“Living Out the Gospel of the Kingdom” is one of the phrases our Fellowship coined to express our mission. No one told us what our mission was. We only discovered it after several years of trying to live a total commitment to Christ, His people and His work in a common purse, intentional community. One evening, after weeks of trying to articulate what our mission is, we made a list of phrases that would capture the feeling and essence of what we were experiencing. This phrase was rated near the top.
But what does it mean? It’s living out the values of God’s kingdom expressed by Jesus in His Sermon on the Mount. Simply, it is loving one another and taking liability for each other. It is committing our whole lives and resources to each other under the lordship of Christ.
I’m sure living out the Gospel means even more than this. But this has been a good starting point for us. Recently, I’ve been reading the book, Schools for Conversion: 12 Marks of a New Monasticism. I thought this quote by Ivan Kauffman caught the spirit of what we’ve felt:
“We are not merely marbles in a bucket – autonomous beings who happen to be in the same place at the same time, each of whom are capable of living whole and healthy lives by themselves. We are cells in a body, each giving something to the body which it needs and each receiving from the other cells in that body what we need to sustain our lives.” pg. 72
It seems we face in our culture a fundamental zealous commitment to individualism. In some ways this is what has made the U.S. a successful nation. But I suspect it has broken a lot of things in other ways. It certainly doesn’t empitomize the values of God’s kingdom.
Living out the Gospel of the Kingdom is trying to put into practice the good news of what will eventually take over the entire universe.