In this E-pistle

The Missional Christian

Pomp and Circumstance — An Unremarkable Child 

The Missional Church is a popular term from the last decade or so and it describes an important shift in understanding and practice whereby mission is no longer understood as a particular program in the ministry mix of a congregation, but as a congregation’s way of life. The Missional Church understands every inch of ground outside its doors to be the mission field. It takes Missional Christians to make a missional church. That is, mission is something we all do everyday, not something some of our friends at the church may do sometimes. So work, school, home and neighborhood become the places where each one of us is sent by God to bear witness to his love in word and deed. “You will know them by their fruits,” Jesus told his disciples who were wondering what is the mark of true and false disciples.

As Park becomes more and more a missional church, we have discovered that participation in dedicated mission projects has a way of spilling into the everyday life of our members. Serving in Brazil, West Virginia or with the Salvation Army changes you forever. On Sunday you will hear of two specific opportunities to immerse yourself in missional work – one for just a couple of hours and the other for a very intense week. Park will provide the Salvation Army evening meal for their guests in Rochester on Thursday, May 31. Sunday’s bulletin will have an insert on how you can be a part of this good work. Secondly, our Mission Commission has begun the process of building a team of Park people to travel to the Gulf Coast the week of September 23 to participate in the much needed and ongoing work of rebuilding communities devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Sunday’s bulletin and June’s Branches will have more information on how you can participate. Is God calling you? Let’s be in prayer together about these opportunities.

This from a very a biased father:

Tomorrow morning Becky and I will be on the campus of Grove City College. Our hearts will race just a bit and our eyes will well with tears when the strains of Pomp and Circumstance fill the air and the cap and gown clad Class of 2007 marches into the central quad. Alanna will be among the 600 or so to receive diplomas and then say goodbye to the place and the friends that have been so important for the past four years. Our hearts will be filled with gratitude as our youngest daughter, now a striking and self-confident young woman, receives her degree and turns to head into the future God has been preparing for her.

Alanna has done well academically and that will be noted somewhere in the commencement bulletin. She loves and is loved by a wonderful group of fellow students, who, though they leave the campus and their shared experience of college days, will be friends for all their lives. She loves God and is a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ not because her parents demand so, but because her heart desires so.

What joy and pride Becky and I will feel tomorrow morning. Our little girl, Boo Boo we once called her, is, well, she is a very unremarkable child. What I really mean to say is that this remarkable young woman is who she is because of some very unremarkable things, everyday things. Part of the reason Alanna is who she is has to do with what the theologians call common grace, grace that is like the rain that falls on the just and the unjust alike. But finally she is who she is by the particular grace that falls upon those respond to God’s call to life in Jesus Christ. Let me count some of the ways:

1. Alanna is who she is by the grace of the gift of family, a common grace. God has used our faithful and often flawed parenting to mold Alanna into the person she is. She experienced all that youngest child stuff, yet her brother and sister are numbered among her best friends. But in particular, Alanna would not be who she is without a very remarkable mother.
2. Alanna is who she is by the grace of the gift of friends, another common grace. God has given her good and nurturing friendships from the playground in Richmond and her buddies in Menominee to those wonderful cross-generational friendships in Beaver and her journey-into-adulthood friends from Grove City.
3. Alanna is who she is by the grace of the gift of education, another common grace. For Alanna, school was the family room and the kitchen table, family field trips and dinner time discussions. It was the college classroom and the streets of the favela. It was the library and a thousand favorite books.
4. Alanna is who she is by the grace of the gift of the church, a particular grace that colors all the common graces of her life. At Lake Grove Presbyterian Church in Lake Oswego, Oregon, little Alanna experienced God’s love reflected through a pre-school Sunday School teacher named Tom and Tom’s wife Ruth Ann who opened her home and her heart to all three of our kids. In Menominee, Michigan, Alanna experienced God’s love as she was always stuck in classes filled with a batch of bratty boys who didn’t listen well and always misbehaved, but people like Sam and Debbie were there week by week insisting that God loved them all. At Igreja Presbiteriana no Jardim América in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, God gave Alanna a hundred little children from the Favela and told her to love them into his Kingdom, and she did and continues to do so. And at Park Presbyterian Church in Beaver, Pennsylvania, God gave her friends of all ages, an organ teacher named Larry, a youth director named Missy, and a love for worship that glorifies God and for thinking that digs deep into the mystery of God and of his Christ.

Family, friends, education, and the church: four altogether unremarkable, everyday things, gifts of God that should not be hard to come by, if only we will let our children come by them. God has used these unremarkable things to fashion the young woman Becky and I will cheer tomorrow morning. Thanks be to God