April/May
2019
- Vol. 103
On
Mission: Part 2
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A Life That Wants to
Share Itself.
by Steve Clark
Now let’s return for a moment to that sentence
that describes our call in the Sword of the
Spirit:
“We are called to live, work and
strive, by the power of the Holy Spirit,
so that others
might have true life in Christ, now and
forever.”
Note that there is a purpose to our calling –
for others to have true life in Christ, now and
for all eternity. We have a treasure: we
have discovered what true life is really about –
life with God, life God’s way. We are called to be
coworkers with God, to use the Apostle Paul’s
phrase, to bring others to that life. This is
foundational to all that we do in mission.
We are not always expressly evangelistic, of
course. We do not start every day by preaching the
gospel or spend it calling people up on the
telephone to talk about Christ. We may do that
sometimes, but all that we do, the very way we
live our lives, is so that others might have true
life in Christ, now and forever.
To be sure, community is for us as well. Most
people in Ft. Detroit probably came there to gain
a better life for themselves. Someone probably
pointed out to them, “You know, you are not living
as well in France or in Quebec as you could in the
new settlement. You can get a big farm pretty much
free or you can make more money trading.”
And why are we in the community? Well, to
most of us, people had probably said, “You can
have a better life. You can know the Lord, you can
have some people to support you, you can get some
help with your family.” But that does not
mean that community life is for our benefit alone.
When people start living this life, they soon
discover that it is an expression of God’s own
life of generosity. God could have lived in heaven
in total bliss all by himself, Father, Son and
Holy Spirit, for all eternity, in perfect
relationship. He could have said, “Why
should we bother with all those sinful, ungrateful
people? They are only trouble!”
But that is not what God is like. He is by nature
oriented to sharing his own life with others, even
with insignificant creatures like us.
When we enter into God’s life, even if we
enter into it just seeking something for
ourselves, what we receive is a life that wants to
share itself. As the life of God begins to work in
us, through the action of the Holy Spirit, the
same desire that God has, begins to come into our
lives, the desire to say, “I have got something
good and I want to share it.” We discover
that there is something about this seed of new
life inside us that wants to give itself away, and
each of us gradually realizes, “I am becoming the
kind of person who wants to share it with other
people.” This is the life of the kingdom of
God. As we generously live the “ordinary”
life the Lord has given us in the Sword of the
Spirit, we become, like Ft. Detroit, centers to
radiate new life and bases for reaching out to
those around us. We are foundationally,
fundamentally a group of people who, as a part of
our mission, live a certain life together in the
Lord.
But of course we called not just to be something,
but also to do things in order to fulfill our
mission. These are summarized in four words
in the second half of “Our Mission”: we are
called to proclaim, leaven, gather,
and defend.
An “Ordinary”
Life on Mission
In order to give a feel for an “ordinary” life of
mission that accomplishes these, I would like to
begin with a personal testimony about serving the
Lord in the workplace, given at a men’s breakfast
by a man in one of our communities who is on the
managerial team of a medium-sized business. He is
a successful businessman, a very good community
man and has a Christian community home life.
He also has a community service. Right now
his community service is being on the music
team. Once a week he goes to music practice
and then leads a music team in community
gatherings. A few years back he was a
pastoral leader. Because of a development in
his job at that point, he had a very hard time
fulfilling any service responsibilities in the
community that were not strictly limited in their
time demands. His community did not need him
to be a pastoral leader at the time and he was
good at music. So he was assigned to the
music team for a while, as community service.
In addition to that, he also does the normal
service that most of us have come to recognize as
part of living life in Christian community –
People drop by, you invite your neighbors over to
share, you bring a work colleague home for dinner,
you welcome as overnight guests members of other
communities or those who come to learn about
community. As in the French fort we talked
about, the gates are open. People come in
and out and experience the life we have together.
Strategically
Evangelistic
This brother described his approach at work by
saying, “I'm somewhat open about Christianity.” As
you probably know, there are various approaches to
being a Christian in the workplace. Some are
more “out there” and aggressive and some are more
laid back, with various approaches in between.
This brother is clearly on the laid-back side,
although everybody in his workplace eventually
realized that he was a convinced Christian.
He said he also did some selective evangelism at
work. He did not go systematically through the
whole work force, giving them the Four Spiritual
Laws, the way certain evangelism courses seem to
encourage. Instead, he would wait until he
saw an opening and then talk to somebody, but
rarely did he speak directly about the gospel.
Many times he would just invite people to
something that he thought they would respond
positively to – a community
meeting or a presentation on how to raise
children. Sometimes he would invite them
home and then they would see his was a Christian
house. He would, for instance, make sure to say
grace before the meal as a way of indicating how
he and his family approached life.
