“Conversion is our ultimate motive but not our ulterior motive in loving and serving others.” – To Transform a City (Swanson and Williams)
I often struggled with the phrase “I’m going to serve and love those around me with no agenda”. On one hand I get it, love and serve the people and communities around you selflessly
with no strings attached. Help reflect the character of God by helping to restore the world around you. But deep down that message seemed at odds with my desire for people to know Christ. People are dieing without Christ and the urgency of proclaiming the Gospel has grabbed my heart.
In To Transform a City, Swanson and Williams help me create a framework that is starting to guide my thinking of being restorers of the world around me and yet proclaimers of Christ.
They write that their ultimate motive is that people would be in a right relationship with God through Jesus. Like leaven into dough, they want the reality of Christ worked into all parts of society and lived out in way that every person knows someone who truly follow Jesus (sound familiar?).
At the same time, we must stay away from ulterior motives, meaning that we do acts of love and service towards others so that they become Christians (which could signify that if they don’t become Christians, we stop loving and serving). They go on to say,
”It is important to remember that we don’t engage in the needs, dreams, and pains of our communities so that they will become Christians; rather we engage the community because we are Christians. We don’t serve to convert, but we serve because we have been converted. We contend that the most fertile ground for evangelistic conversation is a servant-rich environment.”
This has implications for the campus ministry, but more importantly it has implication for how I live my life in my neighborhood with the hundreds of poeple that don’t know Christ. My ultimate motive is that they would meet the the God who loves them deeply, but I’m not going to engage in any gimmicky bait and switch tactics to engage them.
What do you think? Do you see any problems with these thoughts?
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Awesome thoughts Matt. Glad to see you are reading, reflecting, learning and blogging about it. You are a blogging.
I think the implications of Swanson’s book are good for us to wrestle with and live out. In my opinion, this framework for mission seems a bit foreign to most of us Cru campus staff because we are in our sweet spot in dominant culture and middle class settings…truly most campus settings represent (generally and not absolutely) a high percentage of privilege.
If we reduce the Gospel to either side of the spiritual/physical paradigm, I think we fall short. All of life is spiritual: relationships (justice issues, how we relate to the poor, etc.), actions, and most certainly how and if we relate to God. We share the message of the Gospel because we are Christians and we do the works of the Gospel because we are Christians.
May you have a strong voice in the movement!
Ha! forgot to put in my adjective for “you are a blogging…”
Fiend? Stallion? Dynamo? Boss?
I prefer Boss.
Thanks stopping by Mike. Great thoughts. Hope all is well with you