|
|
God is not an island
God chooses to reveal himself in relationship and this must be the pattern of our mission. It’s as simple – and as complicated – as that, says CMS General Secretary Tim Dakin. Here he explains why being ‘relational’ is a core value of CMS.
“If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others.”
This African proverb was told to me by Professor Jesse Mugambi, who was chair of the Kenyan college where I used to be principal. At the time we were sitting in a meeting with CMS Africa Director Dennis Tongoi and another Kenyan colleague, deliberating with some CMS partners on how to take a project forward.
When we journey to another culture to be with others rather than do things for them, our eyes are opened
I was struck by the wisdom of this saying. It teaches me to place a high value on relationships with others or else I could end up at the destination I wanted to reach but stuck on my own. It also encourages me to be patient – with myself, with others, and with the journey itself.
It’s just one example of how, when we journey to another culture to be with others rather than do things for them, our eyes are opened. We gain some perspective on life’s deeper issues and questions.
That’s the simple bit. But if we want to understand why working in relation with others, however frustrating it can sometimes be, is an essential part of Christian mission, then our belief in God as Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – is key.
The idea of the Trinity, that God is ‘three-in-one and one-in-three’, is mind-bending stuff. Of course, no human being can completely ‘get their head round’ God. But this image of God is full of deep meaning for our attempts to live in relationship.
In the struggle to make our meagre language explain the reality of the Trinity, we often talk of God as a ‘community of three persons’ existing in loving relationship. This image has become especially popular in the community-hungry Western world.
Mission is a like a dance God that invites us into
We might think of a triangular diagram, with each point being Father, Son or Holy Spirit, perhaps with arrows to show them constantly relating each to the others.
But I believe that for our understanding of mission, it would be better to understand the Trinity as the three great movements in God’s dance of life.
The theologian Paul Fiddes says that in the human world the closest mirror to God as three-in-one is “not persons, but the personal relationships themselves.”*
His idea is of ‘God-as-relationships’, rather than as three persons relating to one another. Again, our minds will stretch as we try to reach for God using human analogies, but they are all we have, and we can remind ourselves that humanity was created in the image of that God. We can get used to the idea of God-as-relationships by thinking about the famous phrase ‘no man is an island’. We all become more than ‘just myself’ through our relationships with others. It’s how we enter into those relationships that makes our lives worth living.
We could say God is like the three larger movements of a dance that we are invited into – this is the mission of God. Sending, like the Father sending Jesus; responding, like the obedience of Jesus to the Father; filling, like the overflowing of the life of God into the world through the Holy Spirit. These are the movements of God’s dance, and relationship itself is the way in which God moves.
*
Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity
, Paul Fiddes, DLT 2000, p49.
|
|
|
|
|
|