A Person of
Character
His coworkers also got to know certain things
about him. It became clear, for instance, that he
would not take part in certain conversations. He
did not preach to his work colleagues about
improving their language or their view of life; he
simply refrained from taking part. They also knew
that out of reverence for the Lord he would not
work on Sunday. Occasionally he would make an
exception for a weekend business trip, but on the
whole he avoided working on Sunday and made clear
that if it were frequently required of him, sooner
or later he would have to leave the company. He
also made it clear that because he was a Christian
he would not take part in unethical financial
practices. As he put it, “They knew that while I
was doing the job, those financial practices were
not going to go on.” To be sure, he was in a
good position, because he knew that they wanted
him. As a result he was able to take a
stronger line without fear of losing his
employment.
There were a couple of other things he thought
were very important. First, he tried to do a good
job. He said he spent more time thinking about how
to do a good job than how to evangelizing people,
and doing a good job put him in a position to have
an evangelistic influence, because it gave him
respect. He was also careful to practice Christian
courtesy - to be respectful and helpful, to take
an interest in people. As he put it, he tried, by
the way in which he related to others in the work
place, to express the kind of life that the Lord
has put inside of us.
“Modest”
Results
He described the results of his approach as
“modest”. He felt that the topics of
conversation and the language had improved
considerably, as well as the general “feel” of the
office environment. He also suspected that
there were fewer unethical business practices
because of his presence there. In addition,
he thought that at least one person is definitely
a Christian because of his influence, and several
Christians are are now living a much better
Christian life, apparently because he had been
able to connect them with various Christian
environments and community events. One
person is now in the community because of contact
with him at work.
This testimony would probably never make its way
onto the Christian best-seller list. But it
does show how a godly man in the middle of a
secular work situation can be a channel of the
life of God’s kingdom. If each
business and government office in a city had one
or two people like him, the cumulative effect of
Christian presence and witness would be
significant. The Lord is not calling all of us to
preach to large crowds in stadiums but he is
calling us to be a source of life in Christ right
where we work and live out our daily lives.
Called to Do
I have used this story as an example because it
illustrates what we are called to do, to fulfill
our mission. It also illustrates how we can do it
in an ordinary life situation. With this as
background, let us look again at the statement “On
Mission” and go through the four things we are
called to do.
To Proclaim.
We do need to speak the gospel. At some point
people need to hear the good news. That is one of
the ways in which they can come to the life of the
Lord. The brother who gave the testimony did that,
although he did not spend most of his time at it.
He did it when he judged it would be helpful to
move someone along. Proclaiming the good news
should have the highest priority in what we do. We
do it in various ways – sometimes by
sponsoring evangelistic events, sometimes by
witnessing through our life, often by taking
opportunities in the course of daily life as they
present themselves.
To Gather. A part
of our mission is to gather people into
communities and movements. Why are we
concerned about “gathering”? Is it not
enough for people to go to church on Sunday? Well,
it may have been at one time, but we know from
experience what happens to most people whose only
Christian contact is their local church. If
they are not involved in a community, a movement
or something similar, they will usually end up
being more and more influenced by the environment
around them rather than influencing their
environment for the Lord. And rarely do
their children turn out to be as Christian as they
are.
So we seek to bring people into community, with a
preference for introducing them to the one we are
in, since we know it best and are in the best
position to welcome them into it. If that
does not seem right, we work to connect them to
another environment where they can get help and
support to live a more dynamic Christian life.
Most frequently we “gather” simply by inviting
people we know into closer contact with our
“ordinary” community life and activities.
To Leaven.
This is not a common term in modern speech:
Leaven is an older word for yeast. It appears in a
parable of the Lord Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel
(13:33): “The kingdom of heaven is like
leaven which a woman took and hid in three
measures of flour, till it was all
leavened.” The parable expresses part of the
Lord's strategy for establishing his kingdom. Just
as you put a little yeast into dough and gradually
it permeates the dough and makes it rise, the Lord
puts us into various situations in this world in
order to permeate and change them so that more and
more of the world can be opened to and changed by
the life of the kingdom of God.
We do not have a social-actionist ideology. We do
not believe that just trying to improving people
and the world will bring about what God wants. We
believe very firmly that Christian conversion is
essential for people to come into new life and for
human society to become what God created it to be.
On the other hand, we are supposed to be a
Christian influence, and the more we act as
Christian leaven in our daily environments,
seeking to promote good values, the more our
presence disposes people to the kingdom of God and
to Christian conversion, and the better their life
will be.
To Defend.
Sometimes we have a chance to defend the gospel
and Christian morality. In the testimony that I
spoke about, the brother found that difficult
business decisions became an opportunity to
quietly speak on behalf of Christian morality. I
heard several of our brothers and sisters say that
the recent U.S. presidential morality scandal,
unfortunate as it was, had the good side effect of
giving them an opportunity to speak to colleagues
and friends on behalf of Christian morality.
It is worth noting that we sometimes need to speak
up, not just in society in general but in our
churches, as well. During the recent wave of
aggressive homosexual propaganda in American
society, many of our members were the only ones in
their churches willing to speak up in defense of
traditional scriptural moral values. Once
they did, however, they found they had a great
deal of support from others around them, including
from many non-Christians.
