Eric Simmons, What is the Missional Life?
Eric Simmons, a fellow pastor and friend, has written a great article, “What is the Missional Life?” In this article Eric, equips us to live a missional life in our own neighborhoods, coffee shops, and grocery stores. To motivate you to read the whole article on the 9marks website, here’s the introduction:
Welcome to my neighborhood. Here’s what it looks like:
-the lady ringing up my order at Panera Bread who is a lesbian;
-the neighbor with everything that life seems to offer—the big house, the Lexus, the beautiful wife, the straight-A kids;
-the guy next to me in the gym who is committing adultery and destroying the lives of himself and his family;
-the guy who works in the bike shop with whom I am pursuing a friendship;
-Phyllis, the 78-year-old woman who just lost her husband of 54 years.Keep looking and you’ll find just about everyone. The atheist. The mocker. The scoffer. The intellectual. The ignorant. These are people that need Jesus. These are the people that I have been called to reach. They are my mission field.
What does your mission field look like? I’m sure the faces are different, but the state of their soul before God is not.
Cool article on the 9 Marks website. I thought this is an instant classic (goes well with the Fight Club pic on yesterday’s posting):
“There’s a young man in our church named Mike. He is one of the most joy-filled missionaries I know. One day Mike was supposed to lead an evangelistic Bible study at a local college campus. But when he entered the room he had reserved, there were about eight gamers sitting around. Gamers are the types who like to wear black—black trench coats, black eye makeup, black fingernails, black everything.
Mike walked in, and said in a friendly tone, “Hey guys, it’s our turn. Can I have the room?”
In response, a tall man in a trench coat screamed, “No!” He ripped his shirt open and bared his chest, and his girlfriend came over and stuck a pin in his chest.
Then he stood up, looked at Mike and said, “I wanna eat your soul.” (I’m not exaggerating; this really happened.)
Here was Mike’s Spirit-led salty remark: “Well, don’t fill up on soul, because we’ve got plenty of free pizza.”
Immediately, the man’s buddies started falling over themselves with laughter. That salty remark defused a scary situation. And the gamers? They all stayed for the Bible study.”
I thought they were going to start swinging! ;-)
It’s great to remember that we are missionaries all the time.
I read somewhere in Velvet Elvis how we should love our neighbors but without having an agenda. That we should not help or do something just so we can preach the gospel to them. Is there some truth there? Maybe it’s more effective that way?
Sergio, my grapplin’ grandmaster, thanks for the comment. I agree with you man, “it’s great to remember that we are missionaries all the time.” Thanks for posing good questions.
I think, yes, there is a bit of truth to the V.E. notion of loving our neighbors without an agenda. I think Christ calls us to love our neighbors without reservation–whether or not we get the “results” we’re hoping for. Good call.
But, I think the V.E. idea of loving our neighbors without having any gospel goal, without any hope and purpose of finding creative ways to articulate the gospel to them, is a wrong way to go. Such an approach is, actually, an extremely unloving approach. The most loving thing we believers can give to our neighbors is the gospel message of a loving Savior who has come to rescue all types of sinners from all types of sinful lifesytles.
So, I think Eric’s article is a great one for us CPCers. We are called to be a church of people who live a missional life, quite naturally finding ways to love our neighbors in an agenda-less way. Yet at the same time the gospel ought to always motivate, influence, and in some way be central to all of our missional loving.
Yes, I agree with the gospel being the motivator behind the way we live.
So let’s see if I got this right- We should not love our neighbors just to pitch the gospel- because they may say “aaah, so that’s why this guy’s so nice. He’s trying to sell me on something!” But we should live in such a way as to make our neighbors say “so… what’s up with you?”
Always hoping for that perfect moment to tell them the good news.
