The activism that is generated by Evangelical experience, and which is a largely unexamined element of Evangelical spirituality, worship and church lifestyle, has made Evangelicals at best impatient and at worst suspicious of the contemplative tradition of Christian spirituality. Not that many Evangelicals would have much interest in harking back to the privatised spiritual traditions of French Quietism, or the apparently world denying flight of the Desert Fathers and Mothers away from a sinful world, in their criticism or rejection of the apparent passivity and introspection and individualism of such self-absorbed piety. Always assuming such parts of the varied Christian tradition were known well enough for such critique, and assuming even more doubtfully whether such criticisms of Fenelon, Francis De Sales and the Desert Fathers and Mothers are anywhere near the truth and realities by which these earlier Christians lived.
But there is within Evangelicalism an inner reluctance to validate forms of prayer other than petition and intercession and personal devotion, and a dismissive superiority when comparing the activism of an evangelistic imperative and impulse to mission, with a more monastic and meditative approach to the world, to God and to the relations between them. As with much of my own thinking, I don't see an either-or here - I am pleading for a both-and. Only as the church learns to recover and practice its contemplative disposition to the life of the world, the church and the created order of God, will it have some deeper and fuller sense of what mission is in that world, and its own purpose within the creation and redemptive goals of God, and therefore its call to adapt and respond to this context of time and place that is our own peculiar calling in history .
Contemplative Mission sounds like an oxymoron, a strained attempt to bring two mutually exclusive mindsets together. But I am not so sure. It may be that if mission is building a city, contemplation is designing and planning it; if mission is the artistic masterpiece of God executed by the church, then contemplation is the artist seeking vision, shape and composition in those preliminary sketches, essential to the completion of that realised vision in beauty and truth.
Thoughtful compassion is another form of contemplative mission. John Stott in a small Falcon publication on mission reminded Christians decades ago of the call of Jesus to practice "uncomplicated compassion". By that he meant no ulterior motives - you make friends to make friends, you care because you care, you reach out because that's what you do. It isn't a preliminary tactic for evangelism, or to create a chance to witness - the act of love in the name of Jesus is its own witness, the reaching out is to embody the way Jesus is, you care because God has shown his care for you and you live under an imperative of love, so you love for no other reason, benefit or goal.
Add to that the word thoughtful, look at the world around and bring thought to bear, ask the questions that matter about peace and its absence, pervasive and chronic hunger, persistent intractable injustice, gratuitous systemic cruelty, lethal levels of poverty - and then ask what is to be done. And the answer won't always be obvious, there may not even be one, humanly speaking. Contemplative mission means a disposition of caring about the world around us, noticing what is going on, seeing the global and the local and the glocal as that God loved world into which Christ came and comes, pervaded by the Spirit of God, held in the purposive intentionality of the Creator Redeemer.
Thoughtful compassion is to think God's thoughts after Him, and to align our affections with the faithful mercy, redemptive patience, and imaginative energy of Divine Love described as inexhaustible, immeasurable and indescribable. Thoughtul compassion embodies, and then seeks ways of practising so that the inexhaustible becomes available, the immeasurable visible and the indescribable finally described in the miracle of God loving through human acts of kindness, conciliation and caring. The photo of Dorothy Day shows how radical that can be - the face is that of a thoughtful, compassionate confronter of injustice, in the name of the God made known in Jesus
Comments