Sunday Worship 15 June | Thinking Missionally

Acts 2:42-47

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

The focus for our church meeting later today will be the mission resolution proposed at this year's Baptist Assembly, and so to help us prepare for that, I thought we could take this morning to start thinking about mission. Don't worry if you can't stay for the meeting, because there will be other opportunities to reflect on the resolution, and I hope this will be interesting in its own right anyway. 

It might help to start by giving a little context as to why this and why now. The Baptist Union is a collection of interdependent churches, and one Baptist church can be very unlike the next in very many ways. There are a few crucial things we agree on and there are rather more trivial things we disagree on, and that's not a flaw but the nature of our tradition. I spoke last week about approaching the great mysteries of the faith with open hearts and curious minds because we're all fumbling to understand them the best we can, and so I think it is a strength that we create such space for different understandings and practices. Having said that, recent union wide conversations have mostly been about what we disagree on, and it's left many of us feeling a little tired and fractious, and so it seems right that we shift gears and remember what it is that we do agree on. I believe that is the idea behind the proposed resolution, which seeks to unite us around a shared understanding of mission, which is really just a way of speaking about the purpose of the church, while recognising that it will be worked out in a myriad different ways.

The resolution has been crafted by the Mission Forum Core Team, and it is offered for reflection and feedback, with the hope that it will be accepted at Baptist Assembly 2027, and can then serve as a foundation and inspiration for our continued mission. It is intentionally broad, and meant to be liberating rather than restrictive. I read it as part of the service reporting back from Baptist Assembly a few weeks ago, but not everyone will have heard it then, and there's so much in it that it bears repeating anyway, so let's hear it again now.

WE AFFIRM that the whole Bible reveals the mission of our Triune God to reconcile all things in heaven and earth into unity under Christ, and Christian discipleship is the invitation and privilege of participating in this. As Baptists we understand the mission of God to be integral, where the words and actions of the Gospel are intertwined. Our mission, our witness, therefore, humbly embraces every aspect of life and includes: proclamation to a broken world of the restorative purposes of our loving and gracious God, accomplished in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ; and demonstration of the love and compassion of God, by serving all in need with compassion and generosity, by prophetically speaking to power and acting for justice, and by acting in ways that protect, nurture and sustain God’s creation. Our proclamation has consequences within society as we call people to love and repentance in all areas of life. Our demonstration bears witness to the transforming grace of Jesus Christ and the present and coming Kingdom of God.

WE GIVE THANKS for all those, throughout our Baptist history, who have gone before us witnessing with words and actions to the good news of Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of God; and for our sisters and brothers across the world who remind us that mission is from everyone to everywhere and, so doing, help us to understand the breadth of God's missional task. 

WE RESOLVE as a collective of churches and individuals within Baptists Together, to intentionally discern our place in the missional work of God in the world. Therefore, we will: passionately share the reason for the hope that we have in Jesus Christ with gentleness and respect; commit ourselves to compassionate service, pursuing justice and caring for creation; and encourage and pray for one another as we move in covenant together in the mission of the Triune God. 

It is quite wordy, which in all fairness is probably quite typically Baptist. Every so often another minister will ask in one of our online groups how long others tend to preach for, and it is always clear that I am very much on the brief end of the spectrum, for which I'm sure many of you will be grateful! I did part of my ministerial training at an ecumenical college, where many of the students were training for Anglican ordination, and much of the teaching was heavily influenced by Anglican thought and practice. And so it was that I was introduced to the Five Marks of Mission, which were developed by the Anglican Consultative Council in 1984. The Church of England has had five hundred years of writing liturgy, and has a gift for a neat turn of phrase, so their definition of mission is rather more concise: To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom; to teach, baptise and nurture new believers; to respond to human need by loving service; to seek to transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and to pursue peace and reconciliation; and to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth. They are sometimes presented even more simply as Tell - Teach - Tend - Transform - Treasure.

I think we see all five of those acts in the mission resolution, although perhaps without such a clear distinction between telling and teaching. Crucially, we see all five of those acts in the passage we heard earlier, which describes the mission of the church as it first took shape, before anyone had even thought of resolutions and marks, when everything was done more by instinct than intention. The disciples were clearly telling the good news because people were joining them daily. They were taking time each day teaching to give the depth needed for faith to take root. They were tending to others by holding all things in common and giving to those in need. They were transforming the society around them by doing everything very publicly and drawing positive attention. And creation care would not have had the same urgency for them but they were treasuring one another through their fellowship. The mission of the church has then always been found in this intertwining of proclamation and demonstration, speaking the good news and living the good life.

That perhaps shouldn't come as a surprise, because the mission of the church is the mission of God, and that too has always been found in both word and deed, in calling us to both faith and action. We are not given a mission which is wholly distinct, and we are not meant to be engaged in a mission of our own devising. We are invited to share in the mission of God, to “see what God is doing and join in” as I often heard during my training. Resolutions and marks can be really helpful, but only in as much as they direct us back to that essential principle. It's easy for us to get caught up in our own ideas and impressed by our own cleverness, but we need to keep the instinctiveness of the early church, even as we grow in our intentionality.

It seems right then that this reflection should follow on from last week’s celebration of Pentecost. The reading we heard this morning comes straight after the disciples have been filled with the Spirit and run out into the streets to share the good news, and so right away we see that they are continuing to share the good news as well as living the good life. The Spirit is not mentioned by name, but we are surely to understand that the Spirit is still with them. I talked last week about the chain-breaking table-turning world-changing stuff we are called to, and how none of it is possible without the Spirit of God, because a revolution without love or joy or peace or patience or kindness or goodness or faithfulness or gentleness or self-control can only build another empire not God’s kingdom. We could replace ‘revolution’ with ‘mission’ in that sentence and the same would still be true. So may the Spirit which hovered over creation and inspired the prophets and emboldened the disciples be with us in all our talking about mission and in all our doing about mission, as together we seek to tell and teach and tend and transform and treasure.