Long ago and far away, I was a parish priest who would travel across the northern border to teach an adjunct course. In fact, I was once listed as one exported unit of missiology for the purposes of NAFTA, which I like a lot. I did my part for the balance of trade!  A few years later, as an avocation, in addition to being a seminary administrator, I used to teach an annual course on that subject.  Little did I know that the word “missional” would take-off, like a share of religious Amazon stock: missio Dei, missional curriculum (here at one stage), missional budgets, and so on. (Generally, a good thing, though I must admit that the words of the late Bishop Stephen Neill, that where everything is mission, nothing is mission, rang in my ears).  I am only here for a day, and I only have 18 minutes or so, to talk with you.  But that is also the length, I understand, of a TED talk.  So right here and now, let me tell you what I think you most need to know about that subject of mission, in seven points, which is a sacred number after all.

         One. Location, location, location.  That is, what matters most -  where you and I are located in the history of salvation. The crisis, the hinge of history, was the moment Jesus speaks of in his passage. Now is the time when humans are to worship him in spirit and truth.  Like all of the Gospel, our story awaits and assumes the resurrection, in whose wake the Gentiles are to come to the spiritual Zion.  Summoning them is location appropriate behavior.  Obviously, this requires taking the resurrection realistically and seriously, for which scholars like Tom Wright have helped us anew in our time.

         Two. The pagan is the Christian’s best friend.  The history of Christian mission may be simply summarized:  the Church has been remarkably successful at summoning pagans of nations across the globe to faith.  Adherents of the world religions, and modern seculars, around the edges at best.  The reason is that pagans know that there is indeed a spirit world, the outstanding questions being to whom it belongs, and whether it can be affected.  Pagans are a pragmatic lot- how can I get access to the mystery, where is the key? Absorbing the answer once they receive it is a longer affair.  The woman at the well is, I reckon, a complex case, a kind of religious hybrid.

         Just the same, the Samaritan woman is a good stand-in for subsequent pagans all in this way.  She has desires, among them spiritual.  And yet there is a gap, between what Jesus says and what she can, for now, hear.  Both longing and resistance co-exist in her uneasily. There is this epistemic gap, across which the gospel can make itself known.  What I am saying is no less true for the suburban worshippers of choice and self to which many of you are headed.  The temptation will be to trim the gospel to their wants and your parish’s urgencies.  But you must resist this, and deal with the approach- avoidance in the hearts of the seekers around you all the days of your ministry. 

Three.  Grace is the watchword.  People sometimes suppose that mission is a matter for Armenians and moral rearmament fans and social activists alone. But in fact, Calvinists fanned out across Africa and Asia in mission, and worked and sometimes died. Why? Because though everything depends on God’s sovereignty in the gift of faith, they were to be its servants, its witnesses.  But this means that mission is not something you simply plan and execute, something we might manipulate.  We too witness and wait on what God has in mind to do.

         Four. Talk is cheap.  We all know that words can be a means to get at the heart of the matter, or a way to avoid it.  At the heart of seminary education is the oneness of believing and doing, as knit together as body and soul. We do and it embodies our believing. And if we really believe we then do.  Only the believer and the congregation which is really sharing its faith with that seeker, in hopes that he or she comes to saving faith in Jesus the Christ, only that one is asking live questions about Jesus. The rest is wind, of which there is as much in congregation as there is in seminary.  The practice of witnessing, smokes out the functional pluralism which resides in much of the Church, it also is the heart of the matter when it comes to the vitality of your parish.

         Five. She fits the profile, the Samaritan woman, I mean.  If you would like a long but profitable read in Lent, if you are wanting for things to read, try Bengt Sundkler’s history of the Church in Africa.  One of its leitmotifs is that the great agents of evangelism were those who lived between times, or cultures, young women fleeing arranged marriages, disinherited youngest sons, children of parents from two tribes, courtiers taught to read, refugees from famine or those seeking work, young men back from the war.  They knew the old, but had been cracked open to the possibility of the new.  We do not know what became of the Samaritan woman, who does seem to have lived on the outskirts in several ways. It would not surprise me if she became an effective ground-level evangelist.

Which leads me to six.  We plan, God laughs - Wikipedia tells me this adage is a translation from the Yiddish: “mann tracht, Gott lacht.”  By this I mean that the history of mission is full of surprises, unlikely turns of events. These should make us humble and hopeful.  Missionaries in India mean only to preach for salvation, and a generation later they had built hospitals and schools across the land. They preached for individual repentance and whole tribes of untouchables came. (They were the inspiration for the North American church growth movement, another surprise).  The missionaries preached in Africa, and one result was a plethora of independent churches they neither foresaw not agreed with.  We debate whether the missionaries were heroes or villains, and miss the fact that the real main actors (aside of course from the Holy Spirit) were local indigenous evangelists.  The missionaries left, and instead of collapsing many of the Churches took-off. The Chinese crushed the church, only to find it increased tenfold a decade later.  In east Africa the church stalled, an evangelist and missionary put their resentments in the light and pray, and the rest is history. I could go on. 

         And, finally, that chestnut of the spiritual life: watch out what you wish for.  We celebrate the global, and welcome our brothers and sisters finding their voice. Until of course they proceed to say what we do not want to hear. But listening to truths we resist from our brothers and sisters is a pretty good Lenten discipline, no?  My own favorite modern saint, the great missionary and bishop to south India, Lesslie Newbigin, emphasized this gift, in fact part of what it means to affirm the Church catholic. Within the body we listen to one another, and speak the truth in love to each other, whether or not we can hear the Gospel in our sibling’s witness, for the sake of mutual reproof and encouragement.  So it is with all families, in order that we might grow into full adulthood in Christ. A similar dialogue is to be had, hard and blessed, in the parishes to which you are headed, and over which calling I pray for God’s blessing on each of you. Amen.