reading on purpose

One of my great privileges and pleasures is time set aside to read on purpose.  It's part of my job and I would say it's part of my raison d'être!   At the moment, I have two work related purposes for reading often and widely:  1) to prepare new curriculum for the OIKOS interns;  2)  to pursue (or to be pursued by) a PhD in Intercultural Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary's School of Intercultrual Studies.  So you can expect that I will begin to expose some of what I'm reading for my work on this blog.   The lines between reading for work, pleasure, personal enrichment or Christian service have never been very clear to me.  I have come to think about all reading as having one essential purpose:  to love the Lord my God with my whole heart and my whole mind.  Reading with this purpose is worship.

In the morning, after Karen and zboyz leave for school, I pour myself a second cup of coffee and walk down to my office chez OIKOS.  Before doing anything else, I read a few chapters of the Bible (I'm in Genesis at the moment) and talk with my God about whatever I have on my mind and heart.  These days, I've  also been reading Chris Wright's provocative book on a missional hermeneutic of the Bible: The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative

In French, we call these intimate, consecrated moments with God le culte personel.  I think of it as having coffee with the Only Living God, the One who purposed all that exists (including the coffee bean), the One who loves me and everything else that he created, the God who sees me and hears what I say and think.  I don't always invite Chris Wright into my intimacy with God, but at the moment this Irish scholar is influencing my thinking about the nature of the Bible.  His book has become important to me.  Let me suggest why I think it should also be an important book for you.

Wright asserts, "The Bible presents to us a portrait of God that is unquestionably purposeful. The God who walks the paths of history through the pages of the Bible pins a mission statement to every sign post on the way."   The mission then that Wright sets out for himself in his book is to "explore that divine mission and all that lies behind it and flows from it in relation to God himself, God's people and God's world, insofar as it is revealed to us in God's Word."  What a splended topic!  Not just one among others, the topic of this book should be the purpose and adventure of our lives: to know him and his mission in his world!  God did not make a mission for his people, the church, he made the church for a mission, His mission.  As such, our stories when we participate in God's mission continue the story of the Bible... "everything Jesus began to do and to teach" (Acts 1:1), we continue. 

As I continue to tell bits and pieces of my story on this blog, I hope you will recognize that its warp and woof weave into the Story of God's mission revealed in the Bible.  I hope you will notice that my greatest desire is to find my own purpose in that Mission.  It is precisely in this sense that I understand myself to be a "missionary," one who committedly participates with God's people in God's Mission for the redemption of God's creation.

What about you?  Are you a missionary?