The July 2006 issue of Evangelical Missions Quarterly featured an article by David Mays in which he identifies what he see as “Six Challenges for the Church in Missions.” They are, in brief:

The First Challenge: Keeping “Lostness” in View
“As churches become more concerned about (1) being less threatening places for non-believers and (2) their image in their own cultures, Christians have become careful in how they use “harsh-sounding” words like lost, sin, and repentance. It is awkward for non-Christians and somewhat uncomfortable for Christians to come to terms with the start possibility that people could be forever lost. I’m afraid many Christians just don’t believe that those who have not heard or do not know Christ are lost.”

The Second Challenge: Reaching Both the Community and the World
“For a long time many evangelical churches focused on (1) discipling believers within the church and (2) reaching the nations abroad. Reaching the community was not a major focus. In the last two decades, however, there has been a strong movement to reach our communities. …Most new churches are focused on reaching the unchurched community; global missions is not a major focus. …The effort to reach our communities deserves to be supported and applauded. How to balance that with reaching the rest of the nations for Christ is the challenge.”

The Third Challenge: Maintaining Focus
“At one time missions was ‘foreign missions.’ As people from every language and nation came to live among us, missions became ‘cross-cultural missions.’ But culture isn’t limited to nationality. We are increasingly a country with multiple cultures, many of them less affected by the gospel or with greater social needs than others. …For most people missions has come to mean any ministry outside the church. …Without clear and understood boundaries for missions, a healthy missions budget is a temptation for any church leader with ideas. If a project or program can somehow be tied to outreach, the missions budget becomes a potential source of funding. …Even while the prosperity of the North American church grows, the challenge also grows to increase, or at least maintain, outreach ministry focused on the peoples and nations with the greatest needs and least access to the gospel.”

The Fourth Challenge: Balancing New Strategies with Commitment to Long-Term Missionaries
“Many churches do not have specific missions goals and strategies. ...Some churches have long ignored the missionaries they support. …A few church leaders want to evaluate their missionaries but have unreasonable expectations. They would not think of evaluating their own church by the same standards they wish to apply to their missionaries. …Occasionally a new missions committee feels compelled to become better stewards of missions resources. They develop a strategy, perhaps without considering the consequences to their missionaries who are far away and dependent upon their support. Missionaries…may be unceremoniously dumped because they don’t fit into the new strategy.

Increasingly church leaders recognize that the congregation is disconnected from missions and they work to get congregants involved. The most natural forms of involvement are mission trips and projects in the community. These require a great deal of planning and management. Many missions leaders are so busy with organizing these complex involvements…that they have little time to think about how or whether these projects contribute to the larger goal of world evangelization. …Becoming more strategic while taking care of our missionaries is a major challenge.

The Fifth Challenge: Maximizing Mission Trips
“Mission trips are a means to accomplish mission work on the field, to enlighten and disciple the ones who go, and to influence the congregation back home. …While much good work is accomplished on some trips, there are all-too-common reports that trips were more costly, if not downright detrimental, than beneficial. The permanent life change we hope to see in the one who goes gradually fades back into normal, everyday life. The congregation may not get the full impact because there is little opportunity to communicate what has happened to the returned missionary. …

The primary result of most trips is more trips. I have never heard anyone say that their church’s regular missions budget (outside of giving for mission trips) has grown because of their mission trips. It is clear, however, that an increasing proportion of many missions budgets is going to help support the trips. …Subtly mission trips are becoming something we do for us, rather than as a means of stimulating greater missions involvement and effectiveness in the world. …The challenge is to do mission trips in such a way that they are (1) productive on the field, (2) include discipleship for the people who go, and (3) stimulate the congregation to greater awareness, prayer, and giving for strategic missions efforts.

The Sixth Challenge: Producing and Sustaining High-Quality, Long-Term Missionaries
“From the beginning the Church in the U.S. has been closely connected to the culture and we still cling to it as the culture deteriorates. We live nearly at the level of our culture. This includes physical comforts, but is also includes accommodation to habits and practices, sins and weaknesses, that compete with spiritual development. …Our American arrogance and independence are not good models. Our freedom to eat, drink, wear, say, and do whatever we want are a hindrance and shame to many of the churches we want to help elsewhere in the world. We are accustomed to a luxurious lifestyle, a stark contrast to most people in the world. Habits and desires do not disappear when one decides to become a missionary. …As one missions pastor told me, ‘Our church has a good missionary candidate training program, but we can’t teach them how to live a simple lifestyle.’”

Formerly Great Lakes Regional Director with ACMC, and briefly Initiative360, David Mays is now serving with the Evangelical Fellowship of Mission Agencies (EFMA) as their Director of Learning Initiatives and Church Relations.

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THE RAW POWER OF JESUS
Colossians 1:17 says this of Jesus Christ: “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” Take a moment to read the entire passage (verse 15 to 23) and let me ask you, Have you considered recently the power of Jesus Christ?

We don’t spend enough time thinking about the power of Jesus Christ. Wherever He went during His earthly ministry, people were overwhelmed by His power. They were stopped in their tracks and were either compelled to bow before Him in complete submission or walk away from Him in total defiance. His power was such that no one ever left the presence of Jesus neutral.

