The Missional Journey...

The journey continues...nine months ago, I moved my family over a thousand miles to a growing suburb on the edge of Madison, WI called Sun Prairie.  In doing so, I left behind the safety and security of a loving church family.  I left behind dear friends.  I left behind a ministry that I had poured my heart and soul into for six years.  Why did I come?  It's a question I get a lot from the people I meet.  After all, I hadn't lived in this area before.  I maybe knew a handful of people, none of them really well.  The cultural distance between Madison, WI and Mobile, AL is enormous.  And, whew, the winters are cold!!! I guess the short answer to the question is "God."  God called me here.  Several years ago, God's Spirit began to nurture a dream in my heart of a truly missional community.  A community that saw God's mission of redemption and reconciliation in the world as its "raison d'être", or its "reason for being." This became a passion of mine so when the opportunity came to start a new church with this missional/incarnational vision at its heart, I felt compelled to pursue it.  So here I am.  And as this missional journey has unfolded over the last several months, I have found myself noting the significant milestones along the way.  My first day at the coffee house (now affectionately known as my "office"...).  My first day playing basketball at the athletic club.  My first spiritual conversation with someone in Sun Prairie.  Our initial dinner meetings with people who felt called to join us in this journey.  Our first Sunday gathering.  Well, we've recently passed another big milestone...our first Sunday gathering out in the community.  As of Easter Sunday, we are now meeting in Beans and Cream Coffee Shop. We've "gone public" as it were.  And the journey only gets more exciting from here! 

As we move forward, it is critical that we not lose sight of the missional life God is inviting us into.  For surely temptations abound.  There is the temptation of pragmatism.  To fall into a "whatever works" attitude.  Or the temptation of efficiency.  To make our fellowship run like a "well-oiled machine."  There is the temptation of defaulting back into forms of church that we are more comfortable with but which, by their very nature, stifle our missional DNA.  I know of only one way to resist such temptations and that is to turn to God's Word.  To immerse ourselves in the story of the early church and walk the paths they trod in order to discover again what it truly means to be "on mission" with God. 

So Allelon is taking up the study of the Book of Acts.  We will take it a chapter at a time and I hope to share with you in this space what we are discovering and invite you into the journey with us.  Perhaps, as we move along this path, you will have insights from your own situation and context that can help us move forward.  Perhaps when we meet obstacles, you can show us the way through.  And vice versa, of course.  Regardless of what happens, I look forward to this being a "living record" of our own successes and failures as we seek to be faithful to this vision God has placed on our hearts. 

Acts 1: An Exercise in Paying Attention (great phrase I picked up from the very Rev. Beth Daniel...)

The early church had been given a mandate. In the same way we've been given a mandate.  It's a commission from the Risen Christ.  "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth."  Sounds awesome!  But now what?  That's kind of how I feel right now.  I try to put myself in the company of the apostles as they hung out with the Risen Christ.  How it would feel to hear the call to "wait?"  To wonder what kind of "power" this was that Christ was promising?  Would this "power", this "Holy Spirit" restore God's Kingdom to earth?  To have some idea of the sacrifice Jesus was asking me to make when he calls us to be his witnesses (witness = martyros in the Greek = from which we get the word "martyr"...).  And then to retreat to the upper room of the house where we were staying to actually engage in this "waiting period." 

Then I note with growing conviction that "waiting" for the apostles did not mean being passive.  They were active in their waiting.  They used the time to prepare themselves through prayer.  Verse fourteen says that they were all "continuously devoting" themselves to prayer.  This single-minded commitment to come before the Father as they waited for the Holy Spirit sets a powerful example before us.  If I am being honest, I think there are few times in my life where I can claim to have "continuously devoted" myself to prayer.  Here is what Gerhard Kittel had to say about this phrase in his classic work, The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament.

"Every great decision in the apostolic period, and in the whole life of early Christianity, is sustained by persistent prayer. In this prayer Christians with thanksgiving and worship brought their decisions and their cause as petitions to God, seeking guidance and direction and clarity from Him. This persistence in prayer, which is just as natural as prayer itself, is determined—we can trace the sequence exactly—by looking to Jesus. Jesus, often in night-long prayer, brought His decisions, His cause, and those connected with it, before God. As the Son, He sought to do the Father’s work in an ever new experience of unity with the will and intention and nature of the Father, to receive power for this purpose, and to realize that He was hidden in the Father’s hand (→ εὔχομαι, II, 803 f.). He not only directed His disciples to pray in this way (Lk. 11:1–13); He also told them to persist in prayer (Lk. 18:1–8). But this involves a different attitude and manner of prayer from those customary in contemporary Judaism, which had fixed hours and patterns of prayer.The disciples continued the type of prayer which they had seen in Jesus and which He commanded them. And they in turn passed it on to primitive Christianity. In this they stood apart from both the Jewish and the Gentile world around them."

So in an effort to literally follow in the footsteps of the early church, we will be spending this Sunday's gathering in prayer.  We will pray for one another.  We will pray for Allelon.  We will pray for the future of our missional band of sisters and brothers.  We will pray for Sun Prairie and Windsor and DeForest and Madison and Dane County.  We will pray for our Jerusalem, our Judea, our Samaria, and our world.  And we will pray for power.  The power to become witnesses.  The power to look beyond our natural, narcissistic selves to the "one anothers" in our lives and love them in the name of Jesus. 

Comments

[Joel Adams]

Thanks for the re-summary. I appreciate hearing the story. May your reason for being always be God's redemptive mission. I like that. It makes me think because what are we motivated by in the church both established and new? In Acts it is so clear the primary motivation of the early church was what God was doing, or the Kingdom. Church was not simply defined by right preaching, proper sacrament administration and discipline was it? Grace and peace be with you and the Christ community in Sun Prairie.

[Doug Resler]

Thanks Joel! Blessings on you and the community you serve as well!