Mission…

We woke up a bit later on Good Friday morning. Only Jack was working, which wasn’t ideal, but it did mean that all of us got a little more sleep, which was more than ideal! We gathered round the table and welcomed Dan, Ruth and little kid Rory to the house and chatted a while about the past week as we all woke up a little more.

We then looked at the theme for the day – mission.

24/7 encourage and explicitly insist that praying communities are missional communities. This has excited us a lot. Not necessarily because we’re all daring evangelists, in fact we’re not very good at all on that. But it does fit more with how God has been leading us in terms of what his church should look like. Not like a model. But more like an organic living community of people committed to each other, and committed to revealing the gospel to those around them in prayer, words, and actions. This expresses itself in loads of different ways, and if in fact, the focus is on being more like Jesus, his church ends up looking different every day, never stuck or set in a particular mould or programme or structure. What is the structure of the body of Christ? Well, the only one I can truly see in the bible is that Jesus is the head, and we are his limbs.

Anyway that’s a different conversation…!

So we looked at what mission was. We looked at the importance of our prayer times never becoming insular or disembodied from engagement with others who don’t share our Christian faith. We highlighted that as a prayer community, we are committed to mission on two fronts – inreach and outreach.

We also saw that mission was a key characteristic of all the previous practises in the boiler room rule:

Prayer.
In the practise of prayer we considered how spending time in God’s presence would make us more like Jesus to each other and to those around us.

Creativity
In the practise of creativity we saw that artistic/imaginative expression can speak to people and display the gospel in profound and productive ways.

Mercy and Justice
In the practise of mercy and justice we mulled over and were challenged over how we could prayerfully and compassionately act for and on behalf of the poor, broken and downtrodden – locally and globally

Hospitality and pilgrimage
In the practise of hospitality we thought of how we could kindness, generosity and a loving welcome to serve others as if we were serving Jesus himself.

Once again, mission brought us back to the very most important reasons to exist as a prayerful community together – to love God, and to love our neighbours

We handed over to jack for devotions and he lead us in a very thought provoking reflection on God’s grace to us. As it was good Friday, he read the imaginative story in the vision & the vow of Pete Greig’s description on what the resurrected Jesus would be like to Judas, had he not killed himself; showing the depth of Jesus’ love and grace and forgiveness. The strength of his sacrifice.

We spent a little while in silence, thanking God for his forgiveness towards each of us. Then shared communion together.

Jack read the heart-wrenching chapter of Isaiah 53, then gave out pieces of paper with some of the key verses to each of us and we spent some time praying about the verse we had been given.

Great stuff.

Thanks Jack!

We then enjoyed a treat that went beyond description – pancakes for breakfast!

The rest of the day we spent chilling out, sharing together and playing the most trivial game of trivial pursuit in true bank holiday style. We took a trip down the canal but the wind was so strong it forced us to return. Beautiful countryside though. Some of the most amazing places in the country are right on our doorstep and we hardly ever go there…strange that.

Tim, our good friend who’s been teaching in Spain the past few months invited us round that evening. He’s already gone back but it was great to catch up with the fine fellow. I’ve put a link to his blog on the right.