Sacred?

Sacred space is something that many western Christians are not particularly aware of, yet it has an important place in our history and culture, and overlooking it can be to ignore a key tool in our missional toolkit.

Sacred space is where the divine intersects with our experience, where the transcendent becomes numinous, typically but not necessarily in a sanctuary or shrine of some sort.  It can also be in an unspoilt natural feature, such a hilltop, spring or seashore, but many sacred sites were ‘validated’ centuries ago by the construction of a religious building on them.  Our experience of God in such places is the reason why many of them have become a place of pilgrimage, and the value we place on these sites contributes to the ongoing spiritual power they have.  So for example, once one person was healed at Lourdes, others went there in the anticipating of meeting with the power of God which was already at work in that place, and this faith fuelled their anticipation even more.

Evangelical Christians have tended to play down the significance of such locations, partly as a reaction to what they have perceived as a superstitious belief in the power of holy sites or relics rather than a living faith in God, and partly because the significance they place on meeting God personally in our day to day lives, which can render a specific location redundant.  Yet in a simple way, any location can aid our faith.  My mother felt that praying in her local Anglican church was more effective than praying at home, since she felt that the cumulative weight of the prayers that have been said in that building for the last 800 years was added to hers.  That’s the significance of a sacred space for her.

Sacred?

A biblical example of a sacred space might be Bethel.  We don’t know why Abraham built an altar there (Genesis 12:8), but just a couple of generations later Jacob was sleeping rough there after he had fled from his home, and had a powerful encounter with God in a dream.  His verdict was “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it… This is none other than the house of God” (Genesis 28:16-17).  The place continued to have spiritual significance throughout the period of the judges and became a centre of idolatry in Israel when Jeroboam placed a golden calf there for cultic reasons (1 Kings 12:28-29).

Another example would be Zion, the place where God said His ‘Name’ would dwell.  This builds on the significance of the Tabernacle, which God commanded the Israelites to build so that He could dwell among them (Exodus 25:8).  That was God’s initiative, expressing a desire to live not set apart in heaven, but among humanity.  This, accompanied by the visual manifestations of God’s presence, led to sense of God literally dwelling in the temple, and subsequently in the church building – the house of God – and which will be eventually fulfilled when there is no temple at all because the Lord and the Lamb dwell among humanity (Revelation 21:3, 22).

So how does this understanding of sacred space help us with our missional endeavours?  Firstly, we can learn that we don’t need to be afraid of buildings, but can use them creatively to draw people into an encounter with God.  They don’t even need to be ‘religious’ buildings.  My own church is responsible for running the community centre in which we meet, and by our constant prayer, worship and incarnational service to the community in every part of the building we have invaded what might otherwise be considered ‘secular’ space to such an extent that people who come into the building remark “There’s a lovely sense of peace here”.  They may not recognise it, but it’s a sense of the presence of God.  The building has become a sacred space.

Sacred?

The other way in which we can use sacred space is to think about the messages we send with our buildings to those who are not yet Christians.  In many cultures, you can see the vestiges of a European definition of spirituality in pictures of a blue-eyed Jesus in India or church buildings with steeples in Indonesia.  Do the architecture, décor and furnishings in church premises speak of something that local people do not identify with sacred?  What can be imported from their culture which they would find familiar and would speak of sacred to them?  Would it be inappropriate, for example, to build a minaret on a church in a muslim country, or to have pictures in which Jesus looks like the people we’re working among?  Does the music we use for worship reflect our own cultural tradition when it might be more appropriate to use that of the local people group?

In my own city, one group is grappling with these issues as it seeks to create a culturally appropriate sacred space for a minority people group to engage with Jesus.  It uses furnishings, religious symbolism and music that would be found in their home culture.  They engage with the religious festivals of that community and embrace their culture.  In consequence, these people have found a safe and sensitive place to worship.  They do not have to cross a cultural divide in order to cross a religious one.

Teamwork is something we all think we know about, but most of us work as part of teams which do not operate at peak capacity, or are at worst completely dysfunctional.  I’ve been part of them myself, so I know.  So how do we get to a place where we are happy with our team, get along with our colleagues, manage change effectively and cope well with the unexpected?

One way is to recognise that we have differences.  Not superficial ones like whether we prefer tea or coffee, or follow United or City, but fundamental ones like whether we can see the big picture or spot the tiny mistakes.  Failure to appreciate these significant differences can lead to serious misunderstandings between us that can hamper our ability to function effectively as a team.

These problems can be exacerbated by cross-cultural  issues.  I will say more about this on another occasion but it is always helpful to remember that others in our team may have fundamentally different  understandings of how we relate together, what we’re doing, and even how the common language we use works.

