Passion and Mission

A Church article with View Comments posted 23 March 2010.
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This article was written for the March 2010 issue of The Messenger, the newsletter of St. John Lutheran Church, Sterling, IL.

In the last month, I’ve been thinking a lot about passion. What is that we are truly passionate about? What motivates us? What gives us zeal for life and a willingness to serve?

The English word “passion” comes from the Greek word “pascho” (PASS-ko) meaning “to suffer” or “to endure.” Notably, when we refer to the sufferings of Jesus on the cross, we call that the “Passion of Christ.” In short, the word passion points us to what we are willing to suffer for. If we are passionate for something, we are willing to suffer or endure many things for it. Especially as we send this newsletter just around Easter, we ought to remember that the passion of Christ was for us – that Jesus was willing to suffer the cross for our sake. So my larger question is: since Jesus endured so much for us in his Passion, what will we be passionate about in thanks to God?

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2 min Intro to the Missional Church

A Church article with View Comments posted 9 March 2010.
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I liked this video a lot – the missional church movement can be very buzzword-y, but this is dead simple:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arxfLK_sd68&feature=player_embedded

(via JR Woodward)

Service Project: Back Seat Bags

A Church article with View Comments posted 18 August 2009.
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You’re driving along, and you stop at a stop sign or traffic signal near a major highway. You see a man, dressed shabbily, standing by the side of the road with a cardboard sign. Maybe it says he’s a veteran, maybe he needs food, transportation, or a job. What do you do?

Homeless person wants a beerMost Christians do what most everyone else does in that situation – they avert their eyes. They don’t make eye contact. They roll up their car windows. Especially if their precious children are in the car. Guess what?

Your kids are watching how you treat the poor.

Here’s a simple service project you can do with kids of school age. Assemble “Back Seat Bags” that you keep in the back seat of the car. Get a paper bag, and include some essentials in it, depending what’s appropriate for your particular context:

  • Food: high energy, individually wrapped, storable foods like granola bars or beef jerky
  • Food: gift certificates to someplace ubiquitous, like McDonalds
  • Information: a map or directions to nearest homeless shelters & food pantries
  • Information: a small, lightweight tract written in English and/or Spanish
  • Transportation: bus tokens
  • What else could we put in back seat bags? Leave suggestions in the comments, below.

The key is to pick things that can sit in a hot car for a long time, don’t expire, and have little cash value on exchange. Bus tokens, gift certificates, and the like may be sold on the grey market, so consider that when making a list of items for your bags. Never include cash.

When you are in the car, stopped on a road near where someone is begging, instead of turning our eyes away and not doing anything, we now have something responsible we can give them. It’s a way to serve people and live out our faith.

Two natures in Christ, two arms of mission

A Church article with View Comments posted 15 August 2009.
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Food for thought: Just as there are two natures in Christ, the human and the divine, so there are two forms of mission for the Church in the world. We would do well to learn from Jesus, who often used physical, human work (healing, miracles) as a means to share a broader divine reality (salvation in his name).

Missional Congregations

A Church article with View Comments posted 31 October 2006.
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A short blurb from an interesting article I stumbled across about the difference between Maintainance and Missional Congregations. The that reminded me most of something I’d seen before was #10:

10. When thinking about growth, the maintenance congregations asks, “How many Lutherans live within a twenty-minute drive of this church?” The mission congregation asks, “How many unchurched people live within a twenty-minute drive of this church?”

I think that churches are called to be community to one another (derisively called “Maintenance” in the article) and to reach out into the community to spread the Gospel (“Missional”). But Percy is right – too often our attitudes turn inward, and as we get caught up in our own internal issues, we lose sight of our mission in the community. It doesn’t have to be that way.