Gathered To Be Sent

Excerpt from The Temple of God by Joshua Graves at New Wineskins

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We are gathered to be sent. We come to our sacred gathering as an actor comes to rehearsal. We receive our script (the Gospel) and we return back into the unfolding drama to play our parts as actors who represent the more excellent way of Lord Jesus.

N.T. Wright points to this truth in a story about a Mozart music mystery.

One day, rummaging through a dusty old attic in a small Austrian town, a collector comes across a faded manuscript containing many pages of music. It is written for the piano. Curious, he takes it to a dealer. The dealer phones a friend, who appears half an hour later. When he sees the music he becomes excited, then puzzled. This looks like the handwriting of Mozart himself, but it isn’t a well-known piece. In fact, he’s never heard it. More phone calls. More excitement. More consultations. It really does seem to be Mozart. And, though some parts seem distantly familiar, it doesn’t correspond to anything already known in his works.

. . . What they are looking as it is indeed by Mozart. It is indeed beautiful. But it’s the piano part of a piece that involves another instrument, or perhaps other instruments. By itself it is frustratingly incomplete. A further search of the attic reveals nothing else that would provide a clue. The piano music is all there is, a signpost to something that was there once and might still turn up one day. (~ N.T. Wright, Simply Christian, pg. 39-40.)

We live under the guise of an urban myth. This myth convinces Christians that God is most interested in church attendance. The myth needs to be slain and exposed for being what it is: a counterfeit impostor of God’s message to God’s people.

Christians are not pew-sitters. Christians have been empowered to continue to live out God’s story, a story that is incomplete actors to practice spirit-filled improvisation. A story that begs improv actors, men and women courageous to imagine what Christianity might look like in our complex world today.

While many run from poverty, immigration, AIDS, the homosexual community, and debt relief—the church runs towards them all. It is a dangerous mission to be sure. But it is the mission to which God has called us. In our baptism, he calls us to a life of search-and-rescue.

To paraphrase Annie Dillard, “Anyone who wants to follow Jesus must wear a helmet.” Maybe, next Sunday, all of us who wear the name Christian should show up to church with our fatigues and helmets! Then we might remember that we are not going to church, for we are the church.

Each time we gather, we do so with full knowledge that we are being sent.