Living Proof of the Living God
Several years ago my family read the classic children’s novel Anne of Green Gables out-loud together before bedtime. The story follows the adventures of Anne Shirley, who is an imaginative 11-year-old orphan girl. At one point in the story, Anne is asked by her teacher, Miss Stacey, to write about a remarkable person. After school, Anne shares her thoughts about the assignment with Marilla. “Oh, I would dearly love to be remarkable,” she says. “I think when I grow up I’ll be a trained nurse and go with the Red Crosses to the field of battle as a messenger of mercy. That is, if I don’t go out as a foreign missionary. That would be very romantic, but one would have to be very good to be a missionary, and that would be a stumbling block.”
Anne is painfully aware of her own shortcomings and sees them as a “stumbling block” to being a missionary when she grows up. This raises an important question for us to consider: Is Anne right when she suggests that the lack of beautiful character is a stumbling block to living out God’s mission in the world?
On the one hand, Anne’s comments reflect a Christendom mindset that a missionary is someone with a higher calling to travel to some far-off land with the message and mercy of the gospel. One of the helpful corrections of the “missional” movement has been to recover the missionary identity and calling as something inherent to every Christian. All of God’s people are called to bear witness to the gospel in their own time and place (2 Cor. 5:18-20).
But on the other hand, Anne is right to say that goodness is in some way bound up with our gospel witness. Jesus calls us to live in such a way that people may “see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matt. 6:16). And so the calling of the Church to participate in God’s mission begins not with having the right ideas or right mission strategy, but by becoming the right kind of people. As missiologist Lesslie Newbigin has said, “How is it possible that the gospel should be credible? I am suggesting that the only answer… is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it.” Holiness is not a condition of salvation—we are saved by grace! But it is a condition of fruitful mission.
And so we recognize—as Anne does—that there are obstacles between us and our deepest aspirations for our church and for ourselves. But we have hope that though we are intractably imperfect, we may yet be sanctified—by the Holy Spirit’s work within us—into something of the loveliness for which the Lord Jesus has taught us to hope—for his glory here in Ladner.