I'm a visionary, big-picture kind of bloke. I like knowing where we're going and not caring about the details. In that sense, the missionary job is ideal for me - there's a very definite big picture. I know what mission in the large looks like: we want to see everyone in Japan given the opportunity to know about Jesus.
But the missionary job is actually a bit too open-ended for me and most people. You get to where you're going, and... then what? What do you do? How are you actually going to see everyone in Japan given that opportunity? You need some strategy in order to get to the big picture. My tutor at college gave us all a load of good advice about how to actually work things into your working week in order to get useful stuff done, or else it's very possible to end up frittering away your time. That's the skill of having mission in the large in mind, and then working out mission in the small.
And yet I have almost the opposite problem. I have a very full schedule. Today was unusually free, and so I felt a little of the emptiness - I did my accounts, paid some bills, did a bit of translation and a bit of exegesis. It's all things that need to be done, but none of it about giving everyone in Japan the opportunity to know about Jesus.
But most of the time, I'm very aware of mission in the small - I spend most of my week on church work, language study, pastor's meetings, preparing and giving sermons... In the same way as I've spend today, it's all useful stuff I'm sure, but I can't see it relating to the bigger goal. It's all a bit parochial, local, small-minded. I'm trying to do mission in the large, and I know about mission in the small, but what I need to understand is mission in the middle - where I fit in, and how my daily activity works towards that goal.
I'm starting to think about ways around this. I know that one of the things I can do here is to pass on the little I know about leadership to others. I need to think about ways to bring goodness to the poor and freedom to the oppressed, since those were two things Jesus talked about a surprising amount.
I also reckon that one of the things I'm good at - or at least, one of the things I do a lot - is think, and so I can easily see my job as helping people to think, whether it's about thinking about mission in Japan, or coming up with new areas for the church to experiment in, or working through with people the church and missionary structures they have in place and evaluating whether or not they're doing what they should be, or to find ways of encouraging, training and developing pastors and missionaries.
I often get so bogged down with details I can't see the big picture. And I often see so much of the big picture that I can't work out how it actually comes together. So what I need is a good sense of mission in the middle.
Update: as usual, the first thing that needs to change is my attitude. I implicitly stated above that doing local, small-minded parochial things is somehow deficient, that it isn't good enough for me. Well, it is. It does have value and if that's all I get to do for the rest of my life, then it should be enough.
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