The Five Marks of Mission
- To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom
- To teach, baptise and nurture new believers.
- To respond to human need by loving service
- To seek to transform unjust structures of society
- To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth
(as Quoted by Carolyn Kitto “Imagining Hope for Groups–Leaders)
While few of us would consider ourselves missionaries, each of us has been invited by God to participate in His mission. God’s desire is to have a relationship with each person He has created. Regardless of where someone’s life is at in this moment, God loves them and wants them to be part of His family: a message that must echo within the church. For those of us who are already living out of that relationship, God wants to mobilize us for His redemptive work in the world.
Your life is unique. God designed it that way. We each have different gifts, weaknesses, interests, passions and perspective–all which shape how we will undertake God’s work. The places where we have messed up, and then let God’s grace work in us, may be of particular use in reaching others who have been there. Our stories of hurt and betrayal, when placed in God’s hands, become places where God’s gentle, healing presence is most evident and they become a testimony to those who are in those hard places, often rescuing them from shame and isolation. Beyond these, our experiences and the stories we hear will move us to fight for justice in different places, and in different ways.
What unites us then, in the midst of the differences, is that we are moved and motivated by the same God: the living God, who sees the big picture. We are filled and re-filled by the same Holy Spirit, who replaces our weaknesses with God’s strength. May we fight faithfully to guard our unity in the mission, that while we receive the freedom to live out of who we were uniquely created to be, we not lose sight of the fact that it is God’s kingdom that we are building and not our own.
