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Frogs, Lizards, and the Mission of Christ
By Stephen Seamands

When the Lausanne II Congress on World Evangelization was being held in Manila in 1989, Lee Yih, a businessman from Hong Kong, contrasted how frogs and lizards acquire food. "The frog just sits and waits and lets the food come to him. As soon as an insect gets close enough, all a frog has to do is stick out its tongue and get it. If a lizard behaved in the same way, it would soon starve. It can't afford to sit and wait. It has to go out into the world where the food can be found and hunt."

Mr. Vih went on to suggest that many full-time Christian workers are like frogs. They go off to Bible school or seminary, get a degree, become a pastor or join a staff at a church, and somehow the people they work with know that as frogs, they are in the business of meeting spiritual needs. Soon their frog-like habit of waiting for others to come to them becomes deeply ingrained.

Several years ago, guest lecturer Donna Hailson told this story and challenged the students at Asbury Theological Seminary not to allow this to happen to them: "We can't just sit in our cozy little God boxes waiting for the world to beat a path to our doors," she insisted. "To reach the world, the Church has to break out of walls, go out of doors, and lead people to the path-the narrow path that leads to life." In the light of the increasingly post-Christian environment of North America, she challenged those whose training and experience have taught them to be ministerial frogs to become "retooled lizards."

Not far from the Asbury chapel where Hailson spoke, there is a life-size metal statue of John Wesley-all 5 feet 3 inches of him. He is portrayed passionately preaching, come rain or shine, in lizard-like fashion, in the open air. There was a time in his life, however, when he would never have done that.

Wesley's ecclesiastical context, ministerial training, and personality type certainly inclined him to think and act like a ministerial frog. Ordained to the Anglican priesthood in 1728, Wesley was a strict Oxford don who was concerned that all things be done decently and in order. Preaching, therefore, should only take place indoors, behind a pulpit, within the four walls of a church sanctuary. At the time, many in the Church of England considered preaching outdoors to be a violation of civil and canon law. As to his personal preference, Wesley would gladly have chosen the quiet of a university library or pastor's study to the noise of an unruly crowd. He was finicky about his personal appearance, always dressed as neat as a pin, and wouldn't tolerate the slightest speck of dirt on his clothing.

However, ten months after his profound spiritual experience in May of 1738 where his heart was "strangely warmed," the retooling process from frog to lizard began in earnest when Wesley preached in the open air for the first time. He describes his embarrassing descent into "field preaching" in his Journal entry for April 2, 1739:

"At four in the afternoon I submitted to be more vile and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation, speaking from a little eminence in the ground adjoining to the city, to about three thousand people. The Scripture on which I spoke was this,.'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor.'"

Considering his church tradition and personal inclinations, "submitting to be more vile" in such lizard-like fashion clearly indicated that Wesley had been caught up in something other than himself-God's mission-that thrust him out of his comfort zone toward lost people.

Soon he was preaching in the open air all over England. And that's what he did for the next fifty years-traveling some 225,000 miles on horseback, preaching 40,000 sermons, winning perhaps as many as 144,000 converts, and establishing a vast network of Methodist societies within the Anglican Church. Yet the frog that had become a retooled lizard never became fully comfortable with field preaching. As late as 1772 he admitted, "To this day field preaching is a cross to me."

By engaging in this unconventional form of open-air evangelism, Wesley also subjected himself to criticism from family members who opposed him for what they considered an uncouth practice. His elder brother, Samuel, once wrote to their mother, Susannah, that he would rather see his brothers John and Charles "picking straws within the walls than preaching in the area of Moorfields."

Anglican leaders reprimanded him as well, for by engaging in field preaching across England, he was disregarding the established ecclesiastical parish boundary system. In a letter to James Harvey, who had questioned him about this, he explained why he found it necessary to invade the parishes of other clergy:

"Man forbids me do this in another's parish: that is, in effect, to do it at all; seeing I have now no parish of my own, nor probably ever shall. Whom, then, shall I hear, God or man?.Suffer me now to tell you my principles in this matter. I look upon all the world as my parish; thus far I mean, that in whatever part of it I am I judge it meet, right, and my bounden duty to declare, until all that are willing to hear, the glad tidings of salvation."

