Jesus said seek first the kingdom of God, and everything necessary will be your as well, meaning make your life all about the kingdom, and God’s got your back, in Bono’s words.
Much of the street-smarts of church leadership, however, seems to live by a slightly different dictum: seek first everything necessary (money, bigger building, more people), and the kingdom might be yours as well. I’ve posted about it before here.
This is the basic reason I like the ideas behind the missional church: mission is foundational instead of peripheral. Instead of trying to get a few more people in a building on a Sunday morning, so we can get a big enough building and enough money to engage in God’s mission, we are simply seeking to partner with God in his mission right now, with whatever resources we have available. To assume we can only have kingdom impact with big buildings and big budgets is idolatry. Jesus never said we could buy the kingdom. Simon Magus got in trouble for that one, actually. We could stand to be less like Simon Magus and more like the boy who offered his fish and bread to Jesus, even though he knew it was clearly not enough to feed thousands of people. Let’s find out what Jesus is doing, and get involved in that, even though our contributions seems ridiculously small in comparison to the task to be done. Who knows? Maybe we’ll see some multiplication happen. Maybe we’ll see the kingdom come.
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