We are living in a time of rapid change.
As the church on mission in the world, we could say, we know what it is we do, so let’s get on with it and do it while taking on board the financial and logistic challenges caused by COVID-19. This is the safe, comfortable approach.
If we think church and mission today looks just the same as it did six months ago, except on-line, we are not understanding what is happening in the world. And so, the more challenging, and I would suggest biblical approach, is to seriously and prayerfully explore what it is that God is doing in the world today.
- Whatever your perspective on the COVID-19 pandemic and the rights and wrongs of government responses, it cannot be denied that this has shaken the world.
- Whatever your views on the BLM and related groups, this is changing our North American world. Old political alliances are shifting, the certainty that science could protect us suddenly looks less sure. Slow, generation-long cultural and religious changes which could have taken decades are working out in a matter of years or even months.
As the church on mission in the world, we could say, we know what it is we do, so let’s get on with it and do it while taking on board the financial and logistic challenges caused by COVID-19. This is the safe, comfortable approach.
If we think church and mission today looks just the same as it did six months ago, except on-line, we are not understanding what is happening in the world. And so, the more challenging, and I would suggest biblical approach, is to seriously and prayerfully explore what it is that God is doing in the world today.
- What does his mission look like when the majority of Christians are in the Global South?
- When ecological changes mean that zoonotic diseases are on the increase (this isn’t the first or the last pandemic that people alive today will live through)?
- When frictions between nations and ethnic groups are on the rise?
- When billions of people still don’t know Jesus?
to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross [Colossians 1:20]and what is our role, as Western Christians, in all of this?
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