The Means
How do we do these four things: proclaim,
gather, leaven and defend? The last
paragraph of “Our Mission” gives a brief
description: “We do these things individually both
in our daily lives and by serving in the community
or its outreaches. We do these things
corporately by opening our life to others, by
maintaining outreaches, and by helping to build
new communities.” The example I gave
illustrates how we can do these things
individually in our daily lives. Now let’s
look at how we do them corporately.
To begin with, we do our mission by opening our
lives to others, which of course requires internal
community service – taking care
of the music, providing meals, setting up chairs.
If we did not do such things, we would not have a
community of disciples on mission. These
support services allow the community to exist and
to manifest God’s kingdom so others can see
it. Our doing these services is missionary
work, because it allows us to function as a
missionary community.
One of the best examples of these essential
support services is the work surrounding our
mission trips. I recently visited one of our
mission trips in Latin America. A group of North
American adults and young people working alongside
a similar group from Latin America were doing
effective Christian service with genuine Christian
zeal. But the trip did not just come
together all by itself.
Dozens of adults on both continents, and not just
parents of the young people involved, sent out
invitations to participate in the mission, helped
find ways of raising funds and then provided the
participants with transportation to and from the
airports. Although the work of these
community members would not be described as
literally as “going on a mission trip”, they were
essential to the mission’s success. That is
life in a Christian community. The people who stay
at home are an integral part of missionary
endeavors.
We also do our mission by having community
outreaches and, as individual members, serving in
them. All of our communities have outreaches of
various sorts, and the regions do as well. I
believe a higher percentage of us are actively
involved in them than ever before. Most of
our regions send younger people off on mission
teams and many of our young people are now taking
a year or two off, to work in community
outreaches. Our outreaches are a key way we
accomplish our mission.
We also accomplish our mission by starting new
communities. As you know, we have just
recently been helping to start a new community in
Fiji. The work began when Eroni Sotutu, a Fijian
who is part of the Servants of the Word, spent
three years doing theological studies in Fiji and
provided inspiration and practical know-how about
community. But several others also traveled
there to help. A married couple from the
Antioch Community in London, with their two
children, went for a summer to give talks and live
with the new brothers and sisters. A young
couple from University Christian Outreach (UCO) in
Ann Arbor lived and served there for almost two
years, and another couple from London with their
one-year-old son went to serve in Fiji for four
months. People from the Lamb of God in New
Zealand have gone there regularly to help the new
community.
These people did not consider themselves
great missionaries. They were for the most
part ordinary members of communities who gave
generously of their time and energy at a key
moment in the life of the community in Fiji.
Establishing communities is a part of our mission
and something that many can personally contribute
to. I hope that in the future many more
couples, families and single people will lend a
hand in this way, but whether we relocate to serve
or we do support services from our home community,
we can all participate in the active missionary
work the Lord has called us to.
Sometimes our missionary work involves helping an
existing community. Just recently the Work of
Christ sent a team of people to Monterrey, Mexico,
to help them establish a summer youth camp. In
that case people did leave their city and country
and went to a new location.
But we can all participate in our mission as we go
about our normal, daily life. Whether we are
raising children, managing our homes, studying, or
working in our profession, we try to be men and
women of God, sources of influence for the gospel
in the various environments we are in. We
are also “on mission” as a community when we open
our life to others, inviting them to our homes and
activities, hosting overnight guests, arranging
community events to which we can bring neighbors
and coworkers – in short
whenever we share our life together with
others. In large and small ways in our daily
life, we seek to proclaim, gather, leaven, and
defend. This is what it means to be a
community of disciples on mission.
Volunteering for
Mission
Joining a Sword of the Spirit community means
volunteering for mission. We are not necessarily
volunteering to be sent out to another country,
although we might be sent out. We are not
necessarily volunteering to spend all our time on
a particular community outreach, although we might
at some point be asked to. Rather, we are
volunteering to live our whole lives as
missionaries.
As communities we are asking the question, Could
our life be more missionary? Could we live our
life in a way which even more allows the kingdom
of God to be advanced? Have we perhaps let
our missionary edge become dulled? These are
good questions for us to ask, as long as we keep
the complete vision in mind. As we
appreciate more fully how our whole life can be –
and is –
missionary, and as we live it in a true missionary
spirit, God will be able to make us even more
fruitful and effective for him.
> See Part
1: Being a Bulwark by Steve
Clark
This article was originally
published in The Mission of The Sword
of the Spirit, (c)
2004 Steve Clark
top photo: collage of
Sword of the Spirit and Kairos
outreach events
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Steve Clark has been a
founding leader, author, and teacher for the
Catholic charismatic renewal since its
inception in 1967. Steve is
past president of the Sword
of the Spirit, an
international ecumenical association of
charismatic covenant communities
worldwide. He is the founder of the Servants
of the Word, an ecumenical
international missionary brotherhood of
men living single for the Lord.
Steve
Clark has authored a number of
books, including Baptized
in the Spirit and Spiritual Gifts, Finding
New Life in the Spirit, Growing in Faith,
and Knowing God’s Will, Building
Christian Communities, Man and Woman in
Christ, The Old Testament in Light of
the New.
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