wright developed this idea then by constructing five
basic areas of the mission of the church: 1) Evangelism, 2) Teaching, 3)
Compassion, 4) Justice, and 5) Creation Care. He simplified this five-part
outline into three basic areas: Building the church (evangelism and teaching),
serving society (compassion and justice), and creation care. We can use this
outline to consider briefly the mission of God’s People in today’s world. [Note
that at the centre of all three is the constant invitation to life in Christ.]
Building the Church
Consider the ministry of building the church. Last
Sunday, I talked about the liberation war in Zimbabwe, which led to significant
church growth in the Brethren in Christ Church. We noted that God’s reconciling
mission was at work through the problems and pain of that war. How did the
church participate in God’s mission?
I remember a report from the Lobengula church – a
church of several thousand people in Bulawayo. The congregation sent out
“gospel teams” into the surrounding countryside to preach to people in the
rural villages. One of the teams reported the response. They came to a village
in the Matopo Hills and found the people at work in the fields. They told them
they wanted to hold a service with them. The people said no, they were busy
planting their fields before the rain came. The young people in the gospel team
then asked if they could help finish the planting. When they were done, the
people gladly agreed to hear the gospel.
This is the church in mission – God at work through
God’s People. In this case, the church combined preaching to others with
teaching the young people what it meant to live in the light of Jesus’
resurrection. We could give other examples, but this one is enough for now. I
encourage you to learn from the people in your congregation who are engaged in
missionary work. I encourage you also to go to Missionfest Manitoba, which this
year is being held April 29 to May 1 at the Church of the Rock. Illustrations
abound, and there is more than enough room for all of us to participate in the preaching
mission of the church.
Serving Society
Serving society includes ministries of compassion
and justice ministries. We could consider the work of International Justice
Mission or talk about the work of agencies such as MCC, World Vision, or
Samaritan’s Purse. I note this morning a local venture in Steinbach, which has
grown out of our own congregation. I’m on the board for this group, so it’s close
to my heart.
Some years ago, one of our members named Irene
Kroeker was a teacher at the SRSS. She worked especially with young people who
were not able to function well in society. When they graduated from high
school, they did not magically become able to function in society. They trusted
Irene, and when they got into difficulties, they would call her for help. Her
response led to the formation of something called Steinbach Community Outreach.
Our congregation gave Irene office space and a room to hold some clothes and
food. She gathered a small team of workers around her and began helping those
people in Steinbach who had no fixed address. They came to her, and she helped
them navigate the system of social support set up in Manitoba.
Today, SCO leases the second floor of our church
building. They serve the invisible people of Steinbach, which includes those
who have no bed inside even when the temperatures outside hit their January
lows. Last Sunday, while I was speaking here, Irene was describing to our
congregation what that looks like. Charlene (our administrative assistant)
arrived at the facility last week, when it was close to minus 30 outside, to
find one of their regulars huddled up against the door. She thought at first he
had frozen to death there, but he was just waiting for us to open up so he
could go inside. Now we are considering options for providing shelter for those
who are left outside in such conditions.
One may wonder, can’t we provide housing for
everyone? We’re working on it. We have plans and government funding to build a
24-unit apartment block in Steinbach. We have several individual houses and
apartments that provide for people who are temporarily homeless. Even so, there
is a small group of people who refuse all offers of housing. That’s who is caught
outside when the temperatures descend to the depths.
We don’t make preaching or evangelism part of the
ministry. We help people fill out their taxes or deal with Service Canada. We
give out food and clothing. We have classes on cooking or sewing. This is
essentially a ministry of compassion. Even so, we see people come to faith in
Christ. I think of Arthur (not his real name), who came to SCO some years ago.
Over the years interacting with our volunteers and the staff, Arthur came to
faith. Then he died, about a year ago. We were able to have a real funeral for
him and rejoice in the final healing that he had experienced. He died with hope
because compassion and evangelism flow naturally together. This is the church in
mission – God at work through God’s People.
You notice that in my first example of the gospel
team compassion and evangelism went together. James told us that it is wrong to
say to someone in need “God bless you” while refusing to help with the physical
need in front of us. In holistic mission, it makes sense that physical and
spiritual and social and political will flow together. Sometimes, we have tried
to say that the church’s mission is one or the other. One person will insist
that MDS or MCC is real mission; another will insist that only preaching
leading to conversion is real mission. The truth is that both are part of the
mission of God’s People. We participate in God’s great work to reconcile the
world to himself.
Creation Care
The third area – Creation Care – may surprise us. It
shouldn’t. The Bible begins with the creation of the world, and as the climax
of creation God gives the mandate to care for the earth. We are both part of
creation and stewards of creation. This category of steward reminds us that God
demands an accounting of his images, his representatives, in the world. When we
think of the judgment at the end of time, when God holds all people to account,
one of the questions God asks you and me is, “How did you care for my
creation?”
Given the distress that we see in the physical world
around us, it makes sense that a gospel of hope must also bring hope for the
creation. I wonder sometimes what kind of a world my granddaughters will live
in. I fear for the problems that human greed and overconsumption have caused,
and I grieve for the distress my grandchildren will experience.
