missionaries

This is me, with a Master’s hood…bright scarlet for Theology!!!

Yes, I’m done with seminary, finally! Why, then, am I sitting in a classroom at Fuller Theological Seminary? Because I love my husband. We’re in a cold classroom gearing up for a four-hour class on Christian apologetics, and I’m glad I’m just an auditor. Edwin, on the other hand, has an intensive 5 week class ahead of him. I’m basking in the glory of being finished with school, and dreaming of the life ahead…reading what I want, writing and blogging on whatever topic tickles my fancy, and preparing paperwork and newsletters for our World Team journey.

I’m getting really excited for pending missionary life. I’ve always wanted to be a missionary. So my thoughts often smile at the direction my life is taking.

God made me to be a cross-cultural missionary. He gave me

.a grandmother who traveled whenever and wherever she could (my papaw called her a gypsy);
.not only a Christian home, but a Christian heritage of grandparents and great-grandparents who loved Jesus;
.a heart to serve Jesus anywhere, specifically among people not just like me;
.and a husband who wants to do the same;
.a great love for world cultures;
.an even greater love to witness the Body of Christ at work across cultural and language barriers.

God is so amazingly unfathomable, and my most real experiences of his glory-in-action have been in the context of mission. But here I’m not talking of just cross-cultural mission. I’m referring to the mission of living with Christ anywhere and everywhere. This mission is the mission of all followers of Christ, and it is because of this mission that we’re all missionaries. I wish more believers, and more church leaders, lived in the reality of our mission.

Oh, there are so many directions I could take with where my thoughts are going. I just “finished” researching (for my final research paper) the “priesthood of all believers,” (found in Exodus 19:6, 1 Peter 2:5,9; Rev 1:6). This topic is so vast and deep, I think I’ll always be researching it. I am so intrigued by the identity God gave us to live in. God has made us priests! Yet the modern-day Church lives as if some are given authority and others are meant to be lorded over. We live in a religious system that I think is not fully biblical, and it is keeping people from knowing who they are! The average Christian “goes to church,” listens to one person tell them what the Bible says (and subconsciously accepting the lie that they are not able to know as much as “pastor” knows), and goes back to life with a sermon in their pocket (literally…on notes that tell the tale of the quaint three-point sermon they just heard). They aren’t (usually) told they’re missionaries. They aren’t led like they’re on a mission. They don’t even know they’re priests, and thus they don’t even know who they are!

My spirit is in a bit of a holy rage over this issue. I’m tired of top-down, CEO-style leadership in the BODY of Christ. A body is organic, natural, and interdependent within itself, organs doing different functions but helping each other run. Hierarchical leadership is distastefully cold, mechanical, and inorganic. There is a sense of a machine that needs the other parts to run, but without the bodily dependence. Parts in a machine can be replaced with no loss of life, only, perhaps, a loss of efficiency. A body, on the other hand, loses parts at a cost to the function of the Body as a whole, and potentially, a loss of life. The church I am in doesn’t run like a body. I don’t even know most of the people or the spiritual gifts they were given by our Lord. We “invite” the Holy Spirit to interact with us, instead of acknowledging the ever-present power of the Holy Spirit and asking him to lead our worship, learning, and ministering.

So, what. I’m not all full of critique. I have ideas. But they’re revolutionary ideas. I’m not hoping for mere revival of the current system, but for a change that is perhaps totally unrecognizable to those of us raised up in the American top-down model of Christianity. And my ideas spin around the issue of spiritual gifts. I’m hungry to see the Spirit lead us believers in powerful outpourings of who he is and who he has made us to be. That leads us back to our identity as priests. If I am a priest, then I am a priest who has the spiritual gifts of giving, mercy, pastoring, and teaching. Edwin is a priest with the gifts of mercy, leading, evangelism, and pastoring. What kind of priest are you? The Church needs you, because it is lacking so many of the priests that were made upon birth into Christ.

More ideas to come…like, how do we develop our gifts? More about the priesthood. How do we practice the priesthood in a top-down structure of ministry like many of us know today?