missionary vs. living missional

Excerpt from 50,000 words

Thoughts from a visit to Mission San Luis

Walking about the Mission grounds we visited the tanner, the blacksmith, and the friar, a seamstress, and the wood carpenter. As we sat down and listened to each of the costumed interpreters tell their story, I began to hear a pattern taking shape. The man working with wood was making a broom handle for one of the women in the mission. The woman sewing was making an apron for the blacksmith from a hide that the tanner had given to her. The black smith was making hinges for a breadbox for the Friar. Each individual was developing their birthright gifts and were giving them in service to benefit the collective needs of the mission. Mission life in the 17oo’s might have meant sharing one’s time, resources, and abilities to help meet the needs of your neighbor. I see the Mission as a village-of-one-another-ness. This spoke in such contrasting language to the self-centered life that has built itself around this beautiful time capsule in the middle of a growing metropolis.

In our metropolis the motto might be, take what you got and hoard it all for yourself. Mission life today for some people might be, a mission in the sense, to divide and conquer taking all the spoils of war for oneself. Now, not to say that there might be little pockets of people scattered all through out the city who with their everyday eating, sleeping, and going to work/school life look to help meet the needs of others before they decide to have two of something, but they are the few.

Seeing the people of Mission San Luis has been stirring in me for sometime. Recently, I have had the opportunity to interact with a friend who is living in one of those little pockets of people here in Tallahassee. Because our city has sprawled out across miles and miles this pocket is and isn’t in one location, it is comprised of little circles of friendships that over lap one another. Here is a real example of how this pocket of people seem to live out the definition of mission as seen 300 years ago.

One guy has a house with a garage that is not being used except to store stuff, so he decides to renovate the space into a music studio because he has some other friends who love music but don’t have a place to play or record. Now there is another guy in another pocket who has some equipment but has no place to put them up. Then there is another guy who has little or no equipment but he knows how to run the equipment because of his time playing in bands and running sound for bands. So all of these music lovers are searching for ways to get together so that they can play. Now that is a picture of desire to form community. They are a community of musicians living missionally to help meet the needs of one another.

That is just an example of one of the little of pockets of people who are naturally gathering around something and using their birthright gifts to have fun and help out their fellow traveler on the road of life expressed by music.

This begins to redefine for me some terms, coming from the institution of church, like missionary. I have thought of a missionary as one who leaves the country in order to become a messenger of particular set of doctrinal beliefs. I have heard of people who thought they wanted to be a missionary, go to some training where they were taught how to get on a plane, go overseas, and take a message to the people. I think our American culture has been so completely altered that it is no longer necessary to board a plane to be in a completely foreign place. I am beginning to see my life as a missional life. Missional meaning to developing one’s individual life for the sake of giving or to benefit the larger community to which I have regular unplanned contact with as well as those I meet with intentionally that we might all grow in the same endeavor.

So mission is not one model that is meant to be reproduced like a factory, rather it is a mode of living that is cultivated and shared with others who are curious about living in a more connected way with their fellow man. It is spiritual. It is physical. Those terms are not separate. Missional is a life lived completely integrated spiritual and physical.

Mission San Luis has reminded me...

I need to relearn how to live;

real life is missional.