Sharing God’s Call toWholeness
many evangelicals worldwide are looking forward to the next Lausanne Congress
on world evangelization in october 2010 in Cape Town, south africa. Here’s part
two in a Faith Today series looking at seven of the major issues to be discussed.
Take a look around. We don’t need an introduc- tion to brokenness and suffering. A teenage Asian prostitute in downtown Toronto, a starv- ing family in Darfur, a homeless man in Seattle,
a heartbroken young widow of a gang member in Chicago,
a Palestinian orphan – all of these are real people trying to
make good choices in a real web of family,
social, political and economic systems that
have gone horribly wrong.
Consider some of their stories. Tracy
thought she was being smuggled into Canada to work in a coffee shop. Instead, she
works the street for the “boss.” The Abboud family fled their village for fear of
being killed by armed tribesmen and now
live on the edge of the Sudanese desert. Peter, in his 70s, was
ostracized by his family when they learned he had AIDS. He
now lives rummaging around garbage cans in Seattle.
And the list goes on to Jews and Palestinians, Tutsis and
Hutus, Shiites and Sunnis – and even Roman Catholic and
Protestant Christians.
In a world that is intrinsically self-seeking, we know that
people never have and never will live at peace with one another and their environment. As Christians we know why.
We also know that it was for this purpose that Jesus came:
to bring peace and to reconcile the world to Himself.
What sometimes feels uncertain to us is the role that
we are called upon to play in this wide-ranging ministry of
reconciliation. We may wonder: if we have trouble living in
peace with our Christian brothers and sisters and cousins,
how can we help minister reconciliation to others?
We can clarify these questions by examining what reconciliation means. Reconciliation today runs the risk of becoming a clichéd word. Given new popularity by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1995, which
examined human rights abuses from the apartheid regime,
the concept is generally associated with efforts at resolving
conflict and fostering peace between warring communities
and nations. It’s more than merely an end to conflict.
Lawyers, counsellors, conflict resolution professionals
and peace negotiators use various techniques to foster reconciliation. Jesus’ call for us to be peacemakers clearly includes
these kinds of work in domestic settings and at a national
level. We engage in them not as know-it-alls but as imperfect
channels through whom the Holy Spirit can work.
Here’s a classic Bible passage explaining this call upon
Christians: “All this is from God, who reconciled us to
himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. . .and he has committed to
us the message of reconciliation. We are
therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though
God were making his appeal through us”
( 2 Corinthians 5: 18-19).
Here Paul refers to a God who initiated the act of reconciling “the world” to
Himself and then calls us to partner and be
the messengers in that ministry. The first
principle here is that reconciliation is God-initiated. God
is the architect and initiator of bringing a broken, suffering
and lost world back to Himself. Reconciliation is at the very
core of God’s heart and it is only God who can bring about
genuine reconciliation.
The second truth follows: God invites us to view the
world from His perspective and participate in bringing
wholeness to a fractured creation. Us, invited to join God
and partner with Him in His redemptive work? That’s a
mind-blowing part of being a Christian. Sadly, we sometimes choose to ignore this invitation or even decline it.
Joining in God’s reconciling work includes helping people
to understand (and inviting them to accept) the good news
of God’s love and forgiveness for them. But it doesn’t stop
there. Reconciliation with God inspires God’s people to seek
earthly reconciliation with their neighbours, both Christians
and non-Christians. It inspires us to try to facilitate reconciliation between others caught in conflict. It inspires us, as
we glimpse God’s perspective and participate in His redemption of a fractured creation, to treat everyone and everything
around us in God-honouring ways.
The line about us being Christ’s “ambassadors” means
we are representatives of the kingdom of Christ in a foreign
land. When we to try to facilitate reconciliation between
others caught in conflict, we acknowledge that we are seeking to be about the King’s business and we testify to the
work He has done and is still doing in us and through us.
We are kingdom rep-
resentatives called
to work tirelessly in
reconciling our lost
world to God
