Partnership for Missional Church

Jay Hawkins from the Caldwell Church of Christ has shared these thoughts on the article from Leadership Journal.

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The kingdom of God has an undefined and elusive quality. It is difficult to grasp. I search for ways to summarize the kingdom, to point to definitive examples, and yet I am always coming up short. The frustration spills over into my investigation of the biblical material. I want to have passages about the kingdom cleanly, warmly receptive to my investigation. But at times I do not even know the tense in which the kingdom is being spoken. Is it arrived, imminent or expected? Have people ushered it in here, has it come by God’s will, or has it come because Jesus has preached it? There are practical issues with this problem for me. If I cannot read it pristinely out of the text, how do I communicate it to my congregation? How does it become the guiding light of congregational formation?

What I am finding is that in the kingdom’s undefined and elusive nature, we experience the God who is working for our good. Because the kingdom of God is elusive, it asks me to be more open to God’s kingdom work. If I cannot pin it down and I cannot possess it, then it is not static, it is not stagnant, it is yet to be discovered. Every day I must be open to the kingdom’s movements and fresh demands. Every day I must be open to it remaking my life. Because the kingdom of God is elusive, I cannot latch onto any manifestation of the kingdom and call it absolute and final. I will be more dependent on God since I am inadequate for the appropriation of the kingdom. I will give more attention to listening to others about their lives and their insights into God. I will listen to God in prayer, worship and the reading of scripture so that I can better be aware of kingdom business.

Because the kingdom is past, present and future, I will inhabit three roles. I will be a recounter of kingdom stories, a watcher in the present moment, a prophet anticipating what is to come, and I will inhabit these roles for the sake of the church. I want to tell stories of occasions in the past where the kingdom has broken in so that these stories can nourish our congregational imagination and cause us to dream kingdom dreams. I want to help the church to see that the kingdom is coming in present situations. I want to be one who verbally acknowledges the church’s yearning toward the final consummation of the kingdom. In all these I want to play a vital role for the church, but my ministry necessarily needs to also lead to others rising up to recount, to watch in the present, and to speak anticipation of the future. The kingdom which we proclaim, however, must be greater than the smallness of our individual lives or even collective congregation life. It must be a kingdom we are seeing in the world, at the point of contact between ourselves and the world.

And so: a parable of the kingdom. The kingdom of God is like Miles Davis’s record Birth of the Cool. While there was a time that I thought I understood cool jazz, I really do not. I accept this fact now. But cool jazz thrills me and it has for a long time. I just cannot adequately tell you what it is I really like about it. I think I like how it breathes and is patient. It seems more truthful and real than many other sounds I hear. When I put on Birth of the Cool, almost inevitably it first sounds jerky and discordant. In those first moments I doubt that this is what I want to be listening to. But soon the rhythms of the music become familiar and I have been reoriented to something different and better.

So it is with the kingdom of God. May it ever continue to reorient us to its ways.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 2:46 pm and is filed under elders, ministers, readings, reflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.