Monthly Archive for December, 2007Page 2 of 2

When was the last time?

So for the last 30 years the Indian spiritual leader Mata Amritanandamayi has been giving out free hugs, allegedly 26 million of them to date, and leaves people feeling wonderful and loved.1 She’s not a Christian but I suspect she may have stumbled upon something that people are craving, love!

Why aren’t we as unconditional in our expressions of love? So when was the last time you hugged someone?

Prophets of a future not our own

I’ve posted the following before, but I read it again today and felt that it bares repeating! For the whole thing you can look at this post, but the salient points are:

It helps now and then to step back
and take the long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.

We may never see the end results,
but that is the difference between
the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders,
ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.

This are the wise words of Archbishop Oscar Romero, a 20th century martyr! Sometimes we need to remember that whatever our thoughts and plans are, we are workers seeking to do the Master’s will!

We live in a world that expects immediate results to our work and in reality some of the seeds we sow today may sit dormant for years. Instant results may not be seen, but this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do the work. After all the architect of the universe is the one who has put together and only He sees the whole blueprint. We simply need to be faithful in the part that He calls us to, whether or not we see any results.

Engaging in contextual mission

In a comment over at theRubicon Geoff Ryan made the following point in reaction to a comment I made:

In one sense, we cannot decontextualize our mission out of the communal framework within which we undertake that mission (ie what tribe we give our allegiance to) however, please let us not refuse to engage with complex and nuanced matters by simply defaulting to a “well-at-the-end-of-the-day-the-only-thing-that-
matters-is-that-we-get-people-saved”.

This has really got me thinking about what mission should really look like for me here in Godalming. Although I already understood the fact, one thing that is coming home to me again and again is that context is important in working out what our ministry should look like. So one of the questions I’m asking myself at the moment is, “What is the context I find myself in here as the appointed leader of The Salvation Army in this town?”