Becoming Part of the Mission of God: A Brief Thought
Author: Bobby Valentine | Filed under: Church, Discipleship, Holy Spirit, Journey, Kingdom, Ministry, Mission
The Missional Change Model for local congregations has five steps 😉 It has to be biblical right lol. We can call it the Five Finger Plan. The fingers look like this:
Awareness (of where we are in both space and time)
Understanding (this is using conversation/dialogue to bring about integration between our thinking and our feelings about where “we” are)
Evaluation (this is a difficult stage. looking at ourselves deeply and critically to see if what we are doing currently helps with our stated goal of reaching out is not easy. Asking ourselves if “programs” actually engage or need to, perhaps, die and what tools do we need to cultivate to actually do something in light of fingers 1 and 2)
“Experiment” (this is perhaps hardest of all. It requires taking the risk of faith and trust in the Holy Spirit. With this finger we decide we must actually take our walk with the mission of God out of theory and put it to the test of life. Engaging “OUR” space and our time may (often does) require thinking and acting out news ways of engaging.
Commitment (this finger requires that our new ways of thinking and doing in our space and our time be more than a week long gospel meeting or VBS. It requires training for the marathon not the 100 yard dash.
My philosophy of ministry states that God’s Holy Spirit is already working in the present. The Spirit was in Macedonia long before Paul went there. In fact Paul’s desire was to go into Asia.
This missional model is simply a fancy way of talking about what Paul does in Acts 16.6-10. Paul discerned that the Spirit did not want him to do one thing but did want him to do another. Paul wanted to go to Asia. But he was attentive to the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit was already at work in a Roman Colony named Philippi, a tough, and challenging place to be. But Paul joined in what God was doing. Paul, in this short narrative, essentially goes thru this process and arrives a this conclusion, he was “convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them” (16.10).
May we pray and discern what God’s Spirit is doing. When we pray we must follow.
God’s Holy Spirit is not a printed page nor is he confined chained between the covers of a little black book. The Holy Spirit is a Missionary who has gone out into the fallen world to breath life into a place that reeks of death. My prayer is that we will follow the apostle’s example and be “lead by the Spirit” into Mission of God.
October 18th, 2017 at 11:19 pm
Totally agree.
October 31st, 2017 at 6:31 am
Since the field is always present, the mission is always present as well. The saints in Acts went out as they went out and so the Word went out as well with them. Paul was more directed as one person. The same message, Jesus Christ, but different avenues or conduits. As we walk with the HS, we are to channel the HS in our life and the HS is to follow us in our life in spreading the Word. This is not a “church program” thing, but a saint thing.