The World is Our In-Box

When I start to talk about "Church" and "mission" I tend to ramble. More often than not, I end up sounding like a crazy person. What follows is a modest attempt to open a door to conversation about the nature of the church and her mission by way of a grossly oversimplified metaphor: the world is our in-box.

As a technology worker, I recognize the distinction between "inbox" and "in-box"; I'm not talking about e-mail. I'm talking about the physical box sitting on your desk where people keep dropping off more and more work for you to do. It's that box that tells you that you still have not run out of things to do. Once something is in the box, it can not be ignored; you have been assigned.

As much as I hate to compare the Kingdom of God to the corporate world (and this analogy can only be taken a very short distance) let's imagine that the moment we choose to follow this 1st-century Jewish rabbi whom we believe to be the Son of God that we are accepting a position in his organization. We take on responsibility for whatever Kingdom of God, Inc. is all about.

If the Kingdom is about loving our neighbours, then every time we see someone who needs love shown to them... *pop*. Another item appears in our in-box. Every time we see someone without food, without shelter, without a winter coat in the dead of winter - yep, into the in-box. When we hear about those being oppressed by criminal organizations or governments in lands far from our own, well, the Kingdom has a branch there, too, so it's in our in-box.

"But that's impossible!" I hear you say. "We can only do so much!"

That's true, which is why we're part of an organization and not independent contractors. The "Great Awakening" and the rise of evangelicalism in the West have done much to reignite our spiritual lives but it is tempting to focus so much on our individual faith that we forget what corporate faith looks like. We see "church" primarily as a collection of individuals coming together to give and receive spiritual nourishment for our personal faith. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's only part of it - I would even go so far as to say it's a "means" and not an "end".

I believe that if we truly owned the Kingdom work that is piling up in our in-box and recognized that we share this in-box with every single person who has signed up to follow this Jesus of ours... well, Sunday mornings might look a little different, not to mention the interactions between different communities within the Kingdom. We're not lone wolves and we need to stop acting like we are. The person who stands next to you singing or reciting whatever it is you happen to sing or recite in your congregation is also your partner in mission; you need their help to tackle our shared workload.

It's a tremendous (not to mention somewhat cheesy) oversimplification of both mission and church, but maybe it's enough to start a conversation.

And, to stretch the corporate analogy just a little bit further, there's one other aspect to our mission: we have all been made "hiring managers" for the Kingdom. If the workload looks like it's far too much to ever accomplish then maybe it's time to do some recruiting.

Peace,

Theo