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Close the gap from Sunday to Monday

For many Christians, the highlight of their week is the Sunday service. Sadly, many believe that this is where the Kingdom of God is primarily expressed. Ministry is limited to what is done within the church. This is demonstrated in the true story of a young lawyer who was asked what her ministry was. She replied, “I teach Sunday school at my church” What a sham! Nothing he did during the week to bring justice, compassion and resolve to the world in which he worked counted, in his mind, as anything of spiritual value. How can we change people’s thinking to free ourselves from this Sunday / Monday dichotomy?

In short, we must reject the concept that divides the world into secular versus sacred, private versus public, faith versus work, and charity versus justice. When we understand the Kingdom of God it is evident that everything is sacred because God is the creator of all things and nothing exists outside of His love and compassion. Our faith makes us responsible to bring the Kingdom to all areas of life. In the words of Justine, a Burundian living in Rwanda: “I see what Jesus meant by the kingdom of God. I see that it is about changing this world, not just escaping it and taking refuge in our churches. If the message Jesus’ kingdom of God is true, then everything must change.

What deep insight, when the Kingdom is expressed, everything must change. Change begins in us and then finds its expression in the world in which we live and work. It is about bringing God’s mercy, compassion, justice, and righteousness to all spheres of his creation. So our lawyer friend has the opportunity and the responsibility to bring about change in her chosen field of activity by using her gifts, training and experience to be a change agent, an agent of the Kingdom.

One of the reasons many people stray from Christianity is that we represent a faith that has no relevance to them. Henry Drummond, writing to his own generation many years ago, put it forcefully. “It is because for great masses of people Christianity has become synonymous with a service in the Temple that other great masses of people refuse to touch it … what they cannot follow, and must always live outside of it, is a cult that ends with the worshiper, a religion expressed only in a ceremony, and a faith unrelated to life. ” What a challenge: our faith has become self-centered and irrelevant to the real world.

What we are seeing is a rediscovery of Kingdom theology. This has many aspects but one of the starting points is the doctrine of the Trinity. In a recent Lausanne paper on ‘Market Place Ministry’ the following conclusion was presented. “To bridge the gap in our partial perceptions of God’s work, we need to be more fully Trinitarian rather than have in practice a unitary (one person) theology that plays for the Trinity. We need to develop a three-mandate theology / commissions.

In these three commissions we see the breadth of the Kingdom. “We are called to be part of God’s new creation, called to be agents of that new creation here and now. We are called to model and display that new creation in symphonies and family life, in restorative justice and poetry, in holiness and service. . to the poor, in politics and painting. ” (Wright) The Kingdom expresses itself in a wide variety of passions. Once we see the vastness of the Kingdom, it helps to understand how other people can be equally passionate about a variety of subjects that may not touch our hearts. This passion is an expression of God’s heart for his creation. We must pursue the passion that God has given us, but we must equally validate and appreciate the passion that He has placed in others.

When it comes to the church, we can think of Sunday as the “gathered” church and Monday as the “scattered” church. Sunday then becomes a time to strengthen, encourage and equip Christians to bring the Kingdom to their world. As church growing expert Eddie Gibbs puts it, churches should shift from a ‘Come’ by invitation search service strategy (which works in suburbs largely with churches) to a ‘Go’ scatter strategy, with a sustained commitment to infiltrate every segment of this fragmented world. The workplace becomes a focal point for producing the Kingdom. As Kevin Costa, a London-based investment banker, states: “If the Christian faith is not relevant in the workplace, it is not relevant at all.”

So from the Kingdom perspective, there is no difference between Sunday and Monday. In fact, it can be argued that what happens on Monday is more important.

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