I'm working feverishly (sounds good, anyway) with my editor to get my manuscript [Night Shift: Crossing the Cultural Line for the Kingdom] publish-ready. Dave Green is great to work with, even when I don't like his assignments! Right now we are rewriting chapter 1. The beginnings of books tend to be the most difficult to flesh out. We're shifting things around and adding and subtracting great lines I've written. All part of what Dave calls the Macro editing or revision process. Anyway, here is the beginning as it looks at this moment, raw and all.
***
How essential to the Gospel is cross-cultural work? Consider this. The central message of the Good News is that God in Jesus became flesh, Immanuel, "God with us." Another way to say that is that Jesus' method was incarnational, meaning he left his own culture and became a part of ours in order to communicate God's culture of love to us. Cross-cultural ministry therefore is at the heart of the message and the method of Jesus, what we call "the Good News" or the Gospel.
What is the Good News? It is the culture of light engaging the culture of night. If darkness is merely the absence of light, the culture of light has nothing to fear the encounter.
If light is metaphor for God's reign, and darkness is the absence of or that which resists the light of God, why then do Believers abandon the night? Why do they avoid or flee people groups, nations, governments, political parties, schools, businesses, neighborhoods and neighbors for the safety and security of the light, thus sealing off these parts of humanity and those human institutions in the darkest of tombs?
There are Believers who do not fear the night, for they understand that He who sends them also empowers and shields them with His Spirit. They know their mission in this life is to cross borders into territories and cultures alienated by darkness and to penetrate the curse of the night with blessing. They do so not necessarily as known superheroes, but as heroes nonetheless, often masking their daring deeds of greatness with harmless acts of goodness. They do not give in to fear, for they know that ultimately in the Kingdom of Yahweh their God, goodness will triumph over evil, blessing will push back curse, and light will surely dispel the darkness of night.
What does it take to get it done where it is not now being done? The second two "its" in this question, referring to victorious and overcoming goodness, blessing and light, is what Stephanie Ahn Mathis calls the "2GC Mandate," the Great Commission and the Two Greatest Commandments. So to put the question more directly, What does it take to fulfill the Great Commission and the Two Greatest Commandments where they are not now being fulfilled?
For thousands of years, we as Believers have been commanded to love God with all our whole beings and to love our neighbors as ourselves, by going and making disciples of all nations. We, like Jesus, are called to bring Good News to the poor, to heal people and set them free, to proclaim what the Ancients called "the Year of Jubilee." Or to put it yet another way, we are to reach the unreached, free the oppressed, and embrace this world's misfits.
Yet after all these millennia, the task of bringing God's culture of love to the unreached, oppressed and misfits remains daunting, to say the least. I do not think our mission is more difficult than it was 100 or 500 or 1,000 years ago, but there certainly is more to it – more people to reach, more needs and kinds of needs to be met, a greater variety of challenges, and so on. Every age has its own complications, and ours definitely has its share.
We as Believers are on a mission to cross cultural lines in the night. We do so by applying biblical models to our lives and work and, in so doing, we learn how to cross cultural boundaries and creatively access out-of-the-ordinary opportunities to fulfill God's mandate that His will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
By "night" I mean serving where our work is not as visible as what we think of in traditional Christian life and ministry. Night work means working in tough times and hard places. Night work means working where people don't know or don't understand what you are doing. Night work means going where people don't want you, serving people who don't like you, and blessing people more likely to curse you in return.
Night work isn't fun, or at least it is not easy. But night work has its own unique rewards, the best of which is knowing that you are doing something very near and dear to God's own heart. Even if no one else notices, He does.
No comments:
Post a Comment