Partnership for Missional Church

The article below comes to us from Jerry Wolfe, on behalf of the elders

at the Federal Way Church of Christ:

We in Churches of Christ, like many other Christian traditions, have not spoken frequently about the Kingdom of God. We have spoken of personal salvation. We have emphasized individual response to the Gospel. We have described salvation as a plan. We have referred to Jesus as both Lord and Christ. We have insisted upon the church as the location of the saved. But we have said very little about the kingdom of God.

Yet it appears that in order to understand the church as a part of the missional work of God we must begin to grapple at length with

what is meant by the words “the kingdom of God”. This grappling appears to be no small task. In fact, it seems as if it is a little bit like Jacob wrestling with God. He struggled mightily to overcome, finally settled for hanging on, asked for a blessing, and came away with a limp. Jacob received his blessing, but this encounter set his life in a different direction. It seems likely that in our wrestling with the mysterious stranger we call the kingdom of God that our lives too will be re-directed.

So what is the kingdom of God? Scholars and commentators have struggled to define it. It defies our best attempts at nailing it down in concrete ways. Maybe one of the best clues to the elusiveness of the kingdom is that the synoptic gospels portray Jesus himself as speaking of the kingdom indirectly through parables. “The kingdom of God is like…” is Jesus’ favorite way of describing it. He doesn’t say “this is it”. He doesn’t define it. He offers comparisons…”it is like a hidden treasure, it is like a pearl, it is like a mustard seed”. And he leaves it to his hearers to wrestle with it.

So at best we are able to name certain characteristics of the kingdom. It is a hidden kingdom. It grows in mysterious ways. It appears in surprising places. It is something to be received with joy, yet it may bring hardship. It can be entered, but it can never be contained. It is related to the church, but the kingdom is not the church and the church is not the kingdom. Jesus is Lord on the throne of the kingdom and where God’s will is done there God’s kingdom reign is seen. Jesus cautions against believing people when they say, “here it is or there it is” yet Jesus also says, “the kingdom is among you”.

If the Missio Dei is the coming of the kingdom in its fullness and if the purpose of the church is to be a sign, a foretaste, and a witness of the kingdom of God then we must learn to speak of the kingdom with greater regularity and deeper insight. Not so much to define the kingdom, but in order to begin to see ourselves as a church that has been caught up in the great mission of God.

And so to that end as Jesus’ modern day followers we must wrestle with and hang on to this mysterious stranger that has crossed our path. In our wrestling may we receive a blessing.

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.

Thanks, again, to Rosco Pirtle from Vancouver for documenting our kick-off event in June:

Jerry Wolfe, elder at the Federal Way Church of Christ in Washington, has written these rich words about the spiritual practice of lectio divina on his personal blog. He has graciously given us permission to reprint them here.

Listen. Listen. Listen. That’s what our first Partnership for Missional Church weekend was about. In the three year process the entire first year is dedicated primarily to listening. We listen to Scripture — Luke 10:1-12. ‘Dwelling in the Word’ is new language for most of us. If you wanted the ancient church language it would be ‘lectio divina‘ which means ‘divine or spiritual reading’.

Our practice of reading Scripture is to read a passage, figure out its meaning, perhaps, although not always, make some application to our personal life or the church, and then move on to another passage. And then when we have done that we ‘know what is in the Bible’. Now get this. This is a good and important way of reading Scripture. This is not something we want to lose. Knowing what is in the Bible is vital.

However, knowing what is in the Bible is a far different thing than having the Bible know what is in us. Knowing what is in the Bible, if we are not careful, turns the Bible into little more than a tool for our own purposes, to prove our own points, to set our own agendas, to create our own categories. That doesn’t have to happen, but if we are honest, we have all done it.

Dwelling in the Word — lectio divina– on the other hand is a way of reading that refuses the approach of ‘figuring out the meaning’. Not that we don’t find meaning in lectio divina, but we allow meaning to surface over time and space. We read, slowly, thoughtfully, pausing over words, phrases, thoughts, allowing them to speak deeply to us. And after reading we sit, quietly, reflectively, with the Spirit, avoiding distractions and allowing the Spirit in the text to sink in and to work on our human spirits. Over time that way of reading will bring multiple meanings to the surface and will open us up and enter our hearts and minds in deep places that a Bible class reading of Scripture will seldom find. Lectio divina — dwelling in the word — is simply listening to God tell us about Scripture rather than us telling him about Scripture. As I spoke about on Sunday, it is counterintuitive.

‘Dwelling in the Word’ is not a replacement or a substitute for our more familiar methods of reading Scripture. To exchange one for the other would be a gross mistake. But used in concert with one another they give us a richer experience of being ‘people of the book’.

Listen. Listen. Listen. Where better to start than Scripture?