Residency in Missional Living

"Grace must find expression in life, otherwise it is not grace." - Karl Barth.

This year marks another new beginning of sorts in my formation as a minister.  I am beginning an internship-style program at ACU under the tutelage of Dr. Kent Smith, a life-long minister, church-planter, and missionary-educator.  This program will train me in missional living & leadership.  I, along with 6 other students plus "significant others," will undergo a different type of education.  While we will be given new information to process and assimilate, the primary vein of instruction will be through practice, particularly communal practice.

We will learn community by being community; we will learn vulnerability by being vulnerable; we will learn pastoral care by pastorally caring for each other and by being cared for ourselves; most importantly, we will learn to listen to a God who is continually active in this world and in individuals by listening for and to God through others.

After a year of very academically-inclined study, in which I have felt an undertow of grace forming me individually, the opportunity to be formed in an "intentional community" has me almost giddy.

To paraphrase Kent, living "missionally" means living in a community that purposefully participates in what God is doing in the world.  I believe in a God in Three Persons; therefore, I believe in a God who is communal, and not one Person of the Trinity can be understood outside of the entirety of the communal God.  I believe in a God whose first recorded act was speech-creating; therefore, I believe we are made to be able to hear God within that Creation (the world itself, communities of people, etc).  I believe in a God who revealed God's self and simultaneously invited us into the participatory relationship of the Triune life through the incarnation of Christ Jesus; therefore, I believe that those of us who follow that Christ and are brought up into his Body are given the gift of grace so that we might continually reveal that God, particularly through pouring ourselves out.

I believe many other things, but these will be central to me for understanding what it means to participate as community with a purpose in what God has always been doing since time began—namely, to bring all people into God's family and all created things into God's perfection.

"With all wisdom and insight God has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth." - Ephesians 1.8b-10.

More coming very soon.

Grace and peace to you all.