Mission as Promise
I don’t want to be a spice store.
I don’t want to carry handcrafted Marseille soap,
or tsampa and yak butter,
or nine thousand varieties of wine.
Half the shops here don’t open till noon
and even the bookstore’s brined in charm.
I want to be the one store that’s open all night
and has nothing but necessities.
Something to get a fire going
and something to put one out.
A place where things stay frozen
and a place where they are sweet.
I want to hold within myself the possibility
of plugging one’s ears and easing one’s eyes;
superglue for ruptures that are,
one would have thought, irreparable,
a whole bevy of non-toxic solutions
for everyday disasters. I want to wait
brightly lit and with the patience
I never had as a child
for my father to find me open
on Christmas morning in his last-ditch, lone-wolf drive
for gifts. “Light of the World” penlight,
bobblehead compass, fuzzy dice.
I want to hum just a little with my own emptiness
at 4 a.m. To have little bells above my door.
To have a door.
When I first encountered Christian Wiman’s “I Don’t Want to Be a Spice Store” a couple of years ago I found it a bit strange on the first reading. The second time through, though, a few lines really caught my attention. In fact, they’ve stuck with me ever since.
I want to be the one store that’s open all night
and has nothing but necessities.
Something to get a fire going
and something to put one out
Surrounded by fancy stores, Wiman ponders what it means to offer something truly needed, something essential. In a neighborhood of indie bookstores, chic boutiques, and purveyors of handcrafted goods, who really is excited about CVS or Walgreens? Yet, at midnight when all the world shuts down and we are in need, where do we find ourselves?
In a similar fashion, I’ve found myself wrestling with a lot of what gets called “missional” these days. In the circles I run in, it seems everyone wants to start things, pioneer things, invent things. What’s trendy are the “apostolic” ones, who like entrepreneurial app developers, have their pulse on the cutting edge. No doubt, some of this is good. I would argue, much of it is window dressing.
In contrast, the most missional people I know are much more unassuming. In fact, they’re easy to overlook. They might not give eloquent talks, galvanize others in large quantities, or ever be considered “movemental.” What they do offer is something more essential, something necessary. What might that be? Well, they have the ability to make and keep promises. They are the steadfast, consistent ones, those who are committed for the long haul and refuse to give up on their people. Like patient gardeners, they tend to and cultivate the place they find themselves in with no need to rush the process of development. They are the people who live out Wendell Berry’s words: “Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet. Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground underfoot. The world is no better than its places. Its places at last are no better than their people while their people continue in them.”
Yes, I truly believe promises are at the core of our missional identity.
To that end, over the last decade I have returned over and again to a beautiful little piece Lewis B. Smedes wrote in Christianity Today back in 1983 entitled, “Controlling the Unpredictable — The Power of Promising.” In it, Smedes argues that promise making and keeping is one of the things that sets humans apart from the rest of creation. Even more important, it is in our promises that we form identity and reality for both ourselves and others. He states, “Everything in our lives together depends on the power of people to make and keep promises.” That might sound like an overstatement, but he backs it up with this, “… it is not only that I know myself in the mirror of my promises. My people, the ones who belong to me, who depend on me, also know me by the promises I have made. What I promise is what I am and will be to them. Only if they really know what I am can they live with me in trust. They know me in the important way, not by reading my analyst’s notes, but by knowing my power to keep promises.”
In her book Living Into Community, Christine Pohl makes the case that God has become known to us through His ability to make and keep promises. Over and again we see in Scripture that God makes covenants with His people. Why? Because in doing so, and in by keeping His word, we discover who God is. Out of that, trust and intimacy are cultivated, and ultimately love is experienced. This is why the unglamorous work of steadfastness is so vital. When we do it, we are emulating the God we claim to follow. As Smedes says later, “Among all the dimensions of the mature person in Christ, none comes closer to the character of our Lord than the daring to make a promise and the courage to keep the promises we make.”
Now, Smeades is appealing to human nature, to the fabric of society and culture, but I think this is even more important in the cultural moment we find ourselves in. We live in a world where everyone is selling us on something. Everyone has a hustle or a means of self-expression they’re looking to convince us of. Almost every conversation contains some form of evangelism, whether we recognize it or not. So, maybe this is the moment for Christians to actually start fewer things, to sell less, and join God in the places we already find ourselves. In a world of individualism and rapid movement, what does it look like to be the person who chooses to remain and commit fully to the people and place right outside your front door?
