Len Sweet‘s new book, So Beautiful: Divine Design for Life and the Church, is ripe with wisdom about what it means to live a faith that transcends attractional, colonial models. Introducing what he calls a “So Beautiful” or MRI manifestation of faith (where M = missional, R = Relational and I = Incarnational), Sweet offers a compelling vision of living a genuine faith in and outside of the church. Rather than do a traditional review, I thought I’d just share some snippets from each of the book’s three sections and let Len’s beautifully written and insightful prose speak for itself. Today, excerpts from Part 1: The Missional Life.
To be alive is to be gifted with a mission…a magical, engrossing mission that leads to adventure, sacrifice, frustration, fulfillment, and holiness. Being missional is not something you do to get something done, like grow a church or sign the success-creed. Missional is who you are, because it is who God is.
From the moment we meet God in Genesis, God is “up to something.” Like the conductor in Fantasia, God is whirling and swirling creation into being. The missional thrust begins in the very being of God. God goes out in love to create the cosmos: “Let there be light.” The missional bent is there from the beginning. Whatever your theology of the Bible may be, God is always defined in terms of creativity. But the Creator has creativity with a purpose, with a mission. Creativity without the thread of purpose unravels in chaos.
I must be simultaneously seeing, following, and being Christ. I have no theology to impart, no biblical interpretation to argue, no agenda to accomplish. I only have my life.
We don’t need more mission trips but more mission people for whom all of life is a mission trip.
The church doesn’t “go” into the world and take the church there. The church “goes” into the world to discover itself there.
Too much of the current missional conversation sounds like our need to intentionally accomplish a predetermined task for God rather than seeing signs of what God is up to and living in response to what God is doing. Once we reduce mission to a task, missional “going” can very quickly be works-salvation and/or idolatry.
The journey of faith is such that, by definition, you don’t know where it will lead you.
Pilgrims are not predictable. Pilgrims have a high tolerance for ambiguity and are full of high jinks and surprises. Pilgrims choose to be open not closed to what Kierkegaard called “the wounds of possibility.” Close down and we choose death.
More tomorrow from Part 2: The Relational Life. What do you think so far?
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