Neighborhood Mission Learning Day
I just returned from Seattle, after spending the day at Seattle First Church of the Nazarene at the Seattle Neighborhood Mission Learning Day conference. Sponsored by Praxis Mission Center, this was a gathering of church leaders and practitioners sharing about how we live out our ministries in missional ways in our communities. The gathering of emerging church leaders included a key note by Brian McLaren, hosting by Mars Hill Grad School’s Dwight Friesen, and other special guests including a panel of Seattle pastors.
The day kicked off with some good words from Brian McLaren about his recent travels through Latin America. He focused on how the communities of faith that he encountered during his trip worked out how to be the kingdom of God in their settings, whether it be through direct service to their towns or through speaking out against injustices caused by the government. It was an emotional time of sharing, as many of the places Brian talked about have impacted the way he viewed our own place within the broader community. As ministers, lay leaders, and other people who serve within the church, we must find ways to impact the culture and world around us as vital members of the community.
Brian went into a discussion about how the Church may be in very desperate need of saving in many places around the world and in our own nation. Maybe we are in a setting where a gospel of prosperity and affluence is being preached, not a gospel of poverty and self-sacrifice. Or maybe our church communities have isolated themselves from the culture abroad, by becoming commuter centers where everyone drives in from miles away and then drives home, not connecting with the community around the church building or with their neighbors in their cul de sac. If the church doesn’t understand the people it is meant to serve and it forgets about it’s vital role within the city community, within the neighborhood, maybe we are the ones worth redeeming? Is the Word really becoming flesh and moving into the neighborhood (John 1:14, the Message)? The idea of Christ’s relationship to our neighborhood’s was the center of the discussion today. Our ministries are not isolated and cannot live as though they were.
The rest of the day was spent listening to some really great Seattle pastors talk about how their communities are taking action to live in the neighborhoods, to impact and become a part of the cultures around them, rather than separate themselves from the culture. I was most intrigued by Karen Ward from Church of the Apostles and their relationship with the arts community of Fremont. Developing out of both Lutheran and Episcopal backgrounds, Church of the Apostles (COTA) has become a key piece of the Fremont community, taking part in parades, celebrating art, and all the while doing church in a mix of very traditional and creative ways.
It was great to hear stories, listen to people’s questions, and watch people get excited about making an impact in their local settings, living out the gospel with renewed sense of purpose for their ministry communities. I have many questions that I will wrestle with, especially as I try to apply what I’ve heard to a college ministry setting. In many ways, our jobs are different than the rest of the ministry world, in that our students move through our community at a rather quick pace, compared with the Nazarene church who has been off of 45th in Seattle for 56 years, probably serving a relatively consistent community. Our relationships must be built faster because they may be shorter lived as students move on. And our community changes from year to year, based on where people are in their academic lives. However, I think we could learn a lot from the discussion I heard today and at least we should always be asking the question of how our community impacts the Bellingham, WWU, Whatcom County people in ways that brings about participation in the kingdom of God.
So, a question to end: What ways is your church or faith community making an impact in your immediate proximity (city block, town)?
The Lord of the Rings (Movie Art Cover)
The Complete Joy of Homebrewing Third Edition (Harperresource Book)
The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn and Wintertime
Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America
A Wrinkle in Time
Great Emergence, The: How Christianity Is Changing and Why (emersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith)
The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier
What I want to know is why no one told me about this. My friend Dale Caldwell went without telling me as well.
I think it is interesting to think about how participating in the pains and joys of a small “immediate” community translates into participating in the pains and joys of the world. 1. How do we make ourselves open to feeling the pains of the world? And is this possible if we don’t have our finger on the pulse of our own community. I met with an organization that does international relief work out of Bellingham. They were tucked away in some office sweet that was only locatable by a number on the outside. The work they did helped people, but it had no relation to our community. It made their work seem dry and less meaningful. They weren’t fostering relationships they were attempting to solve an equation that cannot be solved without relationships. Yes, they had villages in the “developing world” that had water, health care, etc. but there weren’t inspiring anybody to invest anything other than money into those villages. There was not plea for tears for individual relationships, for ears to hear or eyes to see. I don’t see their impact reaching very far. Can it?
Jesse, you make some great comments on how we must examine our hearts when we engage in mission. I think a good question to ask is: Is my heart for mission a holistic thing or just a specific thing?
The idea that we can live missionally into our communities, the areas closest to our home, work, or church seems to come hand-in-hand with our global action. I wonder if it’s a stretch to make this comparison, but I’ll go ahead with it for the sake of the discussion: Jesus talked about arriving at the temple and remembering someone we had an argument with and getting up to go reconcile with them before we worship. What if we took that truth into the way we live our mission in our lives? Should we think about mission as a series of concentric circles, where we work in our immediate community first, our nation second, and our global community after that? Part of me says yes, take care of those closest to you and enrich their lives, so they can enrich others.
The flip side is to remember that the most oppressed and the most needy may not be in your suburban backyard. We need to look out for the rest of the world, because maybe no one but Jesus’ disciples will do that.
Balance. Doesn’t it always come back to balance?
Yes, it does seem to always return to balance!
I’m reminded of a directive from the Prophet: “see first that you yourself deserve to be a giver, and an instrument of giving.” For me, when this makes the most sense is when I realize that I indeed do Not deserve to be an instrument of giving, but being granted that opportunity by the grace of God in this life, giving “or serving, or ‘being missional’” becomes one of the greatest honors I can know. So living out a life of generosity, hospitality, service, humility, and submission, is not a contractual obligation guaranteeing my salvation, but rather one of the greatest gifts God presents me with.
We must remember not to allow worldy stigmatisms to dictate our arenas of mission and service. Worldy stigmatisms meet our (often petty) need for “justice,” so we seek out a certain group of people to engage with (a race, a social class, an income bracket), and by doing so are shallowly submitting ourselves to inclusive prejudice. Seth, I am reminded of the charismatic-though-misguided youth pastor who spoke at the Methodist church in Lafayette the first day we were there, who instructed his baby boomer-age, upper-middle class, white congregation to go out in to the “black” neighborhood and bring them in to “our” church, to finally end segregation. This is a very blunt example of inclusive racism (which, when imposed on me, I have always hated deeply), but you get the idea.
So I suppose in my balance of things, I keep the stresses and pressures of knowing what to do, where to go, who to serve, very low. What I keep high is how faithful I am to the beautiful mercy of a life where every movement, every word, every deed, can indeed be one of unconditional generosity, humble submission, and grace for all, as given by God. If I am working to be faithful in that way, I believe that whatever I do, wherever I go, and whoever I am with, will be part of God’s beautiful composition.