The Open Secret by Lesslie Newbigin still carries a theological punch, and sounds a wake-up call to the Church 46 years after it was published. My copy is one of the relatively few books I own that is heavily annotated and underlined (and would be really annoying if someone else now tried to read it!). I learned so much from this book. Here is the last couple of paragraphs, as he reflects on the parable of the talents, in particular the man who buried his boss's money for safekeeping, and the consequences for the church if it models its mission on similarly risk-averse playing safe with what it was given to invest.
"To invest the money with a view to a high rate of interest is to risk the capital. The church has often been afraid to do this, thinking that the faith once delivered to the saints is to be preserved inviolate and without the change of a comma. Verbal orthodoxy then becomes the supreme virtue and syncretism becomes the most feared enemy. When this is the mood real dialogue becomes impossible. And so does real mission."
"If such a church is strong there can be a kind of proselytism but there is not that kind of mission which seriously expects the Holy Spirit to take what belongs to Christ and show it to the church thus leading the church to new truth. The mystery of the gospel is not entrusted to the church to be buried in the ground. It is entrusted to the church in order to be risked in the change and interchange of the spiritual commerce of humanity. It belongs not to the church but to the one who is both head of the church and head of the cosmos. It is within his power and grace to bring it to its full completion, that long hidden purpose, the secret of which has been entrusted to the church in order that it may become the open manifestation of the truth to all the nations."
Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret. (London:SPCK,1978) pp.213-4.
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Isaiah promised that the Servant would become "a light to the nations." John wrote of "the true light that gives light to all, was coming into the world...in his was life and the life was the light of all people." Mission is a direct implicate of Advent, and Advent is the recurring call to mission.
All those years ago Newbigin insisted that God call's the church to take risks, to hazard its life on the gospel, to trust the truth and the resilience of the good news of Christ in the risky business of dialogue, discussion, proclamation and persuasion of human exchange. More than that - his was the call to the late 20th Century church to demonstrate in its life and character, its words and actions, its priorities and strategies, the truth of Christ the Saviour. And to do this by being communities of compassion, gatherings of forgiven and therefore forgiving sinners, incendiary fellowships in which the power of the Holy Spirit in transformed lives was primary evidence of the presence and activity of the living God.
The gospel is a light that should never be buried in the ground, kept safe as if it could be lost. It sits on the table and gives light to all in the house; it's a well lit city visible from the furthest distance of human longing and need. As Newbigin's title says, the gospel is an "open secret", a mystery to be lived as well as spoken, beyond our best rational explanations which always reduce the wonder of God's love in Christ, but a message so full of meaning that it transforms the lives of those who come to believe, trust and surrender to all the risks of following Jesus.
Some years after reading The Open Secret, I read the most influential book on mission published during my lifetime, David Bosch Transforming Mission. Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. Yes, in the intervening years Bosch's thesis has been critiqued, questioned, refined, and eclipsed by more recent approaches. My point in mentioning it is that I read it during Advent, and ever since then, mission and Advent have a mutual resonance in the way I understand both. The Christmas story is the historical hinge-point when God's redemptive, reconciling and renewing mission entered human history in the person of Jesus, Immanuel, God with us. Advent and mission, is the faith that 'the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it." The open secret, is that God is on the move, that in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself.
Here is Newbigin earlier in his book, in provocative mode for emphasis, providing a good summary of the thrust of his argument:
"It is of the essence of the matter that Jesus was not concerned to leave as the fruit of his work a precise verbatim record of everything he said and did, but that he was concerned to create a community which would be bound to him in love and obedience, learn discipleship even in the midst of sin and error, and be his witnesses among all peoples." (Page 176)
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