Mission that looks like me!

Thankfully, I have a continued concern for people outside the life of the church. I am grateful for this as I sometimes feel that while Christian people might give lip service to this concern, I sometimes find the church quite disconnected as far as mission is concerned. It seems that the old missionary model still exists where it is accepted that the people who need to hear about the love of God are the obvious unfortunates of life. Now of course this is true and part of Jesus’ own call to ministry was to ‘preach good news to the poor .. proclaim freedom for the prisoners .. recovery of sight to the blind and release for oppressed;’ but I think that we can tend to get stuck there and lose sight of the more obvious mission fields right on our door step.

Ronnie and I support wider mission in a bunch of other ways such as sponsorship of a child and financial backing of social justice and / or ministry fields. However, for me my missionary heart has never strayed too far away from people who look like very much like me. My Biblical foundation for this is found in the call of Ezekiel in the Old Testament. Good old Zeke might have yearned for a mission field among some tribe of a distant land but God told him his mission was with his own people, the people of Israel. The first three chapters of Ezekiel describe this and the narrative closes with words that mean a great deal to me. Ezekiel has had a vision of God and now he is back with his people beside the Kebar River at Tel Abib (Modern day Tel Aviv):

‘I came to the exiles who lived at Tel Abib near the Kebar River.

And there, where they were living,

I sat among them for seven days—overwhelmed.’

I regularly get upset about injustices locally and internationally; but my heart is generally for people who look, speak and act very much like me. Even now, some twenty plus years on from the time when my faith came alive, I know and understand the feelings of Ezekiel as he sat among his own and was overwhelmed by their sense of loss and pain. I am pleased to say that my heart is still regularly overwhelmed as I pray, reflect, talk and serve among our local community.

Christianity has a bad name in some circles because we tend to be seen as people who answer questions that no one is asking. We have a prepared script with the appropriate Bible passages to prove that a person is far from God, needs to repent and turn to Jesus and no debate will be entered into. It’s funny that we are often critical of Jehovah Witnesses for doing the exact same thing?

Rather than going in there with a script we need to go in with an open heart, open ears and closed mouth. We need to sit with people and hear their questions, their doubts, their joys and their fears. Only by being with them can we hope to offer anything of life and hope. For me it has always been in sitting with people that my heart has been enlarged for them. It began with some street kids in my local suburb 24 years ago, sitting with them in the gutters at 3.00 in the morning hearing and feeling their pain.

For six years those kids shaped my future ministry. Over that time our team was mocked and occasionally abused and hardly a night would pass without our being ridiculed for what we were doing. On a couple of occasions I was physically attacked; once so badly that I had cracked ribs and was black and blue for days after and yet it was in this place that God touched me.

These kids were not usually out of bad homes with abusive parents. Often they were simply bored and trying to be a little rebellious. The suburb was a new growth area full of young families not dissimilar to where we are today. Since those days I thank God that I still have a heart for the mission field that confronts every morning when I open the front door.

What is it that touches your heart? Is there a way that you can find to sit among them and be overwhelmed?