There are also simple personality differences which mean there are people we naturally relate to well and others we don’t hit it off with.  This is not necessarily a failure.  Someone once calculated that in any random group of 12 people there will be at least one whom you don’t like.  Liking is not the issue, but if we’re in the same team together we have to make it work.

In his excellent book Global Member Care: the Pearls and Perils of Good Practice (2011, William Carey Library, Pasadena CA, ISBN 978-0-87808-113-4) Dr Kelly O’Donnell points out that people in your team will fall into one of four groups: kindred spirit, collegial, enigmatic and irritating.  These are people you love to be with, and spend time out of work with, people you get along with ok, people you tend to avoid because you don’t really understand them, and the ones you really wish God would move somewhere else!

The first two groups are not an issue because you can work with them well.  The third you will have a tendency to misunderstand and the fourth you can frequently fall out with.  These last two groups are the ones that require most effort and emotional energy to deal with, but if we persist, can lead to fruitful working relationships even though we may never become friends.  The annoying people are probably sent by God to be the grain of sand which produces the pearl!

It is important to stress that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with finding a person annoying.  That may simply be a character clash, but it will be helpful to ponder whether contact with that person exposes a personality issue in you which needs to be worked on.  I have found in the past that persevering in developing a relationship with an annoying colleague has helped me to appreciate other less obvious qualities and has led to lasting friendship.

There is an American Indian proverb which says ‘Never judge a man till you have walked a mile in his moccasins.’ In order words, rather than complaining because people at work are difficult to get on with, try to understand why they are difficult.  Realising that there may be a reason why a colleague is hard to get along with may be the first step in learning to get along with him.

This ability to transcend personal dislikes for the sake of the team is what distinguishes excellence from mediocrity.  The United players may not actually like each other or their manager, but their teamwork is excellent.

Is this church?

When you hear the word ‘church’ what image comes to mind?  A building?  A community?  A service?  A family?  Perhaps all of these do, or perhaps only some of them.  What do you think is essential for church?  Your answers to these questions may vary significantly from those of people of a different generation to you.  They might also acquire additional significance if you’re working in a missions community where the local church may have lengthy services in uncomfortable conditions, with repetitive singing in a language you don’t fully comprehend, and loud sermons that are not aimed at your needs.  And that’s just if you’re lucky enough not to be preaching or leading the worship.

For most older mission workers, church may not be an enjoyable experience, or even a relevant one, but it’s part of the job.  You go to church, because you should.  It’s expected of Christians, particularly of mission workers who should set a good example to the local believers.  And what happens there is pretty standard: Acts 2:42 sets out the four pillars of church: teaching, fellowship (whatever that is), communion and prayer.  Though we always leave out the embarrassing bit about having all things in common and nobody being poor – that was just culturally appropriate to the Jerusalem church.

Is this church?????

Somebody I spoke to recently was completely unable to understand why young people did not want be part of an experience like that.  They’re just not committed, she complained.  I was able to explain that young people (postmoderns, Gen X) are able to be highly committed, but only to things they believe in, and not merely to things somebody else thinks they ought to be committed to.  So younger mission workers are increasingly spurning traditional ways of doing church, just like young people in Europe.  They are finding new ways of doing things, and making them work, but this doesn’t always look like church to an older generation.

Why is it not church when a group of people meet regularly together in someone’s house for prayer, or worship, or Bible study?  Because they don’t do them all at the same time?  Because it’s not Sunday?  Because there’s no leadership?  Is that really what defines church?

This conflict has its roots in a transitional phase that the western world is going through at the moment: the much-talked-about but little-understood transition from modern to postmodern.  It’s not merely an intergenerational conflict where the old don’t understand the young and vice versa; it’s a change of epoch on a scale of the fall of the Roman Empire or the rise of the Enlightenment out of the middle ages.  It involves fundamentally different worldviews and ways of doing things.  Including church.

Is this church?

Here in the west there are already many different ways of doing church which do not fit the traditional model.  House church led to cell church, and 50 years later there are simple church, messy church, cyber church, deconstructed church, and an awful lot of people who love God together but don’t do church at all.  While this development may not have touched the cultures of the two thirds world in the same way yet, it has had an impact on a large number of young people who have grown up among a postmodern generation who are passionate about church in a different way.  When these young people enter the mission field, they want to keep doing things in a different way, but often the older generation not only sees this as a threat to the work they’ve spent their lives establishing, but doubts the very genuineness of the young people’s relationship with God.

