Napier Baptist

I subscribed to the journal Stimulus the other day. It's a Kiwi Journal of Christian Thought and Practice. I've missed reading it since I left College so I thought I'd subscribe to it. I ordered a back copy from last year that was guest edited by Martin Sutherland on Missional Chruch. I had read Martin's essay called 'The Kingdom Made Visible: A Missional Theology of Church" on the Stimulus website (you can access it from here) and I've found myself referring back to this essay regularly, so I thought I'd better get a hard copy. I'd encourage you to have a read of it - it's briliant (although I'm biased as Martin has been, and still is, a teacher, mentor and friend to me). On Sunday I'm starting a short series on the theme of witness. What does it mean to be a witness to Jesus today? Some of the things I was taught about being a witness when I first began to follow Jesus often looks a bit like spam - an unwanted unethical intrusion into people's lives that comes across as utter nonsense that needs deleting to the recycle bin. I think Martin offers a much broader vision of witness in his Missional Church essay when he says 'The Missional Chruch (and there is no other kind) exists to make the Kingdom visible.' In today's church climate I am nervous about the elitist divide that seems to be growing between those churches which say they are "Missional Churches" with the implicit (and at times explicit) assumption that other churches (who aren't successful or edgy or postmodern enough) simply just don't cut it (at least not in the minds of the 'missional churches'). I think Martin's essay reminds us that being missional means being the church. When we are being the Community of God we are being missional. Our witness is in being the community of Jesus Christ.

When I was inducted as Minister at Napier Baptist, Martin gave me a book as a gift for entering ministry. It is by an Anabaptist theologian called Thomas Finger called A Contemporary Anabaptist Tehology: Biblical, Historical, Constructive. In his section on Evangelism (and I don't think witness simply means evangelism (in case someone thought I did)), Finger points out how the early Anabaptists witnessed in Switzerland. "Within days of the first baptisms in Zurich, Anabaptists evangelized the neighbouring village of Zollikon. [Quoting an early Anabaptist writing] "There was water prepared and if anyone desired baptism they poured a panful of water on his head in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." Immediately...converts "also...practiced community of temporal goods" and "broke the locks off their doors, chests and cellars."" I think this is making the Kingdom visible and this is witness. Missional Christians (and there is no other kind) exist to make the Kingdom visible.