For many, many decades, a Handbook has circulated at the center of our missionary community. The document describes who we are, what we do, where we do it, and why. It is the accumulated testimony of our shared allegiances, core values, and the fundamental strategies that guide our missionary obedience – a repository of our collective worldview. If we were Roman Catholics, we would call it our “rule.” If we were a troop of girl or boy scouts, we would call it our “pledge.” In the fellowship of the World Mission Prayer League, it is our Mission Handbook.
Our Home Council is the steward and keeper of this document. Over the past few years, they have been revising it, piece by piece, bringing its language up to date and adapting its structures for this new day in mission. We used to talk about mission fields, for example; today we use geographical imagery less than previously. We used to assign all of our people to mission conferences; we are more likely to give them to inter-agency partnerships, today.
At its meeting in February of this year, the Home Council completed a significant round of editing the Mission Handbook. Over the next few months, I want to introduce you to this foundational document. You may want to download a copy for yourself and read it through for yourself. We will begin this month with the Handbook’s counsel regarding a very basic question, facing every community of every sort anywhere in the world: who are we? In months to come, we will examine what we do, where we do it, and why.
So who are we? The Handbook offers this succinct response:
At its deepest and best, our community is simply a fellowship at prayer, gathered in service to the mission of God in the world. We are a wide-ranging, free association of sisters and brothers committed together to the values, purposes, and priorities described in this Handbook. (¶35)
Our missionary community is comprised of sisters and brothers, families and households, scattered around the world. Some are full-time, cross-cultural workers. Some are short-term volunteers. Most are “ordinary” Christians, living out their faith in school, on the farm, in the office or factory, or simply at home. We consider every one a colleague. We are together the World Mission Prayer League. (¶207)
If you receive this newsletter, you are yourself a member of our community. If you pray through its pages from time to time, you do what our community does. You are part of “the sisters and brothers committed together.” And the Mission Handbook is for you.
The World Mission Prayer League is comprised of thousands upon thousands of sisters and brothers like you. People who take their faith seriously. People whom grace has found. We are a community redeemed by the wonderful love of Jesus – who cares that others come to know his love as well.
You may feel yourself “ordinary” in most ways: all of our members do. Yet if you know Jesus Christ, you may believe yourself called to his mission in the world. Knowing the Savior, as it turns out, enlists you in his cause. God “has reconciled us to himself through Jesus Christ; and he has made us agents of the reconciliation,” explains St. Paul (2 Corinthians 5:18, Phillips). “We are now Christ’s ambassadors” (v.20).
We believe that God has called all Christians everywhere to involvement in his mission in the world. Each one has a role to play. Through its Personnel and Regional Offices, the Prayer League seeks to help its members to hear that call and to discover their place of maximum participation. (¶71)
Many of our members will discover their place of participation at home, in their own neighborhoods and in their regular occupations. Others will discover their place in extraordinary service elsewhere in the world. The Mission expects that God will commission its members to a wide and wonderful variety of participations in his mission of love around the world. (¶72)
Who are we?
You might say that we are “the priesthood of all believers” in action. We are sisters and brothers gathered in outreach. We are a praying league in world mission. We are a community of friends in common service, to our wonderfully uncommon Lord.
Other posts in this Introducing the Mission Handbook series: