Slideshow image

It is appropriate during the current sermon series to consider the place where God has sent us Monday to Friday. We ought to ask: how God would have us live distinctively in this place? Below is a way to ‘stock-take’ your missional life Monday to Friday. You might set aside some time this week to begin your ‘stock-take’. Have a few goes at this over the next few weeks. When you are finished you might pin your thoughts up where you can see them during the week.

Take a page. Down the left hand side of the page write the six ‘lenses’, below.

  • What is valued here (are there false God's here)?
  • How are people valued?
  • How is the earth valued?
  • How are finances valued?
  • What do people have ‘faith’ in here?
  • What story is this institution living into?

Across the top of the page have two columns:

  • What aspects of this place/institution/vocation are glorifying to God?
  • What aspects of this place/institution/vocation need to be redeemed?

In point form:

  1. What situation has God placed you Monday to Friday? Write at the top of the page.
  2. What aspects of this place/institution/vocation are glorifying to God? What aspects conform to God’s purposes for it? What aspects are in tune with creation order?
  3. What aspects of this place/institution/vocation need to be redeemed?
  4. Consider (about) five practical ways that you will live distinctively in your place/institution/vocation. What part of this institution are you able to redeem? Write these down and pin them up where you can see them.

As you consider your role in the place where you have been ‘sent’, you might pray the prayer that we prayer together on Sunday:

A short testament -- Anne Porter:  whatever harm I mave have done, in all my life in all your wide creation, if I cannot repair it, I beg you to repair it...  and where there are lives I may have withered around me, and lives of strangers far and near that I've destroyed in blind complicity, and if I cannot find them, would have no way to serve them, remember them, I beg you to remember them, when winter is over, and all your unimaginable promises burst into song on death's bare branches.