Missional: To witness in our stations

The emphasis on being a “missional church” means witnessing by who we are in all our stations in life, says David Schroeder in this first of a two-part series. The second article will explore our prophetic and ecumenical witness.

With the reorganization of Mennonite Church Canada and USA has come a new emphasis on being a “missional church.” The change is from what we “do” to an emphasis on “who we are” as witnesses.

All people, not only Christians, are witnesses to their faith. All people act out of a worldview, religious or not, that informs their lives and influences the choices they make. The more we are committed to be a witness to our faith, the more we will seek to bring proclamation and action into line with each other.

The early church was missional. It did not emphasize a specific strategy of missions, or a method of evangelism, or a particular area to be evangelized. The early Christians looked rather to the gifts that God had given them in the Christian community. They paid heed to being followers of Christ in the world.

God’s invitation

It is instructive to observe how God comes to sinful humanity: God comes to offer freedom from bondage and an invitation to choose life. We observe the liberation from bondage in Israel’s exodus out of Egypt, and we find God’s invitation to life in the giving of the law at Sinai.

The Exodus (Exodus 1-15). God’s intention to free people from bondage was made evident when God showed mercy to an enslaved people and liberated them. The Exodus became paradigmatic of God’s intention to free people from bondage of all kinds, and to allow them once again to act as responsible beings, as God intended from the beginning.

The Exodus gave a clear indication that God is a freeing and saving God, offering salvation to all who respond in faith to God’s self-revelation.

Sinai (Exodus 19-20). At Sinai, God invited a people who had been set free to freely choose life. The problem was that, because of their sin, the people no longer knew what was right or wrong, and what would lead to life or death. So God, through Moses, revealed the will of God. In the Torah, the Law of Moses, God revealed what would lead to life and what would lead to destruction.

Having freed them to become responsible people, and having revealed what would lead to life and death, God invited the people to choose life. This they could do by pledging to keep all that God had commanded. The Old Testament reveals a long history of obedience and disobedience to God and the way in which God sought to bring the people back to the covenant they had made at Sinai. These attempts culminated in God becoming incarnate in Jesus and once again making the offer of salvation and the invitation to choose life.

Jesus Christ (The Gospels). In Jesus, people could observe both the character of God and what they were intended to be and do in their response to God. Jesus manifested God’s intent to seek and to save the lost (those in bondage to sin). He manifested the love of God to all he met and gave hope of salvation to those who had been rejected as hopelessly lost.

Those who followed Jesus were set free from bondage and proclaimed him as Saviour and Messiah. Jesus did what God did at the Exodus. He set people free and allowed them once more to become responsible persons.

Inviting people to follow him was Jesus’ way of inviting people to choose life. The way to life could be seen more clearly in Jesus than in the law because it was lived out in the flesh for all to see. Those who followed Jesus called him “Lord” in that they had chosen to do his will.

Jesus in his ministry also revealed how we should respond to God. We can choose to do the will of God as Jesus committed himself to do. Jesus placed his trust in God even when he was rejected and killed by those to whom he was a threat. We should do the same. He gave to all the hope that as he was raised from the dead, all those who are in Christ will be raised to newness of life.

Witness in our ‘stations’

The early Christians gloried in the salvation that had become a part of their experience through Pentecost and the outpouring of the Spirit. They, too, had been set free from bondage and now were intent on sharing this good news with the whole world. But how should they do this?

Paul simply called on Christians to be Christian in their stations in life. We do not talk much about “stations” anymore, but we should! The early Christians were well aware of their stations in life, and it was here that their witness to the gospel was to be given (Ephesians 5, Colossians 3:18-4:1, 1 Peter 2: 13-3:7).

Your “station” is the basis of your duty or ethical responsibility to someone else. If you are married, you have a duty to your spouse; as a daughter or son, you have a duty to your parents; as the driver of a car you have an obligation to other drivers on the road.

We hold any number of stations in life simultaneously. In all of them we are to manifest the fruit of the Spirit. To be Christian in our station is really a double-sided testimony. It allows people to see who we were before we gave our lives to Christ and who we now are in Christ. It allows people to see what difference our allegiance to Christ makes when compared to their own lives.

The difference Christ made in the early church can be observed most clearly in regard to Christian slaves. Through faith in Christ, the slave was empowered to be a morally responsible person. Slaves did not have power over whether they were slaves or not, but they did have power over what they did as slaves (1 Corinthians 7:21-24).