I write this brief introduction to a highly complex issue in the hope that older mission workers will be able to be tolerant of younger ones who want to do things differently, and that younger ones may understand why the previous generation just can’t see what they see.  This of course relates only to the church needs of the mission worker; how it impacts on the church needs of the local believers is an entirely different matter!

Effective prayer?

I was struck recently by a video I saw of some Christians in Denmark who roam the streets looking for sick people to pray for.  Their approach was unassuming, they didn’t make a big issue of it, but lots of people were being healed.  There were lots of shots of people throwing away crutches and walking unaided without pain.  There was no prior explanation of who Jesus is, how he saves, how he heals.  They just asked if they could pray.

What struck me most however were their very simple prayers.  They didn’t shout, command healing, rebuke Satan, or use any of the other spectacular techniques that we have come across.  They prayed a simple prayer: Jesus, we thank you that you can heal.  We ask you to heal this person now and take away all the pain.  Thank you.

This of course, is not a new approach.  Jesus told his disciples not to pray like pagans, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words (Matthew 6:7).  He taught them that God will answer quickly (Luke 18:6-8) because he is a good father who knows how to look after his children (Matthew 7:7-11).  Hudson Taylor remarked that he never forgot that his children needed food to be put on the table for them, and he had no reason to assume that God was any different than him.

Effective prayer?

Max Lucado observed, in a sermon called The Power of the Timid Prayer, that when Jesus found his disciples unable to cast out a demon, he subsequently taught them that only prayer could cast the demon out  (Mark 9:29).  Yet the only prayer recorded in this passage is the one of the boy’s father – if you can do anything, have pity on us and help us. Did he have great faith?  No, he even asked Jesus to help him believe.  Was he eloquent?  No, his prayer was a pitiful plea.  All he had in his favour was that he had asked the right person.

Have pity, he pleaded.  The underlying Greek word is much stronger than pity or compassion, closer to ‘gutted’ in modern English.  It is used selectively in the Gospels: only of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:33), the father of the lost son (Luke 15:20), and of Jesus on the numerous occasions when he had compassion on the lost, the poor, the sick and oppressed.  It tells us a lot about Jesus.  As the creed says, his nature is always to have mercy.

Effective prayer depends not on our faith or our eloquence, but on the mighty and compassionate God who has pity on us.

Join the Syzygy prayer network to pray for mission workers worldwide, or visit the World Prayer Map for up-to-date prayer information on specific countries.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been part of two seminars on risk.  One considered the need for charities to comply with legislation protecting children and vulnerable adults, observe employment legislation, and take out insurance against risks that can’t be entirely managed away.  The other concerned how much risk our organisations are prepared to take when sending people abroad, particularly into potentially hazardous situations.  How much does the litigious culture we live in force us to avoid some legitimate risk, refrain from sending teams to unstable places where they can make a huge difference,  and pull our staff out of dangerous situations at the very time the local people need us most?  Apparently some of the first people on the flights out of Haiti after the earthquake were mission workers.  How tragic.

Evaluating risk is something we all do on a regular basis.  We’re so accustomed to it that we don’t even think of it as such, but each time we cross the road we evaluate the risk of not walking fast enough to get all the way across before that bus hits us.  When we choose a school for our children, we’re evaluating the risk of damage to their education or personality if we get it wrong.  When we take out a pension plan our advisers ask us what our risk profile is, so that they know how to invest our funds. Most of the time, we plan for safe options.  We talk about job security, or financial independence, but what we mean is ‘safe’.  Perhaps there’s not enough risk in our lives.  One of the reasons that apparently dangerous activities like bungee jumping, tombstoning or riding on roller coasters are so popular may be because people don’t get enough adrenalin in their lives without artificially seeking it out.

Perhaps we should actually be looking to live more adventurously.  We were asked at one of the seminars ‘Does God take risks?’  The answers varied, but it was clear that over the millennia his people have done.  From Abraham setting out from the security of Ur for an as-yet-indeterminate country which he would never call home, via Paul regularly suffering beatings, stonings and shipwrecks when he could have had a pleasant life as a Jewish rabbi, to the many missionary saints and martyrs of more recent centuries, God’s people have not been known for being risk-averse.  As Hudson Taylor observed, If there is no element of risk in our endeavours for God, there is no need for faith.

When I was first planning to go and serve God in a particularly undeveloped, post-conflict country in Africa, my best friend asked me what I thought the risks were.  Before I answered him, I thought about the potential damage to my career prospects and my finances.  I wondered about the impact on my hopes to have a family.  I considered the possibility of serious health problems – or even death  – due to landmines, gunfire, malaria or car accident.  In the end I concluded that there was no risk at all… because a risk only exists where what you stand to lose is of value to you.  As that missionary martyr Jim Eliot wrote: He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose.