This morning I took part in the monthly meet-up of Northwest Hothouse. Hothouse is a group of pastors, para-church ministry leaders, and community organizers who come together to explore what it means to live and lead missionally in our particular contexts. A lot of inspiring ideas and experiences are shared in these meetings. Dynamics like that of Hothouse — intelligent, imaginative collaboration — get me all the more excited about life in ministry.
One of the big questions — it was more of a dilemma, really — that arose this morning was this: What does it mean to appreciate missionality that is “slow steeping” and relational (not an imperialistic take-over), while recognizing that people have urgent, immediate needs to experience communion with Christ?
This is my attempt to answer that question.
First, I think it is important to give Jesus the respect of focusing our attention where he asked us to place it — on the Kingdom of God. It is the Kingdom, not a cosmic transaction, that is at the heart of the Christian story. The latter relates to the former as a means to an end. To say it differently, any truthful soteriology is entirely grounded in truthful eschatology. To say it differently still, the big picture is about the resurrection and reconciliation of creation, not “soul-winning” and an escapist afterlife.
We live in a Kingdom of God story. The Kingdom has come, and the Kingdom is coming. In New Testament studies this is referred to as “the already-but-not-yet.” To reverse the order, what we see around us is not as good as it gets, but it is the current creation which God has covenanted to resurrect. Creation matters because it’s creation that has been, is, and will be the project of God.
Like I said, it’s a Kingdom of God story we are part of. And the future of this story requires both announcement and fulfillment — pictures painted and promises kept. There is rootedness to this idea. We see the interplay of announcement and fulfillment in the words of the prophets and the teachings of Jesus — an urgent announcement to transform our ways immediately so that we can join in the gradual, progressive entrance of God’s Kingdom. Whether along the rivers of Babylon or during the Sermon on the Mount, new pictures of the Kingdom have been painted, and those pictures have inspired, befuddled, and expanded imagination. Picture are painted (immediate action) about a new reality that is being created (gradual, sequential movement). But we would be off the mark to divorce the picture-painting act from the larger sequential movement.
When we paint pictures, we are doing more than more than simply describing something that will someday be. Our descriptions are entities in their own right. Pictures are real. We can hold them on various levels. Pictures have thingness, yes?
Because they have thingness, they also have an irrevocability to them. When we see important images, they stick with us. They delight us. They haunt us. They inspire us. They speak of new realities while being themselves a new realities created. When the pictures we paint are real and true, the audiences to our picture-painting cannot help but own them in an irrevocable way. Even if we paint an image of the future, that future has just happened in that it is now been seen or heard. That is the in-breaking of the future into the present. The future exists in that its picture has been called into existence.
Some of the most powerful moments within our Kingdom of God story have come about when the future is called into the present through picture-painting. Again, I think of the prophets of an exilic Israel sitting along the rivers of Babylon and being filled with the dream of universal exile — a sensus plenior exile. I think also of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Did the future of which King dreamed exist at the time of that speech? We might be inclined to say that it hadn’t or even still hasn’t. There were countless race riots yet to come after that speech, and some racial tension remains today. But I imagine that if we asked those who were there in person to hear King’s dream, they would tell us that something that hadn’t existed prior to that speech suddenly did as King spoke. A new reality came into existence. And many events that have helped to fulfill that dream since the day of the speech happened only because the dream was announced.
Pictures create futures.
An unimagined, unannounced Kingdom never comes.
We live in a culture that believes talk is cheap. We form a dichotomy between words and actions. Falling to the temptations of our distrust toward the spoken word, we leave little room for speech-acts — for words that not only describe future realities, but also are, in and of themselves, immediate realities. We need to reclaim the speech-act as an essential, prophetic component to our Kingdom of God story.
Sometimes picture-painting happens in front of a large crowd (like King’s dream), but more often it happens in family rooms, coffeehouses, and bars, with a handful of people or just one person at a time. When the picture is beautiful and real and true, there is nothing those small audiences can do but grapple with the picture’s irrevocability and possibly begin to draw that picture, or a continuation of it, themselves.
As Kingdom of God pictures are painted, we experience an in-breaking of tikkun olam in two ways: our description of where the story is heading is itself an invitation to join the story, and new reality is created because we have chosen to paint.
It is amazing how many people — whether self-proclaimed Christians or people who are unfamiliar with God’s story — well up with hope when they hear the good news about God’s commitment to, and intentions for, creation. While it is possible to dream aloud this good news and still be met with hostility or rejection, I believe that real good news is generally better received than the incomplete good news, the news that explains a cosmic transaction but does not explain where the story is heading. As I said earlier, all truthful soteriology is grounded in truthful eschatology.
When the story as a whole is told, most neighbors who disagree with us are still generally glad to be our neighbors. We can be very “Abrahamically effective” like that, when we tell the whole story, the real good news.
So how do we face the balance of being an incarnational presence for the long-haul in our ministry context while acting on our concern for so many who have not received what God has for them? We dream out loud. We paint pictures about God’s covenant faithfulness to creation, the Kingdom that is growing, and God’s continuous tikkun olam mission. We demonstratively look forward to a bright future, and in so doing create new present realities that cause people to hope in a way they’ve never hoped before.
