missional living = the good life

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to participate in Calvary Chapel’s (Seattle) mission conference and was asked to unpack “The Meaning of Missional.” As I sought to give some kind of understanding to this fairly new word, I ended up resting on missional as living the good life.

One of the questions that continue to drive my thinking is: What did God have in mind for humans what God created all that is? When God created humanity in God’s own imagine and placed us in the context that is our world, God breathed life into us. The very breath of God animated female and male and in relationship we bear the imagine and likeness of the Divine. In God’s incarnation in the person of Jesus we see life as it can be. The life of Christ is the good life.

Of course there are many competing descriptions of what the good life looks like and that is precisely because that’s exactly what we are created for. As we inhabit the narrative of Christ’s life we get a glimpse of what the good life looks like.

A number of weeks ago, in light of our current political and cultural co-created context, I read and reread the four gospels, and I did so through the lens of a few categories: war, power, sexuality, gender, and poverty. I even made an spreadsheet of my findings to help me keep track of his teachings and embodied responses to these themes. Very telling. And tremendous glimpse into the good life or the missional life.

One of the things that struck me was that almost every time a person or a group of people came to Jesus with an issue, Jesus made the surrendering of that issue the point of their “salvation.” Jesus kept inviting people to surrender their pet thing in order to live into solidarity with the other.

Peace, dwight