Dear Brian,
Thanks for checking in with me on Sunday. It was great to talk to you. I have to tell you how encouraging it has been to see God moving in your life. Who would of thought that we would both be living downtown Toronto and helping to start a site here? Not me.
When you asked me about my class on Sunday it got me thinking. I want to explain to you what I have been learning in my class because I think you could really benefit from it. You know how you told me that you have struggled with what your purpose is? Well, it turns out that the Church in North America has really struggled with this as well. We know that we are supposed to be doing something here but there is a lot of confusion of what that looks like and it seems that most churches are losing the trust and commitment of people. So this class is really about how we can me effective leaders in our community by encouraging us to be a different type of community than what the world offers. It’s all about fostering and encouraging God’s children to be what we are called to be, the people of God. Let me explain.
We live in an interesting time. After almost 1700 years the church no longer has the same voice within the structures of our culture. The majority of people don’t look to their local churches when making decisions or enacting new laws. You probably have heard the term, Christendom. That is what the world experienced when the Church had privileges within the structures of the world to help enact laws and holidays in order to push the general public towards following God through a top down structure. I know what you are probably thinking. Yes, that has caused a lot of problems but it took us a while to get to the point where we could see that and it wasn’t always a problem.
Over the last few hundred years, society in the west has developed into a very individualistic culture. I think anyone can see that. We look out for our own interests and fight for our own rights and privileges even if that means that we step on the rights and privileges of others. Our economic system encourages the hoarding of possessions and money and the production of more and more in order to continue growth and sustainability. We can see the damage that has caused us as we have slowly run out of resources and look to other places to find them. Our social structures changed into roles and titles within the economic system where the more influence and power you have to more you are seen as important. We have seen our own agendas as most important while at the same time we’ve been tied to jobs that feed the system of marketing to our individualistic mindset. Our understanding of truth has been defined by what we can measure and prove through science and study while ignoring our feelings and emotions and intuition. You have probably heard the term modernism. That’s what our parents have grown up in.
This all started to shift about 20 years ago when the system experienced a economic downturn. The things we were told to trust and believe in failed us. Profits were down and so was income. People lost jobs and didn’t know where to turn. Around this time a generation of people started to look for truth in other places but since we have been trained to be individualistic and encouraging of our own rights and opinions we looked to what we believed was individual truth. This is now. This is what most of our generation have grown up with. Marketing campaigns directed at our individual identities and opinions, cars which allow us to go wherever we want to go whenever we want, and jobs which ignore normal social interaction and ask us to work long hours so we can earn the money to buy what will feed our personal identity.
So what does the Church have to do with this? After 1700 years of privilege the Church has gone along for the ride and allowed the culture of this world to dictate who we are, how we see things, and how we organize our communities. Our parents were raised to believe that attendance on Sunday morning was essential to being a good Christian, our possessions, and positions of power are a sign of God’s favour, and our communities are top down structures organized around business culture and the techniques used to get results. They were taught that the removal of the rights the Church they grew up in was something they should be willing to die for. Essentially, the Church has become a reflection of the culture that it was in instead of being the people of God representing His way of doing things. When society stopped coming to us for advice for help and for community they started to look to the things that culture told them to look at, themselves.
So what do we do? I know that you are asking this question. Well there are many people who are trying to figure this out. A big part of this question revolves around where God has put us and what he is asking us to be. If we were to lay out a plan of how to communicate the truth of God to our world we would probably need to know who we are talking to, wouldn’t you say? There have been many theories over the years about how we do that and how we interact with our culture. Some think we need to remove ourselves from culture, some think we need to change culture, some think we need to use culture to further our own agenda, some think we need to be immersed in culture. What we actually need to do is be in culture but offering an alternative to what culture tells us.
What would it look like to be in culture and at the same time present an alternative way of doing things? Take a moment to dream about it. It is difficult isn’t it? You probably are already thinking about the things that you would like to see from your own perspective. What is God’s perspective? What is important to Him in the way that we live our lives and how we represent Him to the world? We can look no further than Jesus. Jesus Christ is God’s best foot forward when trying to show what His heart is for the world and what it means to be His people. We call ourselves Christians because we find our identity in Christ. If Jesus shows us what God wants to do with this world we see a world made right. Jesus didn’t sit on an earthly thrown to rule from a place. His thrown in the hearts and the minds of his kids, us!
In Jesus God announced that He had made things right. The very thing that has kept us from being who we were called to be has been taken care of for us. Our brokenness and sin, which nobody is exempt from, has been taken care of. We no longer need to worry about death separating us from God. Death will come but when we have faith that Jesus has already gone through it, paid our ransom, and then was raised again we know that God’s reign is here! We no longer can do anything to earn that favour with God. It is taken care of for us. We now need to live like it. We need to live in the new reality of the kingdom of God.
God’s kingdom is a where we find out citizenship. It will be as though we are aliens here in Canada. You know when you meet someone from another country that is living here and talks about the country they are from with fondness, affection, and tries their best to live out the customs of their country here? Well that is what we are called to do while living among foreigners here in Canada or wherever we are. We are not citizens of a nation of people but God. This country has different ways of doing things which are completely different, in fact, opposite of the way the world tells us to live.
Instead of starting a violent protest to gain some privileges for our churches we turn to God and worship Him in an act of complete trust. That is our political statement. Complete trust in God to provide what we need. In God’s economy we don’t follow what the world says “survival of the fittest”. Instead, we believe that survival of all is more important. We don’t value ourselves as more important than anyone else so we share with each other and put others needs ahead of our own. Remember our political statement? God will take care of us. When we are given some sort of power, whether it is with money or with our charisma or with our intellect, we don’t use it to further our own selfish reasons. We use it to help others. When we could us violence to gain our own way of doing things we follow Jesus lead and lay down our own lives for those of others (and others means people who aren’t like us as well). Often when this topic comes up people will say that we are irresponsible to not act violently to help people or to overthrow an oppressive government. The question to ask is who are we responsible to? I’ll let you figure that one out. How do we be the community that is authentic in the world that is fake? Basically, everything this world tells us we are is what we reject and live in the reality of the kingdom of God.
So all of that still probably has you asking about why we use the world Missional. If you notice I never talk about us getting people to come to us. We are called in be IN the world. We all have a part to play. God has gifted us in many different ways to share in the mission of living in the world as the people of God showing the world that there is an alternative way of life that is actually the way we were created to be.
In this class I’m learning what it looks like to lead this type of community. You want to know how? It is about pointing out all these gifts that are in all of us. It is about encouraging people like you to share the same vision that God has for our world. The reign of God is here buddy. You have gifts, just like everyone else, that are needed in the kingdom of God. We live in a world that has told us to not ask for help, to get stronger, to make your own identity, to take care of yourself and prop yourself up. I’m learning to teach people to rely on help when they don’t need it, to submit when you are strong, to find your identity in Christ and His kingdom, and to take care of others and serve others. I’m learning to teach this community to be the Church where we are, to be pioneers instead of settlers, to expand the kingdom of God in the hearts and minds of people everywhere.
You have a part to play brother. You have an ability to relate to people and explain things better than most people I know. The kingdom of God needs you and the gifts you have (gifts not skills or power) to allow people to see the heart of God. Let’s keep talking about this. You have a lot of friends who need to hear the good news that God has given them a option that is life changing and eternal but they need to see it more than they need to hear about it.
I love you brother and I can’t wait to see how God is going to use you. Thanks so much for asking me about this.
Your brother in Christ,
Brian Raney