No doubt, doing so comes at a cost. Nothing about promise making and keeping is going to make much noise. No one will talk about it at a conference. No book deal or accolades are likely coming. It’ll likely get overlooked. It’ll cost us the ability to be hyper-mobile and translocal. Yet, rather ironically, I’m increasingly convinced that placing limits on our lives is key to the flouring we’re after. Smeades again:
The paradox of promising is that we freely bind ourselves to keep the promises we make. We limit our freedom so that we can be free to be there with someone in his future’s unpredictable storms. “The person who makes a vow,” said Chesterton, “makes an appointment with himself at some distant time or place.” And he gives up freedom in order to keep it.
When you make a promise, you tie yourself to other persons by the unseen fibers of loyalty. You agree to stick with people you are stuck with. When everything else tells them they can count on nothing, they count on you. When they do not have the faintest notion of what in the world is going on around them, they will know that you are going to be there with them. You have created a small sanctuary of trust within the jungle of unpredictability: you have made a promise that you intend to keep.
There at the end he’s paraphrasing the famous philosopher Hannah Arendt. She stated, “The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises.” Both are attesting to a simple fact, when turbulence hits, it’s not the most dynamic or charismatic people who provide a better future. No, instead, it is the people who remain steadfast in the face of that which is precarious, who have something to offer.
One of our microchurch leaders, Julie Oliver, penned these words for a recent devotion. I think she encapsulates perfectly the kinds of people who sacrifice to live these kinds of lives.
We sacrifice sleep to stay up and listen to a friend who is hurting. We sacrifice time to show a colleague at work how to work the new program. We sacrifice annoyance when we patiently answer our child’s two hundredth question. We sacrifice pride to reach out to a brother or sister whom we have offended and ask for forgiveness. We sacrifice comfort to invite a foster child to live in our home. We sacrifice food to make a meal for someone who is sick. We sacrifice our weekend to help a single mom move. We sacrifice a Friday night to visit a widow who lives alone. In community, we are refined.
So, why aren’t we cultivating more of these kinds of people? My fear is that the church, in response to decline is pivoting to marketplace thinking. We’re convinced the answer lies in doing more and learning more. So what we aim for is innovation, movement, multiplication, relevance. Buzz words that sound great on a webinar but remain hollow in the spaces of our reality. What if we instead helped our people become less insular and become more rooted and committed to the place God has already placed them? Not necessarily to start a bunch of things or make a bunch of noise, but to simply help those nearest to them be seen, known, and loved. What if our neighbors, coworkers, and friends knew they could count on us no matter the issue, no matter the cost? What if we were their “midnight” friends, the ones they knew they could text or call and we’d be there for them?
In our platform driven world, full of conferences, cool ideas, and silver bullets, everyone wants to be a spice store. But the place with handcrafted Marseille soap isn’t good for a whole lot. In the same way, we have a lot of activity and words, backed by programs, cohorts, presentations, and books. Yet, where is the consistency? Why are there so few stories of long-lasting faithfulness and fidelity in the missional space? Are the places and people around us all that better for all the enterprise? More importantly, are they any better over the long haul because of the sacrifices we make now?
Willie James Jennings’ warning should loom large here — “I want Christians to recognize the grotesque nature of a social performance of Christianity that imagines Christian identity floating above land, landscapes, animals, place and space.” Compare that to James K.A. Smith’s reminder, reminiscent of Pohl’s ideas of God: “God’s covenant with Abraham is the paradigm, finding culmination in Jesus’s incarnational promise to never leave us or forsake us, even ‘to the very end of the age’ (Matt 28:20 NIV). That is a promise of presence through history — not above it or in spite of it.” Isn’t this the core of missional theology — having incarnational impulses? Isn’t this what the call is about — embedding ourselves in flesh and blood with our neighbor?
Maybe I’m overly sensitive to the nuances of this conversation, but my instincts tell me we often lose the plot. I wonder that even if the calls for reform or change in the missional church space don’t end up remaking the same issues. Because in the end, the life God is inviting us into is far less complicated than we make it. The other stuff is often nothing much more than a distraction from the slow, simple work of fidelity and steadiness. Promise making and promise keeping are not the warm up act to the work, they are the work itself. Smeades eventually gets around to wrestling with this very idea: “Perhaps the church cannot be a force for redemptive change in our throwaway society until those of us who belong to it renew our commitment to promise in the society of the promise-making Lord.”
So, in a world where we can be anything, I pray that we would be people who have something truly needed, something essential. Not flashy, but important. That our commitment to those nearest to us over the long haul would be our calling, our life’s work.
