Living Missionaly:
- Living a good story:
The Gospel is God's grand story that He is sovereignly shaping within history. It is the story of a perfect, sovereign, loving, and holy God, coming to rescue His rebellious people. It is the story of the true King coming to take back His rightful throne, restoring His Kingdom that had been destroyed by His own people. It is the story that we all long for and often imitate in our films and books. It is the greatest of all great stories, because it is not just story, but reality!
As humans we love story. Humanity has always told stories and we are shaped by the stories we tell. We are a people that create stories with our lives and the stories that we live identify us, revealing where we came from and where we think we are going. Every person is telling a story with their life as they are writing a story with their life. The question is what kind of story are you telling with your life? As we live out our own story, our particular story is playing a part in a bigger Story. We are all living our story as part of a bigger story, but we must ask ourselves "what is the bigger story that I'm living for?"
We all have given ourselves over to living for very small stories. Whether it be a story of personal success, momentary pleasure, social achievement, etc, our stories are far smaller than they were intended to be. But when we are redeemed by Christ we are called to abandon our small stories to be caught up in His grand story. As Christians our personal stories begin to take on great significance as our stories are used by God to play a part in His grand story of redemption and restoration throughout all of creation.
To live missionaly is to live your life in light of God's story of His mission to bring redemption to His creation. Living missionaly is to purposefully live out your story in a manner that tells of God's story. It is reorienting your story to participate in God's great story of redemption. As a people called to God and sent out by Him, we must ask ourselves "what story is my life telling the world around me and what Story is my story participating in?"
Marks of a missional life:
There are many marks of a life being lived on mission, we have chosen a few marks to help us gauge if we are living a missional life.
- Purposefully relational: purposefully building relationships with the people God called us to.
-Opening your home and life to those living and working around you.
-Engaging others where they are, joining them in the activities they enjoy.
-Inviting others to join you in celebrating and enjoying God's gifts and creation.
- Listening: listening to God's story (the Gospel) as a student of the Scripture, listening to the Spirit as a disciple dependent upon God, and listening to the stories that shape our city and the stories of the people around you.
-Growing in your understanding of the many facets of the Gospel and growing in your ability to creatively and faithfully
retell God's story.
-Studying the culture you live in, seeking ways the Gospel connects, confronts, and completes the stories that shape
the culture and the stories of the people around you.
-Actively and prayerfully seeking the guidance of the Holy Spirit as you go through your daily life.
- Serving: displaying God's grace by serving the people around you.
-Seeking ways to serve the needs of others.
-Displaying the Gospel by giving of yourself for the benefit of others.
- Gospeling: displaying and declairing the Gospel to the people living around you.
-Actively displaying the Gospel in how you live and interact with the people in your midst.
-Creating pictures of the Gospel through the arts, hospitality, redeeming spaces that were blighted or abandoned, etc.
-Displaying the Gospel by caring for those that cannot care for themselves and standing up for the oppressed and
helpless.
-Displaying the Gospel by showing forgiveness and seeking reconciliation.
-Declairing the Gospel by creatively telling God's story.
-Engaging others with the Gospel by applying the Gospel to the stories of the people God has called you to.
Gospel community on mission:
Every Gospel community of E3 is viewed as a missionary team, commissioned to be an outpost of the Gospel to the people they live among. As a community formed by the Gospel for the sake of the Gospel, we must think like a team of missionaries sent out to a particular mission field.
What if your Gospel community was placed among an unreached people group in some other part of the world? How would that effect how you live as individuals and as a community? How would you organize your group? How would you spend your time, resources, and talents as a community? Often we think biblically and strategically when placed in a foreign context, yet our thinking changes when we are living in a context that is familiar to us. But the reality is that even if you are living on the same block in which you grew up, when we come to faith we become citizens of God's Kingdom, called to be on mission within the world in which we live. In Paul's second letter to the church in Corinth he calls us ambassadors of Christ. So in essence our Gospel communities are little embassies of the Kingdom of God, representing a kingdom that is not of this world but one day will be established in this world.
When we begin thinking as missionaries called to display and declare the Gospel to an unreached people, we will begin to approach our life as a community differently. We will become more intentional in how we spend our time among the people we are called to reach. We will be more strategic in using our resources and talents to properly display and declare the Gospel to the people in our mission field. We will become students of the culture in which we live, seeking for ways to participate in the life of the people we are called to, while looking for ways to engage the culture with the Gospel.
When joining a Gospel community you are joining the mission of that community. Every Gospel community will be called to seek God together to discern what people group God is calling them to reach as a community. The Gospel community will then work together in creating a strategy to engage their mission field by building relationships with, listening to, serving, and Gospeling the people that the Gospel community has been call to reach.
Just as we are all called to be intentional in finding ways to live missionaly among the people around us, we are also called to be intentional as a community, seeking ways to live on mission together.
