Have you ever had the experience of reading something you’d written a long time ago and being surprised to meet yourself again? It might be a letter you wrote to your grandmother that she kept and then returned to you (grandmothers do these things), or a diary you scribbled in as a teenager that your mother dragged out of the shoebox in the storeroom, or an impassioned essay you wrote at Uni which you discover as you’re cleaning out the filing cabinet.
It can be embarrassing to hear your own voice floating back to you across the years—but it can also be a pleasant surprise. Did I really write that? What a clever guy I was back then! And what’s more, I still agree with me.
I had something like that experience after I finished editing ‘The strategy of God’, Phillip Jensen’s feature article for this Briefing. I decided to go back and look at one of our very early Matthias Media resources—a resource which was all about planning and strategizing—to see if I still agreed with it. I wanted to know did it fall into some of the traps and dangers that Phillip identified? Was it a useful tactical tool that sat under ‘God’s strategy’, or was it trying to do—or was it claiming to do—too much?
The resource I’m talking about is Mission Minded by Peter Bolt, which we first published back in 1992 (US link). And while reading it again after all these years, my reaction was, “What a clever guy Peter Bolt was back then! And weren’t we clever to publish such a profound little tool!”
Mission Minded is built on the two main assumptions that Phillip outlines in his article: that the God-given goal of ministry is to see his people evangelized, converted and built up into the likeness of Christ, and that our God-given part in this can be summarized as three Ps: prayer, proclamation and people.
Mission Minded then asks, “If that is God’s strategy (or ‘Christ’s mission’ as Peter Bolt puts it), how can we focus and plan our lives and ministries around this God-given program? How do we analyze where we are at the moment? And how can we begin to escape from the dreaded ‘maintenance mode’ and become more ‘mission minded’?”
At heart of Mission Minded lies a very simple but ingenious planning tool consisting of a sheet of paper with some columns on it. (Don’t forget this was 1992; we still used paper back then.) You’ll have to read the book (yes, it’s still in print!) to see exactly how it works, but the beauty of it is that it allows you to analyze and plan not only what you’ll do with the structures and programmes and activities of your church, but to think through the people you are ministering to, and how you might make progress with them.
It’s a superb little book, and one that has been used by many pastors, parish councils and Bible study leaders to re-think what they are doing, and to plan their activities (what Phillip’s article would call their ‘tactics’) in line with what God is doing in the world. If you were challenged and excited by ‘The strategy of God’, may I suggest that you grab a copy of Mission Minded and work through it, either on your own or with your ministry friends and partners.
