Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
We’ve understood that mission’s mobilization is not just about recruitment. It’s also about this long-term process of shifting worldview. So we like to talk about “deal with the roots not just the fruits”. Fruit is the things we see in terms of how people are making decisions and their actions. But the roots is what we believe and if we see a lack of missions fruit in this case, lack of people praying, giving, and going. Oftentimes, most of the time, it’s because of what we’re believing in our worldview roots. So we are always asking “What are the worldview roots that we need to address, that will lead to much more missions fruit as the body of Christ?”.
And I think one of these world view roots is what you might call “closed universe thinking”. See, we are saturated by the world… we are believers and we read the Bible and yet we are more influenced by the worldviews around us than we’d like to admit. I think one of those worldviews, some of those worldviews are things like naturalism and secularism. And in those worldviews what you see is what you get. It’s a closed system and only what’s in it is what’s available to us. There’s nothing beyond that. And so I think that really influences how we function as even believers in terms of generosity with our time, talent, and treasure because just imagine a simple illustration of a piece of pie. If I take a bigger piece of pie that means that there’s less pie for everybody else.
So imagine this community that’s struggling to do the ministry they want to do locally. They don’t have it in the budget to do all that in their heart to do, good stuff! And then somebody, a missions mobilizer comes and says, we need to be doing more for the unreached over there in the uttermost parts of the earth. There’s there’s like, well we’re not going to sacrifice but we need to be doing here locally in order to do something for those people way over there. And that almost seems like, of course, makes sense it’s just wise not to sacrifice this for for that. And so we have to make a case for how God functions differently. God is functioning in an open universe he’s able to create something out of nothing for for him there is abundance. There’s more where that came from! For everything He created there’s more where that came from. And we can see that we can never give God. When we give in the face of our own need, there is this abundance that comes. So we can see this in the life of Jesus, where there was five thousand men right? He’s teaching, plus women and children and they’re hungry and the disciples said we should feed them. He said you feed them, remember this? And they freaked out and they scrounged around and found a couple… A boy with a lunch a couple of fishes and pieces of bread and fed all of those folks with leftovers. There was abundance not just what they needed but more. God functions in an open universe.
And there is story after story of communities who have taken the courage to give to the least-reached, to the unreached, in the face of their own need, in the face of their own building program. And God has honored that and expanded the whole “piece of pie” so they have more for what they want to do locally and are able to even increase what they are able to do globally. I think this is a world view root that we can address in ourselves and in our communities.
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