Apply: Holistic Gospel Witness
Track One
The Gospel is the good news of God’s reign, grace and love in and through Christ for the redemption and the renewal of all things: personal, communal, and systemic. This gospel includes the transformative work of the Spirit in an individual’s life for personal salvation, and healing of every kind. Setting captives free, it brings justice and shalom for all people, every neighborhood, and all creation. By our gospel witness we testify to this good news!
Acknowledging the gift of common grace, God’s people are called and equipped to the work of evangelism (literally, “gospeling”) through the embodiment, proclamation, and demonstration of God’s sovereign work.
Parameters
Through our Holistic Gospel Witness Track we seek to learn from experiments that are:
- Seeking to discern new postures and practices for holistic gospel witness as defined above.
- Engaging in practices that help us listen to the Spirit through the Scriptures, and our local context that lead to discovering how the Spirit is at work ahead of us and how we can join God. Practices such as:
- Listening (to God and neighbor), including through dwelling in the text and neighborhood and attentive and intercessory prayer.
- Discerning (what God might be saying, doing)
- Experimenting (with what God might be asking us to do)
- Adopting (the learning and practices that have come out of the other 3)
- A.R.T. (Action Reflection Theological) work (after every action, taking time to reflect, learn from and engage with what the Spirit might be saying & doing).
- Actively involve a CRCNA congregation(s), related faith community(ies).
- In and with a local context (a neighborhood or community) not just the congregation, faith community.
- Integrated with on-going, sustainable ministry in the context.
- Preference will be given to experiments led by the following types missional leaders:
- Members of an ethnic minority
- Participants in a diaspora community
- Those serving in an urban community
- Young adults
- People who are within a CRCNA congregation
Adaptive Challenges: Holistic Gospel Witness
Practicing Barrier-Crossing Friendships
Barriers of race, culture, and religious tradition separate and isolate us both in our relationships within the body of Christ and in our relationships with our neighbors. This deprives the church of the fullness of the gifts of the Spirit and hinders our gospel witness. We all need to learn how to notice, welcome and embrace those who are different from us through the power of the Holy Spirit and the gospel practice of barrier-crossing friendship.
Opening Space for Missional Initiative of Young Adults
Local faith communities, Resonate and partners need to learn to acknowledge, remain connected to, and open space for the missional initiatives of young adult lay leaders in the local congregation and beyond. We all need to overcome the presumption that only “ordained,” “commissioned” and “experienced” leaders can be agents of mission.
Joining the Spirit on Mission in Our Neighborhoods
Our traditional methods of evangelism and outreach often focus on human effort. Instead, we need to recognize that God is already out ahead of us, and that we are invited to discover and join the Spirit on God's existing mission in our neighborhoods. In order to participate in what God is doing we need different postures and practices that lead us into a new way of bearing holistic gospel witness.
Engaging Our Cultural Context
How can the people of God engage our cultural context faithfully with the gospel? How can we discern when and how to affirm culture for its creational goodness? How do we discern the ways that sin twists and distorts this goodness? How do we learn to avoid becoming culturally irrelevant on the one hand and how do we learn to avoid becoming absorbed by the powerful idols of culture on the other hand? How might listening deeply to those outside of our cultural context help us become more discerning? Faithfully engaging our cultural context is vital to our mission. We welcome experiments that help us discover practices which will help us grow in our discernment.