Four Missional Stakes

Bishop Bruce Ough has been sharing a message with us since he came, concerning his four stakes in ministry while serving the Minnesota and Dakotas episcopal area. He wants our shared ministry to be characterized as "missional leaders, missional churches, missional impact and missional connection." It's a sound, Wesleyan and Christian plan. It is solidly Scriptural since it reflects Christ's intention not to entertain, not to just "do religion," and not to appease or please others, but to actually heal God's people in every way possible.

Jesus was teaching in a synagogue on the sabbath. And a woman was there who for eighteen years had been crippled by a spirit; she was bent over, completely incapable of standing erect. When Jesus saw her, he called to her and said, "Woman, you are set free of your infirmity." ... She at once stood up straight and glorified God. But the leader of the synagogue, indignant that Jesus had cured on the sabbath, said, "...Come on [the other days] to be cured, not on the sabbath day."  --Luke 18:10ff.

This passage in Luke's Gospel is provocative. A leader in a significant religious system is presented as disinterested in, and even resistant to, the "missional" fulfillment of God's work of healing human life and restoring human dignity. The leader seems to us to be caught up in the comparatively lighter stuff of religious observances, dramatically overlooking the fact of a remedy for human suffering. How sorrowful, and yet how common this is! When the leaders are so trapped, then the faith community is also, and so is the overall impact, and so is the wider connection among such communities!

How many of us have attended worship, hoping not to run into some boor? How many of us sit at a dining table or bus seat, wishing that we would not need to be near a person we find unappealing for whatever reason? How many times have we hoped to be picked for the good team? How often have we preferred the rules and common practices of our institutions and organizations to what our own senses and souls tell us? How often have we denied our own interior pain, rather than admit personal limitations or struggles to anyone?

Why do we do this?

We prefer the comforts of control and the avoidance of inconveniences like poverty, mental or emotional affliction, chronic illness, and suffering of so many kinds. We prefer this to allowing God to do what God does in Jesus Christ--which is to face, confront and address human sorrow and suffering in order to bring abundant life to us and to all.

What if we were to imagine our religious gatherings as places where the key actions taking place were not the fulfillments of ritual expectations, but the grateful glorification of God, and the unflinching ministry of releasing all kinds of people from all kinds of bondage and infirmities?

What if we broke the rules of church in order to heal the people of God? What if we were to become
missional leaders serving missional churches for missional impact in and through our missional connection?