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The universal Church is comprised of local congregations who's purpose in our day needs to be re-directed from trying so much to get folk into their churches as making more effort to release God's People to be in mission where they are, day by day. Raising the spiritual temperature, where we live and work and work-out, calls for spiritual and practical formation, before and as we go.
“Thank God it's Monday!” – we might well say, for weekly and daily we show up in homes and fields and farms, in urban and rural areas, in our jobs and vocations - there to be God's People, setting up sign posts of Kingdom-present and Kingdom-coming. The Kingdom is near, bringing the shalom that comprises all of life. We don't bring in the Kingdom, but we sure as Heaven can make people hungry and thirsty for it. In the mean-while, it is often difficult to know how to live out our lives for Christ, individuals and as a Community. All of the major institutions of the West are failing or at least changing as may need be. Local churches need to change too. It's as if God's People were back in Babylon, wondering how to sing the Lord's Song and to live faithfully in a new land, in a new day.
If we think we have this already figured out, we're misguided. It will take time for us to get our breath, to discover and rediscover where we are to be and how we are to serve today in God's Missional Plans to reclaim people, places, and things back to God's Self. Yet it was while in Exile that God's Old Testament People were led creatively, imaginatively and faithfully to continue. When they could no longer go to Temple on Sabbath, (because Jerusalem had been completely destroyed, they had to figure out how to keep going, keep faith, keep their kids and culture. It was in such times and places they came up with 'synagogue' and continued as a Community, as God's Chosen Ones.
Similar challenges and opportunities are before us. God's people have 'been here before' - in similar times, circumstances, and against similar hostility, odds and apathy, and in the face of outright unbelief (sometimes including our own). God helping us, we will remain faithful, joining together in the Mission of God, on our bruised, black and blue, planet.
