Pilgrim Soldier

This post has been hanging around for two or three weeks now and today I sat down to finish it, only to completely rewrite it as a new thought came to mind.

Last week I was teaching at our training college and trying to put across how important it is for the cadets to know the community that they will eventually be placed in, and giving them a couple of tools they can use to get to know it better. Over the course of the next few months they are supposed to use these tools so that they can start thinking about Mission opportunities for the corps they are placed during training.

One of the reasons that this is so important here in Latvia is that it is very easy for the corps to fall into the trap of doing the things that come with the territory of being a country making the transition from Communist to Capitalist state. These things are normally the immediate need meeting things like soup kitchens, showers, clothes distribution etc, which are of course very important with a population of around 28%-33% under the poverty line. However, these do not really do justice to the deeper transformational quality of the Church’s mission.

For many years the Church has had an “Out of the Box” mission mentality. We look at what happens at the church down the road, or what we other churches have been doing for the last 1500 years and simply copy it. This has often led to ministry that has no apparent success. This system perpetuated things and every so often someone would break out and do something new. Martin Luther, John Wesley, the Morovians, William Booth and I could go on!

The secret was that instead of taking the same old “out of the box” ministries, they started to “Think outside the box”. I celebrate the fact that now instead of stale old ministries being kept alive simply because we have always done it that way, christians are starting to follow that lead and find out what works in the community that they find themselves. There is a place for every sort of ministry in the church, as long as its relevant and fulfilling God’s mission!