Today I’m back to thinking about the “missional challenge” before the church. One author wrote to say it is as though we just woke up to find out we live in a world. “Hey, there’s a whole wide world out there, that isn’t so bad….maybe we oughta find out what’s going on in it, and see if it has anything to do with our community of faith”. Yes, that is what I want to know. How are we called to be church, how are we called to do church, in this new and different world?
The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Pope Paul VI, 1965) suggests an essential attitude: “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the people of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts.” The church is not called to be isolated from or reactionary to the world. The church’s mission is in the world.
Churches that are thinking missionally are seeing a new picture of our world. There’s a big, wide world out there that we all live in—and most of it isn’t even “Christian”. Are we not called to learn more about it so we can understand it, and serve it, and change it? Does anyone else have the sense that the things we’ve “known” up to this point are being challenged in healthy ways? Until I am changed and transformed, I will remain powerless to change the world. Unless I understand afresh what it means to be a Christian and a part of the church, I may fail to truly be a follower of Christ every day of the week.