Having supper with a group of church leaders in Pasadena this week, I was reminded again that more than anything else this missional journey isn’t about models and plans or big ideas and fancy concepts but how in Jesus we are invited to be human again.
I was listening to people tell stories. Mark Lau Branson described the everyday practice of Dwelling in the Word that we have made so much a part of our working together. In a multi-cultural church he has spent a year of more simply dwelling in Scripture, doing what he calls lectio - not the teaching of Scripture as much as learning to live with a text and listen to the ways God speaks through each other in the text.
One of the people in the group is an eighty year old woman who was a part of reading and entering Luke 10: 1-12. No one talked to her about doing evangelism or the best practices that come from the text or the key missional values that should make us a church. They listened to God through one another as they dwelt in Luke 10 over a number of months together. No one told her that she ought to go and speak to her neighbors, but that is what she started to do - talk to her neighbors just like those people did in Luke 10. In the natural ebb and flow of neighboring they sat around her table and she naturally talked about her long life and her experience of Jesus. But no one told her she ought to do this - the dwelling and the text invited her into these so ordinary and human practices. As she did so she mentioned these neighbors of hers to another woman in the church much younger than she - how might they connect with these neighbors who had memories of church from long ago and did not attend any more. “Let’s have tea together” was the response and so the conversations deepened. The next thing Mark knew these neighbor women were in the church kitchen participating in a Fall festival - dwelling and neighboring had moved lives.
Mark commented that he would never have factored an eighty year old woman into his strategies and planning to make a church ‘missional’. But, he observed, it is not about that kind of strategizing. Missional is what happens when you give people permission to love their neighbors. This is a good description of being human. And yet we seem to have created communities that are separated from our neighbors and people struggle to know how to have conversations with them. It’s amazing how this Dwelling in the Word and expecting God to do things shapes missional life.
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