Due to my closing work of the Fuller MAGL and a lil’ party in Austin called SXSW, I’m reposting some greatest hits. This post was inspired by last year’s convergence of Lent and SXSW. Enjoy.
If nothing else, being missional means being missionary. A missionary is one who learns a culture, in order to present the gospel in words and forms that make sense to them. While I sympathize, and happily participate, with evangelicals wishing to reclaim liturgical traditions, we need to realize that those actions alone will not help us present the gospel to the cultures we encounter.
The value of a the liturgical calendar is not in specific rites, but in the idea that how we organize our time defines our lives.
What if, as we set out on our missional endeavors, we took the concepts of time and calendar seriously. Are there celebrations in a local culture that can be redeemed by the gospel? Are their gross imbalances that can be reformed through organized, corporate disciplines? Perhaps borrowing from other Christian traditions may help us address this or perhaps we will find ourselves creating something new.
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