Back in the early 00’s when I was in college, there were a lot of Christian books coming out about how to live the Christian life in “radical” ways. These books would then tell the stories of the .2% of people out there who would make drastic changes to their lives to go live on mission for Christ. I was always in awe of these stories but many of my peers, myself included, felt inadequate in comparison. While these stories were moving and spurred us towards taking great steps in our faith, it was difficult to imagine the vast majority of Christians taking those radical leaps of faith to live in extreme ways for Christ. One of my friends and I kept joking about writing a book called “Mundane Christianity” where we told stories of faithful followers of Christ who were transforming the world where they were in small ways.
Our focus this year of being faithful to God’s presence is that kind of Christianity. It is where every Christ follower is attentive to the presence of God in their life and attentive to the presence of God in the world around them. We do this together in community through the practices of the church on mission in the three circles. We’ll talk more about these practices next week. This week we will focus on the half circles of our lives and how each of these spaces become our mission field.
I am a firm believer that when we set out to “do evangelism” we are typically doing it wrong. There was a time when “evangelistic programs” worked but they are largely counterproductive in our society today. Evangelism is best accomplished through genuine relationships where we are guests in spaces in the world. The world needs to experience Christ in tangible ways where Christians respond with compassion and love to what is going on in their lives. We cannot know what is going on in their lives if we are not in real relationships with them. When we find people marginalized and hurting, we look for how God is already present and working and we join him in his work.
We take the position of guests in people’s lives as those who carry God’s presence. We do not force our way or insist our way on others. We arrive in the world as servants, aiming to better the people we encounter along the way. There are groups of Christians in our society who try to instigate change through positions of power. This rarely brings about the reconciliation to which the cross calls us. The cross ignites a revolution that, in the words of NT Wright, “happens once and for all when the power of love overcame the love of power.” God’s ways do not make sense to the world. The gospel calls us to a subversive way of living that undercuts the power of this world through acts of service that transform our communities. When we fight the culture wars, we forget the power of the cross and the mission of the church.
The power of the cross is the power of love, lived in real relationship with people where they are to then walk with them toward Christ. First, we must be transformed by God’s presence in our own lives to then inhabit their spaces as guests. This week we will focus on Jesus sending out the 72 in Luke 10. Read this passage and reflect on what Jesus calls them to do:
What does it mean to offer peace before entering the space?
Should we continue to stick around if the peace is not received?
V16 – What does it mean to have the presence of Christ when you speak and are rejected?
V20 – Whatever great things might happen in your life, what is it that you are supposed to rejoice in? How does this help you work from a place of humility?
V23-24 – Through the work of the Spirit in our lives as those who are sent on missions from God, we will see and hear things that prophets and kings longed for but did not see or hear. Pray that God will give you eyes to see and ears to hear what the Spirit is doing in the world around you.