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It is time to proclaim a new radical minimum standard for the work that God wants to do in our lives. Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection make it possible for his followers to live as the people whom he created each of us to be. The work of God in our lives involves a profound renewal of our own humanity—the humanity of God’s dreams crafted in God’s own image. This is announced in Genesis 1:26-31. God forged us in His image so that we would connect others to God by reflecting God’s character in our lives while relating to one another in authentic and genuine community.

The imprint of God’s image calls out to us with the need for authentic humanity. The Scriptures can guide us to discover our true selves. God alone can do the work in us required to recreate and renew us.

St. Augustine recognized this process in his spiritual autobiography, The Confessions:

You are great, O Lord, and greatly to be praised. Great is your power, and your wisdom is infinite. And man would praise you; man, who is but a small particle of your creation; yes, man, though he carries with him his mortality, the evidence of his sin, the evidence that you resist the proud; yet man, but a particle of your creation would praise you.
You awake us to delight in your praise; for you made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. (The Confession of St. Augustine: Modern English Version by Hal McElwaine Helms, p. 1)

What do you think?

© 2007 Brian D. Russell

Missional Reading, Missional Hermeneutic

When God’s mission (mission dei) takes center stage in the life of Christ followers (as it should), we read the Bible differently. Our eyes are opened to the reality that mission permeates the very core of the Scriptures. This is the presupposition of a missional hermeneutic or any missional reading. Mission is present from Genesis through Revelation. Mission begins with God’s creative work to bring order to Creation. God created human beings to serve as a missional community to reflect God’s character to the world. A proper understanding of imago dei (image of God) turns on recognizing that image at its core points to God’s intentions for humanity to serve Creation as a visible representation of the divine. As my friend, Alex McManus says, “We are a clue.” In the aftermath of humanity’s embrace of sin (Gen 3–11), God’s mission focuses on the redemption of humanity and Creation. The Bible exists as the witness to this mission.

How do we read the Scriptures differently when we participate actively in God’s mission?

1) We bring different questions.

Engaging others in conversation by entering into the world outside the safe confines of local communities of faith quickly subverts typical Sunday School fare. In the West, a Judeo-Christian worldview is rapidly fading. This means that many of the non-Christ followers with whom we will speak will have no points of contact with the religious talk that we use. A few encounters in the world will send us back to the Scriptures in search of the Gospel beyond proof-text and for more than personal devotion.

2) We read the Bible to gain insight into humanity.

Don’t hear this incorrectly. The Bible is fundamentally about God and God’s story. But it does offer the truest portrayal and analysis of the human condition. As we seek to reach people with the Gospel, the Bible is our only true guide to understanding the deepest needs of humanity.

3) We read to allow God to transform us and our communities into missional communities.

Encounters with non-Christ followers will drive us to the realization that we need to become more profound people and our communities of faith need to become more authentic and Christlike. The recognition of our own need for continued cleansing and renewal pushes us to read the Scriptures in order to answer this question: How do I as an individual and we as a community of faith need to change in order to reach the world?

What do you think?

© 2007 Brian D. Russell

The opening Psalm reminds us of the importance of Scripture in the life of Christ followers:

“Happy in the person who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of waters, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers. (Ps 1:1-3)

The defining characteristic of the happy person is his or her ability to live under the influence of the life-giving Word of God. This devotion to Scripture permits the follower of Christ to live a life in the world without being under its influence. The result is the ability to bear fruit regardless of circumstances. This is a key insight for a missional life. The world must be engaged, but we need God’s empowerment in order to be persons of influence rather than the the ones influenced.

We all know this. Many of us hold to a high view of the authority of the Bible. Yet do we really live a life shaped by its words? I recently read John Steinbeck’s powerful novel East of Eden. If you haven’t read it, I recommend it highly. It is profound and theologically rich. It is not a Christian work of fiction per se, but it offers a reading of the Cain and Abel story (Genesis 4) in an early 20th century setting.

One of its main characters is Liza Hamilton. She is the matriarch of the “good” family in the story. Ostensibly, she is a Christ follower and she speaks out against sin, immorality, and modernity throughout the novel. Yet the narrative offers this sublime assessment of her devotion to Scripture. The context here is one in which she has criticized her husband Samuel for reading books and sharing them with their children.

“Her total intellectual association was the Bible, except the talk of Samuel and her children, and to them she did not listen. In that one book she had her history and her poetry, her knowledge of peoples and things, her ethics, her morals, and her salvation. She never studied the Bible or inspected it; she just read it. The many places where it seems to refute itself did not confuse her in the least. And finally she came to a point where she knew it so well that she went right on reading it without listening.” (page 43, italics added)

I find the last line to be particularly powerful.

Am I reading Scripture or am I listening to Scripture? How are we doing in this area?
How can we make certain that we do indeed listen to God’s Word and live accordingly?
How does my engagement with the Scriptures cause me to change?
How does it invite my community of faith to change?

© 2007 Brian D. Russell

Personal transformation is the result of encountering God. When we surrender ourselves to God and become followers of Jesus Christ, God fills us with the Holy Spirit and begins to reshape us into the people whom He created us to be. We are grafted into the community of God’s people and join the community in its active participation in God’s mission.

When God knit us together in our mothers’ wombs, he created us with a unique gift mix. Following Jesus Christ is the only way to become the people whom God created us to be. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, God can unleash us to use all of our gifts, talents, and passions for the glory of God and for the furtherance of God’s mission to redeem the world.

In his writings, Paul offers the profound image of God’s people serving as the body of Christ. Each follower of Jesus offers his or her gifts for the good of the community of faith as it seeks to fulfill God’s mission for the world. I invite you to read carefully Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12-14 in particular. The idea of gifts for the community is also found in the Old Testament, particularly in the narrative about the construction of the Tabernacle (Exodus 25-31 and 35-40).

The Church as the Community of God’s people is an organic and dynamic body. Each person whom God brings into the community is a treasure whose potential must be tapped. The mistake that most of us make however is that we substitute our static programs and human-sized dreams for the unbelievably powerful force that God desires His people to be. We need to recapture the dynamism of the early church but unleashing rather than controlling the people in our communities of faith. Rather than helping people to “plug into our programs” we need to ask ourselves how can we help each person to deploy her or his God given gifts and talents. Many times this will involve change on the community’s part rather than on the part of the individual. Instead of relying on standardized “spiritual gift” inventories, we need to probe deeper. Spiritual Gift Tests have helped many people, but they are limited by the categories that are used. They also tend to be “community-focused,” i.e., the gifts are concentrated on work within the community of faith itself with little or no attention to the deployment of gifts “outwardly” or “missionally” in the surrounding culture. Our communities need to help God’s people to move to a true gift based culture in which each person’s unique gifts and talents are fully used.

It is vital for us to find ways of helping followers of Jesus to understand their unique design as human beings. In coming weeks, I will be returning to this topic.

Reflections:
1) How does my community of faith help each follower of Christ to become the person whom God created them to be?

2) What tools or resources have I found helpful?

© 2007 Brian D. Russell

Scot McKnight, New Testament scholar and avid blogger, has written an excellent and well balanced review and critique of various strands lumped together under the rubric of emergent/emerging church.

He offers these five categories:
Prophetic
Postmodern
Praxis-oriented
Post-evangelical
Political

Read the article at Christianity today online.

HT: Andrew

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