Like Wesley, retooled ministerial lizards, intent on participating in God's mission, view the whole world as their parish. For ministerial frogs, however, their parish tends to be their world. So they major on meetings, methods, maintenance, and machinery rather than mission; they function more like keepers of the aquarium than fishers of men and women.

At the end of the third and the beginning of the fourth chapter of Revelation, two different types of doors are mentioned within a short span of three verses. The first is the familiar door of Revelation 3:20. Christ stands and knocks at the door of the church and the door of our hearts. Here, then, is a closed door that we have to open, and in doing so, we invite Jesus to become a part of the world of our church and our lives.

But then the apostle John writes, "After this I looked, and there in heaven a door stood open" and he heard a voice beckoning, "Come up here and I will show you what must take place after this" (Revelation 4:1). Unlike the first door that we must open, this second door is already open, but we must enter it. And this time, instead of inviting the Lord Jesus to become a part of our world, he invites us to become a part of his world.

In fact, from this point in the book of Revelation, it's Christ's world that dominates. John joins in the worship of the great company around the throne in heaven; he hears the agonizing prayers of the persecuted and martyred saints; he beholds the judgments being poured out on the earth, the intensifying war in heaven and on earth, God's final victory over Satan, the establishment of God's kingdom, and the final restoration of creation.

As I was thinking about these two doors, the door we open and the door we enter, it struck me that we need both doors in our ministries. Often in ministry, however, we are so preoccupied with the first-working in the church so Christ can enter-that we neglect the second-participating in Christ's larger mission in the world. Yet we need both doors, and we serve a parish best when we don't allow it to become our world. In fact, the more a local congregation participates in God's world-wide mission, the more its own vitality increases.

I must confess, however, that being raised in a third-generation Christian family of pastors and missionaries, and graduating from a Christian college and an evangelical seminary all combined to shape me more into a ministerial frog than a lizard. Consequently, for almost the first twenty years of ministry, whether I was pastoring local churches or teaching in seminary, I was focused on the door of Revelation 3:20. As the risen Christ knocked at the door of the lukewarm Laodicean church in the first century, I firmly believed he was knocking on the door of the congregations I pastored and the United Methodist denomination. My task, then, was to work for the renewal of the church at both congregational and denominational levels.

In 1990, however, while I was at a conference on church renewal attended by church leaders representing a wide range of American churches and denominations, I had an experience through which I entered the second door of Revelation 4:1 and began my retooling from a ministerial frog to a lizard-a process that I should say is still going on.

One evening during the conference as I lay in bed, I pictured myself standing in the United Methodist denominational vineyard in which God had called me to labor. I had been born and raised in it, my faith had been nurtured in it, my father and both my grandfathers had served it as pastors and missionaries. So I loved this vineyard and longed to see it become the kind of fruitful vineyard it was during the times of Wesley and Asbury.

Behind me I pictured the risen Christ. Since he has many vineyards represented by various churches and denominations, he wasn't standing in any particular vineyard. So he was outside the gate of the vineyard in which I was standing, but he was encouraging me as I looked out across it and worked and prayed for its renewal.

Then, instead of facing the vineyard as I had been, I turned around to face the risen Christ. I thought he would be facing me, but to my surprise, he had his back to me. I thought he would be looking at me and my vineyard, but his tear-filled eyes were focused elsewhere-on the world out beyond him. That's what he seemed most concerned about-not the renewal of my or, for that matter, any of the vineyards, but the redemption of the world.

As I looked intently at the Lord Jesus, it dawned on me that if the redemption of the world is what he is most concerned about, that's what I ought to be most concerned about, too. Of course, he wants to use all his vineyards toward that end, so they're all very important. He loves each of them dearly and they're all a part of his body. But I realized that I had made the renewal of my church and denomination an end in itself. I was so intent on getting Christ into my church world (the door of Revelation 3:20) that I had failed to consider the much wider world he was so concerned about (the door of Revelation 4:1). I had invited him to come into my world, but I hadn't responded to the invitation to enter his world.

Will my local congregation and my denomination be renewed? For almost twenty years of ministry, that was the most important, pressing question for me. However, as a result of that experience, I'm now convinced there is a more important question: Will we join Christ in his mission to the world?

For many in ministry, trained like I was to be a frog, and, after several years in ministry, comfortable and set in their frog-like ways, a paradigm-shift experience may be necessary to set them on a path toward fuller engagement in God's mission and to begin the retooling process of becoming a lizard.

