Quotes from Staying is the New Going

 

The title alone is worth the price of this book! This also set the stage for my creation of a neighborhood mission trip series. Let me share some of my favorite quotes from the book:

For a long time now, mission has been framed as a far-off endeavor, a trip requiring a passport, a plane ticket, and a lot of packing, but God's mission is active everywhere, which means God's mission is active among your family, your friends, and community. For God's work to become tangible, it must first become local, invading our everyday thinking and the places we inhabit.

The ideas and dreams you have are good. They just need to be connected to actual living, breathing people with souls. This is why we pray, "Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth or in my place as it is in heaven." For a long time now, mission has been framed as a far-off endeavor, a trip requiring a passport, a plane ticket, and a lot of packing, but God's mission is active everywhere, which means God's mission is active among family, friends, and community.

For God's work to become more tangible, it must first become local, invading our everyday thinking and the places that we inhabit. The place you already live is the most obvious place to begin your mission, but it is also the most overlooked place for mission trips and ministry. The church was born to a spirit-filled group of disciples who expected to see the gospel spread from their place to the whole world. Acts 1:8 reads, "But you'll receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you will be witness in my Jerusalem and all Judea and Samaria into the end of the world."

When rightly applied, the gospel propels us in an outward direction. Join the mission of God, burst through our comfort zone, and calls us into non-traditional ways of loving people. We are invited to be sent ones taking on Jesus' mission to seek and save the loss, but also taking on Jesus's incarnational posture. In their book, The Leap of Faith, Michael Frost, and Alan Hirsch observe that Western churches are suffering from a sense of suburban homelessness, never at home in its local neighborhood. "They're describing the essence of displacement. We have a place, but we are somehow removed from it. We are the ones that are displaced."

Rethinking mission trips. The idea of long-term commitments applies not only to our particular place, our global mission efforts can sometimes drift into a form of conquering. We put a pin on a map and say, "Been there, done that, got the T-shirt." While there is certainly nothing wrong with mission trips, we can accidentally slip into mission tourism, attending the mission's vacation of our choice.

Emily T. Wierenga, author of Atlas Girl, reflects about religious tourism. She writes, "On these trips, we view another part of the world, how they live, and we have our hearts move for the things that move God." These trips usually help us, but not necessarily them. That's okay as long as we don't inflict harm in the process, so long as we don't go there to use the locals, so long as we don't go there with the wrong motive or impression to erase some guilt that we have or to do an active service that will somehow fix the world. Not only do these attitude shame versus dignify the national, but they also prevent us from understanding the humility of our situation or the majesty of God.

I suggest that we ask ourselves this question. Will our church or organization continue to follow up with the people we've met with the intention of developing a long-term relationship? If not, what we may be doing is more mission tourism than world missions. The goal of any mission trip is to join God's mission. Joining God's mission does not necessarily require a trip. Living in the outward direction is a posture, not a destination. The gospel propels us away from churches, our desires, and our security. When the decision to stay in a place is understood missionally, the impact of faithful presence usually increases.

Today, the opportunities for reaching the nations can happen by going or by staying. Decades of globalization have brought the world to us. Many Christians have a heart for the nations, buy fair trade products, wear TOMS shoes, sponsor a child, pray for unreached people groups, but many of these same Christians can't tell you the names of their neighbors. We have accidentally depersonalized missions by imagining villages halfway across the world instead of our next-door neighbors.

Don't use global engagement as an excuse for local disengagement. We need to continue praying for serving and traveling to other nations to show and tell of the life transforming story of Jesus, but be careful of ministry wanderlust lead you to miss the people right here under your nose. We need to use the resources God gave us to help those who are close and those who are far away.

Staying does not conjure the same emotions or fundraising efforts. Committing to stay in one place and work for its good might be the most counter-cultural, transformative thing we can do. We must be careful to not be all mission and no incarnation. We have opportunities to make disciples as we weave through our days in the coffee shop, on the bleachers at our kids' soccer practice, during an awkward conversation with a co-worker, or on our driveway talking with neighbors.

These are all necessary stops in the neighborhood mission trip. The beauty is always in the moment when they say, "I'm realizing I can be a missionary right here in the city. I don't have to go overseas, although someday I might get to go overseas, bingo." As we equip people for mission, local training can function as both a strategy to reach your place for Jesus and a training ground for the future.

Most spiritual conquest and colonization liken people to projects that we must accomplish and these vulnerabilities are aggravated by a short-term, unrooted posture toward a place. If we are relationally investing in people today but gone tomorrow, we can leave people feeling abandoned and devalued. Jesus used parties as opportunities to make theological statements of who is welcome, who is worth risking our reputation for.

In Luke 14, he tells the parable of a banquet feast. That's Luke 14:16-23. The first thing to note about this parable is the age-old plight of busyness. Let's not blame Western culture for our busyness. It's right here in the pages of scripture. Don't get discouraged when people turn you down and seem to be terminally unavailable. Keep inviting them and look to find others who want to accept your invitation.

Staying is most powerful when going is the most logical thing to do. After Hurricane Katrina, I led one of many teams that went down to help with rebuilding. We went to a small rural strip south of New Orleans. The damage was devastating. There were cars and trees, huge shrimp boats blocking the road into town. Some of the families we met had been there for generations. They had no plan of leaving. Then many people thought twice about staying. I remember gutting a church building. After our work one day, a local pastor told me he had reached out to the church's pastor and received no calls back. The whole congregation was probably gone for good.

Living a life of mission is hardest when you have nowhere to hide. Proximity allows others to view pieces of your lives through a glass house. Family and friends and neighbors see us in our grumpiest moments. Here's the good news though. Others have nowhere to hide either. After entering our neighborhood and rebuilding relationships with a serving posture, we began to develop friendships. This was exciting. We were finally getting somewhere, I thought. Then we experienced a strange step, being served in return. The gospel makes the most sense in proximity. Perhaps this is because proximity invites us to taste what Jesus tasted in coming to earth.

Christians can turn our homes into fortresses away from the stress and worries of the world. We can't end up being so busy attending church events and gatherings with other Christians and teaching a Bible study that we just want to collapse on the couch and turn our time off. If people don't know Jesus enter our homes, we have the chance to immerse them in a loving family and community.

I hope they smell the aroma of Christ, not the mothballs of stress and discontentment. If our homes begin to function as castles, our kids, our family, our neighbors will never get to experience how the gospel tastes. How sad would it be if our neighbors only know us as the ones who drive to church on the weekends but never bring the gospel home with us? We can take comfort that the bar for community in North America is set really low. This is good news. Any attempt at a faithful presence, no matter how small, will be noticed.

In case you're wondering, God is already at work in your friends, your neighbors, and your city. You don't need to take Him anywhere. The battle for people is not your battle, it's His. It's not your ministry, it's His. We are returning to things, people, and places that we have drifted away from. This will bring us to our knees in independence upon our God as He brings us into relationship with those around us. Our eyes have been veiled for too long, pointing too high on the horizon.