So Beautiful

Divine Design for Life and the Church

Leonard Sweet

• Publisher: David C Cook
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781434700872
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

More than 50 years ago scientists made a remarkable discovery, proclaiming, "We have found the secret of life... and it's so pretty!" The secret was the discovery that life is helixical, two strands wound around a single axis—what most of us know today as the model for DNA.

Over the course of his ministry, author Leonard Sweet has discovered that this divine design also informs God's blueprint for the church. In this seminal work, he shares the woven strands that form the church:  missional, relational, and incarnational. Sweet declares that this secret is not just pretty, but beautiful. In fact, So Beautiful!

Using the poignant life of John Newton as a touchstone, Sweet calls for the re-union of these three essential, complementary strands of the Christian life. Far from a novel idea, Sweet shows how this structure is God's original intent, and shares the simply beautiful design for His church.

PART 1

THE MISSIONAL LIFE

God’s “GO”

I don’t much like God when he gets under a roof.¹

—John Wayne

It stands as one of the all-time classic lines in American cinema history: In the 1967 movie The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman’s character, Benjamin Braddock, is given advice by one of his father’s business buddies.

“Just one word,” the man says. “Are you listening?”

“Yes, sir,” the graduate answers.

“Plastics.”

If there were “just one word” the church needs to hear today, it is the one you will hear in a variety of ways throughout this book.

Mission.

God is a God of motion, of movement, of mission. Or, as it is popular nowadays to say, “two-thirds of the word God is go.”²

Mission is not an activity of the church but an attribute of God. God is a missionary God, Jesus is a missionary Messiah, and the Spirit is a missionary Spirit. Missions is the family business.

God doesn’t so much have a singular “plan” for your life as God has made you for a mission and has a design whereby you can accomplish who you were born to be. God doesn’t just have an agenda for you to do; God has a mission for you to live.

Disciples of Jesus live a mission-shaped life. Every life is a missionary life. Every marriage is a missionary marriage. Every vocation is a missionary vocation. We’re all here on assignment.

To think that your church exists to provide a pew for you is to forget that one word, to miss mission.

Your church exists to love the world and to commission you for a mission of expanding beauty, truth, and goodness upon the earth.

Life on earth is a temporary assignment.³

—Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life

Are you familiar with the missionary position? For those of you who are easily offended, this is your great moment. Just remember: The place where offense is most easily taken is in prison.

The church needs to rediscover the Missionary Position, a posture that forces us to look at the world eye-to-eye and face-to-face without turning our backs. The Missionary Position tries to get together with the world in a healing and so-beautiful way. It doesn’t view the world as a “market” but as a “mission.”

Everyone is here on assignment. Everyone is on a mission. Everyone is a missionary. Every Christian has an apostolate to fulfill. Every disciple of Jesus conveys the good news to the world. If the great discovery of the Protestant Reformation was that everyone is a minister, the great discovery of what God is up to today (yet to be named) is that everyone is a missionary.

Yes, I know, I know. There’s a big problem with that word missionary, not to mention the fact that the word mission is not found in the New Testament. I guarantee you that when you say “missionary,” the first image that comes to mind is not the missionary to China around whom a whole movie was made called Chariots of Fire. And rather than Eric Liddell in the 1924 Olympics, you are more likely to think of Robert De Niro in the 1986 movie The Mission. A missionary … always works in Africa, is poor, has awkward social skills, dresses poorly, and is completely out of touch with reality. At best, the status of “missionary” is seen as an elite spiritual position to which only a select few are called. At worst, “missionary” is a backward calling for those who can’t make it in the real world; people who will no doubt impoverish the “natives” and put them at risk, making them easy prey for persecution and elimination, by devaluing local customs and promoting Western values.

Forget all that (for now). You have been given an assignment to fulfill. And it will not work to pull off a Walter Cronkite, who named his sailboat Assignment so that whenever CBS announced that Cronkite was not hosting the evening news because he was “on Assignment,” they would be telling the truth.

To be alive is to be gifted with a mission … a magical, engrossing mission that leads to adventure, sacrifice, frustration, fulfillment, and holiness. Being missional is not something you do to get something done, like grow a church or sign the succeed-creed. Missional is who you are, because it is who God is. Disciples have one mission (to make other disciples), but we express it in many missions (the unlimited ways to fulfill our mission). Everything about life should be missional—how we Twitter, take vacations, talk to our kids, even how we tip.

Either you are a minister or you need one.
Either you are a missionary or you need one.

—Presbyterian pastor John Huffman’s oft-repeated refrain

From the moment we meet God in Genesis, God is “up to something.” Like the conductor in Fantasia, God is whirling and swirling creation into being. The missional thrust begins in the very being of God. God goes out in love to create the cosmos: “Let there be light.” The missional bent is there from the beginning. Whatever your theology of the Bible may be, God is always defined in terms of creativity. But the Creator has creativity with a purpose, with a mission. Creativity without the thread of purpose unravels in chaos.

The ultimate story of the Bible, the metanarrative that unlocks the whole story, is that God is on a mission, and we are summoned to participate with God in that mission.⁴ The impulse to create, to conceive, is what lies at the heart of the missional.

Blessed is the man who finds out which way God is moving and then gets going in the same direction.

—Anonymous

Even when God showed Abraham the Promised Land, Abraham didn’t sit down. The “wandering Aramean” became a wayfaring Hebrew, a pilgrim on a journey. The God of the Bible is only static in unwavering loyalty to the covenant and unchanging love for the creation. This is one reason why the Gospels are filled with travel metaphors. Len Hjalmarson brilliantly elaborates the difference between a temple spirituality and a tabernacle spirituality; the former being priest-centric, the latter being road-centric.⁵

Stillness is a problem. Stillness is something you’re told to do at the dentist’s office or in the detention center: “Keep still.” In the still of the night, I walk around our silent house, but the stillness and silence are not ends in themselves. They prepare me for movement. They are “sacraments of the world to come,” in the words of Saint Seraphim of Sarov, preparing us to use words and metaphors, “the weapons of this world.”⁶ The energies of Christianity are outward. Unlike many other religions, the movement of faith is not from the outward to the inward, or from the inward to the innermost inward, but from the inward to the outward and back in again. From a theological standpoint, a “still life” (whether in the form of a painting or person) is a contradiction in terms.

Different tribes boast their own distinctive articulations of the missio Dei,⁷ but an outward thrust is one of the things that makes the Jewish Christian traditions unique. The universe was not created by a God at rest or a God at peace. The universe was created by a God in motion, a God in mission, a God who “goes” and who tells all gatekeepers to “Let my people go,” a God who “goes out,”⁸ a God who “goes before,”⁹ a God who “goes with,”¹⁰ a God who is constantly creating, and a God...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Missional Life
• Part 2: The Relational Life
• Part 3: The Incarnational Life
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bible Resources
• More Sweet Resources