One thing is completely clear to me. The root of the
problems our world faces is human sin, and only the gospel can fix them. When
God reconciles all things to himself, God brings hope for the healing of the earth
as well as of all people on the earth.
This idea is not so new as you may think. Twenty-two
years ago, George Verwer, the founder of Operation Mobilization, preached a
sermon he called, “Seven people lying on the side of the road.” [This message
was part of his ministry to Providence College and Seminary in November 1999.] He
asked, if the Good Samaritan travelled the road today, who would he find lying
on the side of the road? Here is his list: Children at risk, Abused Women, The
Extreme Poor, HIV/Aids Patients, People with Impure Water, The Unborn, and The Environment.
OM is completely focused on preaching the gospel, and they see clearly that the
gospel includes the whole world.
A Rocha is one organization that has focussed on the
environment, on creation care. Peter and Miranda Harris began A Rocha, with
their first centre in Portugal in 1983. “A Rocha” means “Rock” in Portuguese.
Peter Harris has written two books about the early years, Under the Bright
Wings and Kingfisher’s Fire. The Harris family with another family
moved to Portugal to do an environmental project. They ended up planting a
church because they wanted a place to worship. Over the years A Rocha has moved
into many different countries – Lebanon, Kenya, France, the UK and Canada.
I remember reading about their work in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. Peter
Harris noted that they were working in a combat zone, trying to reverse environmental
devastation. The Aammiq Wetland had been degraded by agricultural runoff, and
efforts to reverse the damage were seen as impractical given conflict between
Israel and Lebanon. Nevertheless, starting around 2000, A Rocha was able to
work successfully in a conflict zone – a dramatic example of God’s reconciling
mission, reconciling both the earth and the people of the earth with each
other. This is the church in
mission – God at work through God’s People.
Today, A Rocha is in 20 countries including Canada
and including Manitoba. They work with government agencies and church agencies
and Christians who care about God’s creation.
God’s Missionaries for
God’s Mission
Consider, then, the kind of people we have been talking
about. The people in A Rocha are ordinary people who care about creation. The
evangelizers from Lobengula church were young people who had just come through
a war. The volunteers at Steinbach Community Outreach range from young people
to retired folk. God’s missionaries include us all. There are specialist
missionaries who go on special assignments. Sometimes we think that they are
the only ones who carry out the mission of the church, but the truth is that
everyone of us is part of God’s mission in the church.
I remember a story Jon Bonk told about Prem Pradhan,
sometimes called the apostle to Nepal. Pradhan had been an airplane pilot in
World War 2. Born a Hindu, he converted to Christian faith after the war under
the preaching of Bakht Singh. Over the next 40 or more years, he was
instrumental in leading thousands to Christian faith in the Hindu nation of
Nepal.
Bakht Singh. He was a secular Sikh who
was pursuing his studies at the University of Manitoba. His first winter in
Winnipeg (I think in 1929), he was at the YMCA, when a man named John Hayward
befriended him. John and Edith became good friends with Singh and hosted him
often in their home. There he began to read the Bible. Reading John’s gospel, he
became convinced that Jesus was the one he should follow. On his return to
India, he became an evangelist, whose ministry led to Prem Pradhan’s own
ministry.
John and Edith Hayward exercised a ministry of
hospitality and set in motion one part of the mission of God’s people, working
with God to reconcile the world to himself.
Conclusion
Our Scripture passage reminds us that all missionary
outreach – whether evangelistic or teaching, whether compassion or justice
ministries, whether creation care in its various forms – all of this is
intended to invite people to faith in Christ. You hear how Paul says it: “We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his
appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: be reconciled to God.”
We are ordinary people, but God uses us to bring the
wealth of the gospel to the world. Paul describes us in the passage we read. We
may not see how what we do brings people to Christ, but we follow Christ daily,
because God has given us the ministry and the message of reconciliation. As a
conclusion, I read these words from the New English Bible (the 1970
translation), which captures something of what I am trying to say.
A basic theme in 2 Corinthians is the way that God’s
power works through human weakness. The young people at Lobengula may have felt
that the aftereffects of the liberation war were beyond their healing, but God
worked through them. The problems of homelessness seem too great for us in
Steinbach on a bitter winter night, but God is working through us to touch the
lives of all God’s children. The environmental problems we fact in our world
are absolutely overwhelming, but God is at work through God’s healing to bring
new life. What we see on the surface is our weakness and inability. What is in the
depths of reality is God’s power at work. As Paul puts it in 2 Cornithians 6:
We
wield the weapons of righteousness in right hand and left. 8 Honour and dishonour,
praise and blame, are alike our lot: we are the impostors who speak the truth, 9 the unknown men whom all
men know; dying we still live on; disciplined by suffering, we are not done to
death; 10 in our sorrows we have
always cause for joy; poor ourselves, we bring wealth to many; penniless, we
own the world.
Fort Garry EMC
13 February 2022
Text: 2 Corinthians 5: 11 to 6: 11
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