Out of our comfort zones
Whether such an experience is necessary or not, one thing is certain: following Christ in mission will involve taking risks, moving out of our comfort zones, and stepping out in faith toward unfamiliar places where God is leading us. Like a trapeze artist with a firm grip on the trapeze bar, we may feel comfortable and confident about the present shape and focus of our ministry. However, following Christ in mission often means letting go of the bar we're clutching in order to grab hold of a strange new one coming towards us.

And inevitably, there is that fearful moment when we're suspended in mid-air. We've released our grip on the old bar, but we haven't yet grasped the new one. Someone has called it "the groan zone." It's frightening because we're out of control. We're afraid that we're going to fall and we won't make it to the next bar. So our natural inclination is to stay in our comfort zone, to cling to the bar we're currently holding. But to follow the Lord in mission, we must be willing to risk and let go.

Like Peter did when he hesitatingly went with the three men who had asked him to come with them to the house of Cornelius, an unkosher Gentile. God had already prepared Peter for their invitation. He had given him a vision of reptiles and animals on a sheet to teach him that "What God has made clean, you must not call profane" (Acts 10:15). Still, it was all so radical and extreme. How could he let a strange vision trump the established unequivocal teaching of the Torah? His precious Jewish identity, bound up with the keeping of the commandments, had been called into question. Yet in obedience he went, sensing that God was leading him, but not knowing where he was being led.

When they arrived in Caesarea and he entered the heathen officer's house, Peter was forced out of his comfortable Jewish cocoon. That, in and of itself, was remarkable. But while he was preaching to the pagans gathered there, things really got out of hand.

As missiologist Lesslie Newbigin describes it in The Open Secret, "Before he has finished, the situation passes out of his control. Cornelius and his household are caught up, in a way that cannot be gainsaid, into the same experience of freedom and joy that Peter and the others have known since Pentecost. Peter understands that he is not in control. A power greater than his own has broken down the hedge that protects devout Jews from the uncleanness of the heathen world, Peter can do nothing but humbly accept the fact and receive these uncircumcised pagans by baptism into the fellowship of the church."

Later, when Peter had to defend his actions before the apostles and believers in Jerusalem, he simply recounted the amazing actions of the Spirit and concluded, "Who was I that I could hinder God?" (Acts 11:17).

Participating with Christ in mission is like that. He is the chief actor in the unfolding story-not us. Not to hinder God, we've got to risk giving up control so that he can be in control. Often, like Peter, it will mean that we risk looking like a fool and that we put our religious reputation on the line.

Like Peter, I have found that God is always faithful and his mission is accomplished through me when I step out in faith and take risks. However, it is often the very success engendered by taking risks for God that makes it difficult to risk again in the future. Erwin McManus is right: "The greatest danger that success brings, aside from arrogance, is the fear of losing what has been gained. The courage and willingness to risk that breed success are endangered after success is obtained."

So taking risks as I seek to participate in God's mission never seems to get easier. Even though God has proven himself faithful in the past and has blessed my steps of risky obedience, I am always scared. I worry about the outcome and what other people will think. It seems like every time I let go and reach for the new trapeze bar God is sending toward me, I have to let go of all the reputation and security and success I've accumulated up to that point! So I always have to overcome my doubts and fears.

Yet, I've found that like Indiana Jones in his desperate pursuit of the Holy Grail, standing at the edge of the wide chasm and peering down at the rocks below, when I lift my foot and step out into thin air, I do not plummet to my death. Underneath are God's everlasting arms-arms that both uphold me and reach out to others to accomplish his mission through me. Someone has described their experience of risk-taking like this:

"Come to the edge," Jesus said.

"No," I said, "I'm afraid."

"Come to the edge," he said.

"No," I said, "I'm afraid."

"Come to the edge," Jesus said.

So I came to the edge, and he pushed me.

And together, we flew!

Indeed, participating in God's mission is not a fail-safe activity. It will involve many risks with much fear and trembling. But oh, the exhilaration of soaring like an eagle, borne up by the wind of the Spirit! Oh, the joy of joining with Christ in his mission to the world.

Stephen Seamands is professor of Christian Doctrine at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. This article is adapted from Ministry in the Image of God: The Trinitarian Shape of Christian Service, forthcoming from InterVarsity Press in 2005. Copyright © Stephen A. Seamands. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press (www.ivpress.com).



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