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This is a draft of an essay that will appear in an upcoming edition of Asbury’s Alumni Link:

I love the Scriptures. In offering my Top Ten Bible passages, I am sharing texts that continue to shape and transform me as I seek to follow the Risen Christ into the world for the sake of God’s mission. I have included a question or two that I find myself pondering as I read these passages.

Gen 1:26-31
God created humanity as the pinnacle of his creative work. Such a statement was audacious in its original Ancient Near Eastern setting and it remains compelling today. God crafted humanity for profound purposes. Women and men exist to serve as God’s visible representatives before Creation by reflecting God’s character through their communal lives together. People exist for mission, community, and holiness. The rest of the biblical story narrates the loss of this reality and God’s redemptive work to restore our true humanity.

Am I living as the person whom God created me to be? Am I part of a missional community that reflects God’s character before a watching world?

Gen 3:1-9
Gen 3:1-9 is a disarming reminder of the tragedy of human existence and of the root cause of our lostness apart from God’s grace. It narrates humanity’s substitution of self-rule for a moment-by-moment relationship of faithful obedience with the Creator. The issue is trust. The dialogue between Eve and the serpent moves God from the subject of Adam and Eve’s life in the garden to the mere object of a theological conversation in which the serpent sows seeds of doubt in the heart of Eve and invites her to rely on her own judgment rather than a relationship with God built on trust. Both Adam and Eve chose self-rule over trust.

Do I trust that God has my best interests at heart as well as those of whom I love?

Exodus 19:3-6
These are God’s initial words to Israel at Sinai. They interpret the meaning of Israel’s redemption from Egyptian bondage. The salvation of God is more than liberation from Egypt; it is liberation for the mission of God. The redeemed people of God exist to serve as a missional community that reflects and embodies the character of God in/for/to the nations (cf. 1 Pet 2:9). We must grapple with this text as we seek to inculcate a biblical DNA in our communities.

How do I embody God’s call to mission, holiness, and community? How well does my community of faith reflect the vision of this passage?

Deuteronomy 6:4-9
The Shema marks the foundation for life as God intended. Our relationship with God is first order in importance. This text reminds us of the vital necessity of a fully committed life. Note that this commandment is lived out and nurtured within community. E. Stanley Jones once wrote, “Christianity that doesn’t begin with the individual doesn’t being; Christianity that ends with the individual ends.”

Is my life marked by a moment-by-moment relationship with God rooted in faithful obedience manifested in a whole being love for God? Am I “all in” for God? How well am I nurturing others in this first-order commitment?

Josh 1:1-9
Courage is the key that opens the door to the life of God’s dreams. Courage is determination to live out our faith commitments to accomplish God’s will. Joshua is God’s choice to take the mantle of leadership for God’s people. God appears to Joshua and casts a large vision for the future of God’s people. Joshua’s role is to live courageously by leading Israel into the Promised Land. The courage described in this passage is rooted in a journey shaped and formed by the Scriptures.

Do I live courageously to advance God’s Kingdom, or am I content to live in the “safety” of the status quo?

Psalm 73
Psalm 73 is a poignant psalm that narrates the psalmist’s struggle with life in the world. It captures a period of despair in which the psalmist’s perceived experience of God does not match his theological expectations. Yet it the midst of this dark time the psalmist enters God’s sanctuary and recognizes the ever present reality of God and God’s goodness. The psalmist moves from a faith rooted in external circumstances to one centered on the psalmist’s relationship with God.

What keeps me grounded when my faith experience does not match my theological understanding?

Jonah
Jonah sits among the Prophets as a nagging reminder to God’s people of God’s radical love for the nations. God is at work in the nations – even in those places that ostensibly stand the most opposed to God’s work in the world. God’s holy love extends far beyond the boundaries that we may be tempted to establish for it.

Do I love the lost as much as God does? In particular, what is my attitude toward those whom I consider my enemies?

Matt 4:17-22
Jesus begins his public ministry with a comprehensive call to (re)align continually with the ethos of God’s Kingdom that he is announcing has come near in him. Don’t miss the initial response to Jesus’ announcement: the creation of a missional community to serve as the vanguard for God’s age of salvation. The call to the kingdom is an invitation to mission and community.
In what ways have I separated following Jesus from following Jesus into the world on mission?

Philippians 3:7-16
This has been my favorite passage in the Scriptures since my teenage years. Paul recognizes that the ultimate value involves knowing Messiah Jesus as LORD. In response to this, Paul reorders his understanding of gain and privilege. Paul had boasted of his credentials in 3:1-6. He now advocates a radical reorientation of his past in light of Jesus. All that he once considered reasons for boasting are now reassessed as loss. This is not merely a pious display self-deprecation, but a deep rooted understanding that our gifts and talents become idols if we glory in them apart from a life centered on knowing Christ Jesus.

Have I surrendered to God my main thing so that it can become God’s thing?

