Our mission

I am reading Breaking The Missional Code: Your Church Can Become a Missionary in Your Community by Ed Stetzer and David Putman. I am not ready to write a review of the book yet, but I am thinking about this paragraph:

"Missions makes this point: it is not about us and our preferences. It is about his mission and the fact that he sends us. We want to practice our preferences. We want things to be the way we like them. But God wants us to be on mission with him, to be sent to some group of people somewhere, and to minister in a way that meets their needs, not promotes our preferences. When we are functioning as God's church sent on mission, we will go into different cultures, contexts, and communities. We will proclaim a faithful gospel there in a culturally relevant way, and we will worship in a way that connects in that setting. When the connection is made, the code is broken. God does not tell us that we will always like it. He does say that we always need to function as his missionary church."

I have been thinking alot about this. All of us, as individual Christians, pastors, and churches, struggle with making the things the way we personally like them, instead of thinking as a missionary or missionary church. If we go go a foreign mission field, we woudl hopefully understand that we cannot do church the way we do it here. We are there to communicate the good news of Jesus Christ to a different culture that may speak a different language. We cannot be fooled into thinking that, here in the United States, the culture and "language" is all the same.

In my particular case, and with our church, we have been called to be missionaries to Westlake, OH and the surrounding communities. So, here in NorthEast Ohio, in 2009, we must consider how to best communicate the good news of Jesus to these people that God has sent us to. Missions is not just about sending people we call missionaries aroun the world. Missions starts right here, with us heeding God's call to reach people right here, and right now. My prayer is that I will be sensitive to God's Spirit, and be always willing to adjust my thinking, my preferences, and the details of our chuch ministry, in order to be God's missionary church.