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Faithful to the core
A life of faith is a mixture of pragmatism and imagination, says CMS General Secretary Tim Dakin. In the face of overwhelming troubles, we often need to ‘just get on with it’. But unless we imaginatively enter into the world of others in their tough situations, we’ll never grasp the vision of a Jesus who can fill the earth full.
I recently attended a local school assembly. The focus was an imaginary character called Ned. Ned liked yo-yos. As the story unfolded, illustrated with yo-yo skills, it emerged that Ned was learning how to make the best use of his time at school.
We can’t let change paralyse us. We press on with practical mission
In fact, the letters of his name stood for three things: Never give up, Encourage others, and Do your best – NED. It’s very practical, values-based advice about how to go on with school life.
A mission agency like CMS Britain should not be too proud to take Ned’s advice. Things are moving so fast in Western contemporary culture that many of us feel overwhelmed. This is even more the case when we factor in the issues of development and the pressing life-or-death concerns of people in the majority world.
We need to face up to the reality of the world today. The past is a foreign country and the future is another culture. And the present? Well, it’s on the edge.
We need time to reflect on all these changes, and over recent years CMS has embarked on fundamental reviews of its work to do just this. But we can’t let change paralyse us. We press on with practical mission based on our core values, one of which is being faithful. So we don’t give up, we encourage, and we do our best.
‘Just keep going’
Being faithful gives us the capacity to keep going when all around is in confusion, drawing on the experiences of other people in other times and cultures to help us lead faithful lives. It keeps us on the long, slow path towards understanding “with all the saints”, as the Biblical writer puts it, “the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
But being faithful means more than just following a particular tradition. The world is changing too much just to bash on blindly. Yet we can learn lessons on how to be faithful from what’s gone before.
Our patron, Rowan Williams, has written about this very thing: “Rather than looking for one unshakeable foundation for one kind of certainty, we need to look at what in fact is done to answer the particular questions and doubts that we face.”*
In our sharing of Jesus across borders we begin to see glimmers of hope
In the face of the big questions like “Why does God allow so much suffering?”, sometimes the only faithful answer is practical. In the aftermath of a disaster like the Asian tsunami, the most pressing question is “What are the practical next steps I need to take to just keep going?”
True to the original vision
CMS stays faithful to the vision of our founders. Their motive was the transmission of a great hope, even when it later got muddied in the period of the British Empire. It’s the hope of humanity recreated in Jesus.
In our sharing of Jesus across borders and barriers of all kinds, we begin to see glimmers of that hope, which Jesus will one day bring into reality: a world reconciled in him. This is the vision that fuels cross-cultural mission.
One practical way of supporting that vision is using a resource like
CMS prayer :: space
, which gives us the opportunity to participate through prayer in the faithful mission of others, not just foreign mission partners but local Christians.
As we imaginatively reflect and pray about other people’s practical challenges around the world, we too are strengthened, as we begin to see how the fullness of Jesus’ life is being revealed world-wide.
*
Why Study the Past? – The Quest for the Historical Church
, Rowan Williams, DLT 2005, p90.
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