Just Enough Certainty

Why have one St. George when you can have two?

A thought about being certain of our calling in mission, and a note about how relationship trumps organisation.

Being on mission should be full of certainty and clear vision, in order to leave home and enter into a foreign culture, to leave the familiar comforts of home and family and become surrounded by strangeness, should require a great certainty of faith. Our call as missionaries is strong enough to overcome the homesickness and the fear that is ever present when you are a foreigner in a strange land.

But it is not like that it seems, we are forever full of doubts and the way is always unclear, there is little certainty. But there is just enough certainty. When we accepted the call to come here to Lebanon we rejected the possibility of going to Africa. This was because we were more familiar with Africa and feared that we would go there confident in ourselves. Coming here to the Middle East we knew would require us to depend more upon God and less on ourselves. This has proved to be true.

We are on mission in weakness the only good things we can do are those that are done with God. What I mean is that if we work with great confidence and strength we may achieve something but it can be difficult to work out if the results have come about because of our own skill and what is God’s eternal result. It is revealed when we leave the field and the pieces of our work that remain give testimony to the work of God in the world.

Returning to my point today, in mission we have just enough certainty to keep us depending on God, we are continually calling out to him to show us what to do next. You would have thought after 4 years in a place it would be pretty easy but no, the way ahead is still unclear and waiting for God to act is just the normal place to be. This dependency upon Him is a good place to be, it makes my prayer life more real, and it undermines my pride, it is not comfortable and often means that when asked by our friends our answers can seem weak and we sound unsure of ourselves. But slowly I am learning that this is a good thing.

a note

Our uncertainty has come about because we are administrators and came on mission to help the local church be better organised. We come as servants but that is not understood in the way we expected. Yet we do see God working.

We have found that our skills of administration although greatly needed are not welcomed whether we have tried to enforce organisation with strength or to gently introduce it the result has been rejection and pain. But in the midst of this confusion we have seen some beautiful things happen despite our personal frustrations. It is often said that the Middle East is a relational culture and that is where we have seen things happen, relationships are important, more important than organisation and the stories of God’s work has been around relationships not organisations.

In fact organisations here including the church are deeply flawed for many reasons, but probably essentially because of the need to keep relationships as more important than any system or procedure which an organisation might attempt to have. This is why we have seen in this context, that a work or ministry is attached to a person, for instance a church ministry belongs essentially to the pastor and when the pastor moves on or dies the ministry goes with him. It is inconceivable in this context that it can be handed on to someone else because with someone else it would be different.