Becoming & Living As Christ Together
From my personal blog, A Living Alternative: Our Missional Pilgrimage:
With the recent discussions around missionShift and the Missional Manifesto, much discussion has been stirred again around the true meaning and implications of what it means to be missional. There are already many incredible contributions (such as these from David Fitch and Brother Maynard, to name just two). The topic has been on my mind a great deal more of late as well, largely born out the active work of our church, Little Flowers Community, to intentionally pursue a missional identity. So rooted in the practice of faith, the implications in this context are enormous. While there is far too much to share in this space, one aspect has been surfacing more for me recently.
When the call was made for a single sentence explanation of “missional”, I had several ideas. Knowing that a single sentence was going to be (unqualified) inadequate to the task, I decided to give what I see as one facet to this larger picture. My sentence was:
“Becoming and living Christ together.”
While I am not the theologian that David Fitch is, and though I lack the masterful word/idea craftsmanship of Brother Maynard, let me try to unpack this a bit here.
First, I think it would be fair to share what I have been using as a guiding understanding of the Gospel. Again, while it is too short to answer all questions, it will be helpful for this discussion. Here it is: The Gospel is the glory of the Triune God made manifest in His work to reconcile every person to union with Himself, communion with others, to fullness of life, and to harmony with Creation, in the context of community for the good of all.
Each aspect of this sentence could be further developed, but let me simply state that while not explicit stated in the wording, I do strongly affirm that the death, resurrection and ascension of Christ for the atonement of our sin is central this process. Atonement theology can be a touchy subject, so I will say that I believe that a variety of atonement themes are represented in Scripture and all must shape and form our understanding of the redemptive work of Christ. I wanted to put this Gospel explanation at the beginning of this post so that it is clear that I affirm that the work of redemption has a greater scope than saving individual souls from personal damnation.
Read the rest of the entry here.