Peter indicated that if slaves would obey Christ rather than their masters, they might face persecution. But that is exactly what Jesus did, said Peter (1 Peter 2:18ff). As slaves chose to do what was right and not only commanded, they witnessed to the power of the gospel to set them free.

The same held true for Christian women. They, too, were set free by the gospel. They were admonished by Peter to retain their faith in Christ even though the society (both Greek and Hebrew) expected women to worship the gods of their husbands. Peter admonished Christian women who were prohibited from speaking about their faith to be responsible in their Christian witness (1 Peter 3: 1-6). The impact of the gospel in these women was that they were now morally responsible persons and chose to serve Christ.

The beauty of this approach to witness is that the whole Christian community becomes a missionary society or a “missional” community. This is the true expression of the priesthood of all believers. Being a missional church is more than sending people out to witness. It is more than individual acts of witnessing. It has to do with who we are, with “being witnesses.” Your life in all its relationships is a witness to your faith in Christ.

The early church recognized that our words and our deeds flow from who we are. In our stations, word and deed come together. Thus our witness to Christ is given most significantly in our everyday lives.

Furthermore, the witness given in our stations is always contextually appropriate. When the fruit of the spirit is made evident in a specific station, other persons in the same station understand it. They can observe firsthand what difference the gospel makes to people in that station.

The contribution of the church to the world will depend on how well we accomplish the task of being Christian in our stations. It is the task of applying the gospel to all of life and of having all of life informed by the gospel.

Marks of true witness

What would it look like if we were Christian in all our stations? I am reminded of Dr. Barkman, a Holdeman Mennonite who interned at a Winnipeg hospital in the 1940s. Since he was known to be a conscientious Christian, he was often assigned to be on duty on days when others wanted to be free.

One evening, a drunk person was brought in with a severed arm. A train had run over him. Barkman refused to participate in the surgery unless the patient received something to deaden the pain. The surgeon explained that, since the patient was drunk, he could not be given an anesthetic.

“But you could give him a local!” replied Barkman. When this was done, Barkman helped with the operation. The nurses later told Barkman that what he had done could prevent him from graduating as a doctor. Barkman responded that if he had to do wrong in order to be a doctor he would not want to be one.

Barkman not only gave his testimony but called into question procedures in the hospital. We are always Christian in a given station and at the same time involved in a larger context.

A good exercise would be to list all the situations in which we have a responsibility to someone else. What would happen if we would relate our witness to everyone we touch in our lives? To give our testimony to Christ in word and deed in all our relationships is to be a missional community.

Once we have a missional mindset, we become aware of people who are in bondage, who are not free to become the persons they were intended to be under God. Then it becomes easier to show people that they can find freedom in Christ and become responsible persons. It becomes easier to indicate what things lead to life and what things lead to destruction, and to invite people to choose life in Christ.

When we witness in our stations, we become aware of how important it is to manifest the fruits of the Spirit in our lives. According to Paul, the fruits are “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians 5:22). All these virtues are important in our response to people.

In Colossians 3, Paul lists attitudes and actions that are not appropriate for Christians, such as anger, malice, slander and abusive language, fornication, impurity, greed. As God’s chosen ones, bear with one another, forgive each other, just as the Lord has forgiven you, Paul says. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ dwell in your hearts, to which you were called in one body.

The Beatitudes (Matthew 5) point out that those who are “blessed” or true witnesses are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those who are persecuted for righteousness sake.

These virtues seem so out of place in our world. But they are the virtues we are to express in all our stations of life.

—David Schroeder

The writer is a New Testament theologian and a member of Charleswood Mennonite Church.

Imagine the church as a canoe trip...

Photo: Children at Trinity Mennonite Church in Calgary fill the canoe as Eric Olfert speaks about the missional church. At right is Hugo Neufeld, pastor at Trinity. See page 7.

To begin a recent sermon on the missional church, Eric Olfert asked the children to get into a canoe and imagine the church as moving along with the current of God’s purpose. The following is from that sermon.

A “missional church” is a church that sees its mission as aligning itself with God’s purpose in the world. Join me in imagining ourselves on a canoe trip. Think about the church as being like a bunch of canoes trying to get to the pick-up point in time for supper. Each canoe is one group of church members. One canoe might represent the Sunday School, others might represent the choir, the church council and the service committee.

The purpose of the church’s journey could be described as “salvation,” “reconciliation,” “liberation,” “building God’s kingdom” or “getting to heaven”—we each have language we prefer. Let the river’s current be God’s intention, God’s purpose, moving us along towards the ultimate goal.

What kind of church are we? Do we stay in the “safe” waters close to the riverbank where we can easily pull out for rest and refreshment? Close to the bank the current doesn’t help as much. There are quiet backwaters and eddies where you lose ground if you don’t paddle hard. It’s harder to make progress if you’re out of the current. The temptation is to pull in and make camp while you send a few of your stronger paddlers ahead to tell those waiting that you’ll be a bit late.

When our Olfert family has its annual May “fishing trip,” its mostly about camping, eating, extreme croquet, and seeing how far the stories of previous fishing trips can be stretched before they break. Last spring the lakes were still frozen so there was no fishing at all, but the fishing trip was still deemed a success. Are there churches like that?

A missional church would approach things differently. When I went canoeing with the campers at Shekinah, we didn’t want to be late for supper. We all tried to find the current that would help us get back as quickly as possible. Our leaders knew the river. When one canoe found a good current, they called us and we all shifted over. It’s easier to understand God’s purpose and follow it when we work at it together.

When we got tired, we would call a “raft-up” and all the canoes would come together, and we would hold on to each other to make a stable raft. That way we could rest, encourage each other, get instructions, discuss options, and share cookies and drink while we continued to move with the current.

That’s what missional church is about. All of us, as individuals and together as a church, need always to be seeking out what God’s intention is for the world, both for the corner where we are placed and for the ends of the earth. Notice that in the missional church, everybody is out there together.

Becoming a missional church doesn’t require us to throw everything out and start over. Mennonite Church Canada is supplying navigational aids to help us organize ourselves and find God’s current. In summary:

• God is at work everywhere before we get there. God is there to welcome us.

• God’s work is healing, reconciling and saving the world.

• Our job is being part of this mission and modelling what it looks like, kind of being God’s demonstration
plots.

• If we are to be demonstration plots, we need to work hard at being different from the crops around us.

• This takes all of us. Nobody gets to stay home and make lunch.

Eric Olfert, from Saskatoon, is Missional Formation and Partnership facilitator in Saskatchewan for Mennonite Church Canada Witness.

Jeremiah for today

Photo: Walter Brueggemann, left, and Ben Ollenburger, professor of biblical theology at AMBS, share a light moment during pastors week.

The prophet Jeremiah “lived through the 9-11 of the Old Testament, the destruction of Jerusalem,” and his model of truth-telling and hope-telling fits our situation today, said Walter Brueggemann during Pastors Week at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in January.

Jeremiah spoke with a voice that was “rich and daring and dangerous and offensive,” said Brueggemann, an Old Testament scholar from Columbia Theological Seminary in Georgia. His topic was “Proclaiming the Old Testament: Finding gospel in the Hebrew scriptures.”

“The book of Jeremiah is profoundly counter-cultural in the context of the urban elite of Jerusalem” who conducted their affairs as though Yahweh made no difference. These leaders had constructed for themselves an environment of certitude and privilege that made the steadfast love, the foolishness and poverty of God irrelevant.

Jeremiah used images such as physical health and marital fidelity to help his listeners imagine a different reality. As a poet, he presented these images without commentary to his audience, modelling the kind of preaching that supplies materials to the congregation “out of which they can imagine living their lives differently if they want to and if they are able.”

“Let the people of God have these scrolls,” said Brueggemann. Then trust them to find their own meanings, because “these scrolls have been making their own way in the life of God’s people for a very long time.”

Jeremiah’s calling was not only to uproot and tear down, but also to plant and build. He was to move into the null point of Jerusalem’s experience to bring hope, said Brueggemann.

“Preaching is moving into the null point and, by speaking, to make things new,” said Brueggemann to the 240 pastors and others present. Through preaching, pastors must lead people to re-imagine the world with “decisive reference to the Creator of heaven and earth.”

Worship leaders for the week were Lois Siemens and Aveani Moeljono, AMBS students, and Arthur Boers who teaches pastoral theology. A variety of workshops took place in the afternoons. Presenters explored topics such as how pastors can support business people, pastoral care in times of divorce, and conflict-healthy congregations.

—From AMBS release