There are countless other passages that I may well have chosen, but these are the one’s that have impacted me deeply in recent years as I seek to be continually realigned with and recast in the story that God is writing in the 21st century.

© 2009 Brian D. Russell

Michael Gorman is professor of Sacred Scripture and Dean of the Ecumenical Institute of Theology at St. Mary’s Seminary & University in Baltimore, Maryland

Gorman has posted an essay “Missional Hermeneutic: Initial Thoughts” in which he sketches out the necessity of reading the Bible from the perspective of God’s mission. He draws the following conclusions/implications from such an approach:

This way of understanding mission has many implications, only a few of which may be mentioned here briefly:

1. Mission is not a part of the church’s life (represented locally by a small line item in the budget) but the whole, the essence of the church’s existence; mission is comprehensive.

2. Mission is not the church’s initiative but its response, its participation in God’s mission; mission is derivative.

3. Mission is not an extension of Western (or any other) power, culture, and values; rather, it is specifically participation in the coming of the kingdom of God. It is therefore critical of all attempts to coerce Christian mission for implicit or explicit political purposes other than the “politics” of the reign of God—the realities of new life, peace, and justice (shalom) promised by the prophets, inaugurated by Jesus, and first spread to the world by the apostles. For Christians in the West, it is crucial that they recognize the failure of Christendom as something to be welcomed, and that they see the church appropriately and biblically as a distinctive subculture within a larger, non-Christian culture. Mission is theo- and Christocentric.

4. Mission is not unidirectional (e.g., West to East) but reciprocal.

5. Mission must become the governing framework within which all biblical interpretation takes place; mission is hermeneutical.

Read the rest of the article.

Check out my essays on missional reading/hermeneutics here.

Greg Atkinson has posted a helpful article on using social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook for advancing the Gospel. He deals with the issue of dabbling versus actual deploying the technology fully. He repeats this quotations a number of times: “New marketing only works with the new mindset. Simply using the new tools with the old mindset won’t bring about the marketing change you need and want…”

Read the Article

HT: Eddie Arthur

Message of the Shack – Random Takeaways

The Shack by William P. Young is a bestselling work of fiction that is spurring fresh conversations about the person and work of God. It narrates the life changing encounter with Godthat its main character “Mack” experiences on a weekend trip to the shack where his youngest daughter Missy was murdered brutally two years earlier at the hands of a serial killer. The death of his daughter brought The Great Sadness into Mackenzie’s life and damaged his relationship with God and others. Moreover, Mack was still bearing the scars of a brutal childhood. Through conversation and hands on experiences with each member of the Trinity as well as the personified wisdom (Sophia), Mack experiences a profound healing that enables him to begin anew to live as the person whom God created him to be.

Here is a preliminary list of key themes/messages built into the narrative:

1) God loves each person profoundly. People matter to God.

2) Relationships are the center of life. The Triune God models a profound relational mode of being. The divine-human relationship and human-human relationships are the true meaning and purpose of life.

3) Forgiveness heals the past and opens the future so that we can live as the people whom God created us to be. Forgiveness involves forgiving self, God, and others.

4) The past is redeemable no matter how dark or how wonderful it may be.

5) The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is the most critical act in all Creation.

6) Freedom is worth the price of the possibility/probability of pain and suffering because of misused freedom. God is neither the author of sin or the cause of evil.

7) God’s immanence/nearness/presence is affirmed continually. God is even present in the darkest moments of our lives.

8 ) Our words and actions matter. The way we live either adds the problems in the world or adds value to others to draw them into the relationship that God desires. There is a missional focus for life.

9) Eternity will be an endless adventure of deepening our understanding and relationship with God and others.

What am I missing? What other themes would you add?

© 2009 Brian D. Russell

Andrew Jones wrote the cover story “Missional Synchroblog: The Skinny on Missional” for the The Next Wave Ezine.

In the essay, he continues an important conversation on the meaning of the term “missional.” Good stuff.
The essay concludes with a collection of 50 key missional blogs.

In the cover story for the July/August issues of The Atlantic, Alan Carr offers the essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”Read it Carr reflects on the changes to culture and intelligence that may be influenced by the easy access to information fueled by the internet search engine.

I personally think that Google is a powerful tool that an educated person can leverage to access data easily. Its danger is that the democratization of research elevates the need for discernment and critical thinking on the part of the user of the Internet. This may be precisely the problem with the Google generation. Google offers information overload without providing the concomitant ability to interpret the data.

The implication for missional leaders is that we need to serve as interpreters rather than merely another source of information. I can remember one of my own professors once saying, “Exegesis is not important; it’s indispensable.” He of course was talking about biblical exegesis or interpretation. His maxim can be generalized for the Google generation and those of us who serve it: Interpretation is not important; its indispensable.”

Back in 2006, I wrote “Images of a Paradigm Shift: From Dispensers of Information to Interpreters.” In it I reflect on the need for interpreters. Check it out.

What do you think?