Mission Impossible #3: Risks

Mission
Impossible (3): Risks
                                            Mk 06 07-13
2015/09/27
Christ Church, Mountain Top
Call
to Worship, Psalm 40.1-11
Children, Isaiah 52.7
Message,
Mark 6.7-13, 30-32
Binding
two related themes
      Impossible things that we must face in
family life, professional life
      Impossible call of Jesus to follow &
serve
Week
1: Departures
      Fish for people
Week
2: Confrontations
      Living the values of the kingdom when the
world is in conflict with them
      Allowing Jesus to confront our sin with
grace to overcome
Week
3: Risks
      Stepping out in mission with creativity
and spontaneity
“If”
by Rudyad Kipling
      If you can make one heap of all your
winnings
      And risk it on one turn of pitch and toss
      And lose, and start again at your
beginnings,
      And never breathe a word about your loss
Risk,
ever present in life
      High school, asking a girl out
      Job interviews
      Making a cold call, sales pitch
      Merging two churches (our November
“birthday”)
      Going for a 2-point conversion
Essentially
risk-averse – need a good reason to step out of safety zone
      “Worth the risk?”

Risk
in the passage:
      Interlude between sending and returning
            John the Baptizer loses his head
In
Jesus’ strategy, rejection, frustration, and threat were fuel for recommitment
and recommissioning (Mortimer Arias, 1992, The
Great Commission: Biblical Models for Evangelism,
Nashville: Abingdon, p
48).
Mark
is introduced as “the good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God” (1.1). The
first person, in Mark’s gospel, to recognize Jesus as “Son of God” is the
centurion who leads his execution detail (15.38-39, see Arias, 51).
Resources:
Creativity, versus Control
      Sent out “resource poor” – like young person
looking in the fridge
      Take nothing for your journey, not even a
second shirt
Cemex – resources at the bottom of the pyramid (an old Stanford Social Innovation Review
article)
Spontaneity,
versus Scripted
      Does not send them with lots of ready-made
answers
      Sends them with authority to figure it out
and do it
            Our insecurity, that are unprepared,
unknowledgeable
      Do not know the problems we will face
      Do not know how they will be solved
            Simply committed to doing it,
figuring it out
      Being the new face – meeting people
            Use a “script”, or choosing to be
spontaneous
He
speaks from his heart because he is too eager to be able to refrain from
speaking. … To all this is added the mysterious power of a secret. Christian
experience is always a secret; and the man who speaks of it to another always
pays him a subtle compliment when he entrusts him with his secret of life.

Roland
Allen. 1962 American edition. The
Spontaneous Expansion of the Church.
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. P 10