Our recent consultation report encouraged our congregation to move into the mission quadrant. This recommendation comes from a number of people’s input that they believe that this is the next step that God is calling our congregation to take. For a number of years we have deliberately gone deep by developing our Explore Groups as places to study the bible and apply it. Now the time has come to scatter into our communities and put our faith into action through service and evangelism.
As I’ve been thinking and praying about this for the past couple of weeks I’ve realised that this will primarily happen through two ways. Both of these recognise that we are already a congregation that is heavily involved in outreach and have been for many years. We love our communities and the people in them. We love our God. And our love of God causes us to serve the people that we love.
The first is that we already are people on mission in local communities. We are part of school communities, sporting clubs and community groups. We have neighbours and workmates, people that we encounter when walking or catching public transport. I wonder if for some of us the problem is not that we don’t have enough outreach opportunities, but that we have too many? I would like to know how our congregation can support, encourage and release you to be a missionary in these places where we already are. Along these lines we might want to join others in the community in what they are already doing. For instance the Brigades take part in clean up Australia day each year, maybe next year more of us would like to join the Brigades as though join with people from all across Australia.
The second is that we again already have a number of effective outreach programmes as part of our church. Playgroup, Brigades, youth groups, Friendship Group, Young at Heart, Community Helping Hand and the Open Table Community dinner all have as part of their DNA a component that reaches out to serve others. It may be that we don’t need to create new outreach programmes, we can just find ways to work with these existing groups and support them and add to what they are doing.
To quote from two church theologians: “The church exists by mission, just as fire exists by burning” (Emil Brunner) and “the church can only really be understood in the context of mission” (Jurgen Moltmann). The very nature of the church is that we are part of God’s mission as people who are sent to serve in the name of Christ and show the transformed reality of his kingdom.
Grace and peace
David Fender
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