Sue Hope
Where does the passion to re-engage with evangelism come from? Sue Hope offers some pointers
Imagine standing on a hilltop overlooking a great plain. Below, covering a vast area of the ground is a camp. You know, instinctively, that it’s been there a long time. There’s the fluttering flag on the pole. Buildings have been constructed: offices, storerooms, you can even see the smoke rising from the kitchens. Some people are off-duty, playing in the river, while others are engaged on some intense formal activity.
Suddenly, the scene is interrupted. A vehicle roars in to the camp, the driver gets out and hurries off. Time elapses, then there’s a buzz of excitement. Groups start emerging from everywhere, things start happening. The camp is being broken up. Decisions have to be made about what can travel and what belongs to the time of ‘settlement’. There are fresh demands and requirements. Everyone and everything is suddenly on the move.
Sometime towards the end of the last millennium, the tide turned for the churches’ mission in England. There was a fresh wind blowing; parts of the Church seemed to be waking up, getting ready. People were talking about mission again, but in a different way, and right across the different traditions and denominations of the Church.
It wasn’t wholesale, but patchy, a bit like rock pools filling up while the main tide is still some way out. And this tide of mission has continued to make its way in. It’s been accompanied and encouraged by various initiatives on mission and evangelism, including 2004’s Mission-Shaped Church by the Church of England’s Mission and Public Affairs Council; Fresh Expressions, the shared Anglican-Methodist initiative was also notable.
These things are helping find new shapes and patterns which can assist mission and evangelism in a post-modern world. But the passion to re-engage with evangelism in our culture, where is that to be found? Is there such a thing as a ‘spirituality for mission’ that will engender and support mission – an apostolic spirituality? And if so, what are its characteristics? Here are 10 indicators of people living in a mission spirituality:
1. Knowing what they are for and about
They are called and sent. They know why they are on the planet and what they are to do while here. They are supremely focussed on their task.
2. Living with trust
Being called to mission means leaving the safe and knowable and locating your identity and security in another place. Like Jesus, whose public ministry was kick-started by an experience of being deeply and dearly loved (Luke 3:22), mission-motivated people have to learn to graft themselves deeply into the love of the Father and to minister out of that love.
3. Contemplative activists
“When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them” (Matt 9:36). Those who are fired with the love of God are those whose eyes have been opened and who see brokenness and pain. They also see God’s possibilities, and God’s promise. Contemplation, true seeing, leads to action.
4. Travelling light
‘Take nothing for the journey’ (Matt 10). Too many possessions can inhibit speed of response to shifts in culture. Too much money can belie our faith in God’s provision. Packaging the gospel into doctrinal formulae limits the way that people are able to receive it. We’re invited to go empty-handed, becoming less anxious and more free.
5. Two by Two
Jesus sends his friends into mission ‘two by two’. Community, koinonia, participation in the Spirit, is the gospel lived. Others are invited in to it. Those first missionaries were instructed not to live in a ghetto, but to lock their community onto that of the person of peace, so that there could be what post-moderns call ‘flow’. Missional community is a key factor in apostolic spirituality.
6. Dependence: Prayer and the Holy Spirit
Those who go in mission need to go in deep dependence upon the Holy Spirit. “Stay in the city,” said Jesus, “until you are filled with power from on high” (Luke 24:49). Learning dependence often happens through the wilderness experience, because in the brokenness and the emptiness of our own lives we learn to lean on the Beloved (Song of Songs 8:5).
7. Branded with a message
There is ultimately one message from which all others spring. It informs and shapes those who go in mission, it burns onto them, they are branded with it and changed by it. The message is that Jesus is alive.
8. Robust faith
The message is transmitted in word and in deed. “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.” (Matt 10:8) The deeds are indicative of a new order. They bring life and transform communities as well as individuals. They require confident engagement with the powers of darkness and are activated by a robust faith.
9. Joyfully serious and seriously joyful
The mission is supremely important. And yet there is a light-heartedness about those who go in mission. Apostolic spirituality means both serious intent and joyful detachment. Outcomes are left to God.
10. Embracing adventure and risk
Whereas a ghetto mentality shrinks people, the adventure of mission stretches us. The risks of adventure are great, but the rewards are high. And those who were first sent out by Jesus discovered that their lives were never the same again.
Susan Hope’s book, Mission-Shaped Spirituality: the transforming power of mission, looks at the attitude of mind required to engage in mission, through a combination of real-life case studies and observations from her own experience. It is published by Church House Publishing.