In his book The Jesus I Never Knew, Philip Yancey provides a quote from Napoleon Bonaparte about the power of Christ. Napoleon wrote, “Everything in Christ astonishes me. His spirit overawes me and His will confounds me. Between Him and whoever else in the world there is no term of comparison. He is truly a being by Himself. I searched in vain in history to find one similar to Jesus Christ, or anything that can approach His gospel. Neither history nor humanity, nor the ages nor nature offer me anything with which I am able to compare it. Here in Christ’s presence, everything is extraordinary.”

Jesus is the One who spoke into the raging storm and set the waves at ease. Jesus healed broken bodies and spoke as One with real authority. Jesus demonstrates power over Satan and has the power to forgive sins. AND Jesus has the power to transform lives as everything is reconciled to Him (Col. 1:22).

Have you considered recently the power of Jesus Christ?

Dorothy Sayers was an incredible writer and thinker in the early part of the 20th century. She writes in her essay “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged”:

“The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused Him of being a bore—on the contrary; they thought Him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround Him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified Him ‘meek and mild,’ and recommended Him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies. To those who knew Him, however, He in no way suggested a milk-and-water person; they objected to Him as a dangerous firebrand. True, He was tender to the unfortunate, patient with honest inquirers, and humble before Heaven; but He insulted respectable clergymen by calling them hypocrites; He referred to King Herod as ‘that fox;’ He went to parties in disreputable company and was looked upon as a ‘gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners;’ He assaulted indignant tradesmen and threw them and their belongings out of the Temple; He drove a coach-and-horses through a number of sacrosanct and hoary regulations; He cured diseases by any means that came handy, with a shocking casualness in the matter of other people's pigs and property; He showed no proper deference for wealth or social position; when confronted with neat dialectical traps, He displayed a paradoxical humor that affronted serious-minded people, and He retorted by asking disagreeably searching questions that could not be answered by rule of thumb. He was emphatically not a dull man in His human lifetime, and if He was God, there can be nothing dull about God either. But He had ‘a daily beauty in His life that made us ugly,’ and officialdom felt that the established order of things would be more secure without Him. So they did away with God in the name of peace and quietness.”

Well, have you thought about the power of Jesus Christ recently? What do you think of His power? We are called to trust Him and find our hope in Him and to emulate Him as we live. What a challenge, when so often I realize that I have decided to define Jesus in categories totally unlike those described by Dorothy Sayers and more importantly, the Scriptures. I need to see Him once again in my life as the Lion of Judah, the One who speaks and all of creation listens, the One who can transform my life—the all powerful One who is my Hope!

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THE FIRST PLACE
Jesus, the perfect picture of the unseen God
Maker of things we cannot comprehend
Wisdom, the earth displays Your strength and beauty
Sovereign, yes every throne knows You are God!

Every inch of this universe belongs to You, O Christ
For through You and for You it was made
Your creation endures by the order of Your hand
So You must have in all things the first place

Victor, over sin and death You triumphed
Firstborn, You've shown us life beyond the grave
Bridegroom, we long for You in expectation
Jesus, Your church rejoices to proclaim

(c) 1999 Matthew Westerholm

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Mudhouse Sabbath: An Invitation to a Life of Spiritual Discipline
by Lauren F. Winner (2003, 2007 Paraclete Press)
Reviewed by Suzanne Johnson

“Practicing the spiritual disciplines does not make us Christians. Instead, the practicing teaches us what it means to live as Christians.
…The ancient disciplines form us to respond to God, over and over always, in gratitude, in obedience, and in faith.”
– Winner, in Mudhouse Sabbath

Though we are nearly a quarter of the way through 2007, the year still has an air of “fresh start” about it for me. Perhaps because tomorrow is the official First Day of Spring, and the year does not seem fully underway until the earth comes alive again. Whatever the reason for this lingering sense of new beginnings, with that mentality I’ve recently found myself drawn to treatments on the spiritual disciplines, and increasingly desirous to see more of these rhythms and practices of spiritual devotion have a place in my walk with Christ.

One of these books is Mudhouse Sabbath: An Invitation to a Life of Spiritual Discipline by Lauren F. Winner. In her earlier spiritual memoir, Girl Meets God, Winner tells the story of her conversion from Orthodox Judaism to Christianity. In Mudhouse Sabbath, she brings her knowledge and experience with Jewish traditions to bear on the Christian faith she has now embraced, suggesting that there are “Christian practices that would be enriched, that would be thicker and more vibrant, if we took a few lessons from Judaism” (from the introduction).

The titular “Mudhouse” is a coffee shop in the author’s hometown of Charlottesville, NC and indeed, one could read this short tome (a mere 160 pages) in an afternoon spent with a latte at a coffeehouse or a picnic in the park. The subtitle describes this book as an invitation, and it is just that; you will not find detailed prescriptions and techniques for practice or lengthy passages on the theology of the spiritual disciplines. In the author’s own words, this is “a small book of musings on and explorations in those practices.” With other excellent books out there that include the former (I am also delving into Foster’s Celebration of Discipline at present) I appreciate this book for its admittedly modest scope and the author’s conversational tone even as she provides an informative treatment of each area of spiritual practice. Winner’s “musings and explorations” on 11 topics—Sabbath, fitting food, mourning, hospitality, prayer, body, fasting, aging, candle lighting, weddings, and doorposts—are thoughts to which I will return as I reflect on my own attempts (and failures) at building these practices into my own walk with Christ.

Lauren F. Winner is the author of Girl Meets God, Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity, and a contributing writer to Christianity Today.

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