Engage: faith that matters

A call to be faithfully of and in this world

We’ve often talked in church conversations about being “in the world but not of it.” But too often we’ve found ourselves “of the world but not in it.” Our priorities, choices and everyday lives sometimes seem indistinguishable from those around us, at the same time as some of our smaller lifestyle quirks, our fear of those who believe differently and our assumptions about “the world out there” tend to isolate us from our neighbours, our communities and our world.

In His final prayer while on earth, Jesus acknowledged the tension His disciples would have with the world around them. They would be people who accepted the call to be primarily citizens of a different kind of kingdom. But Jesus didn’t pray for them to be taken out of this world or isolated within it; rather—as He addressed His Father—“Just as you sent me into the world, I am sending them into the world” (John 17:18, NLT).

Given this divine commission, we as His disciples should be the most engaged in our world and in our communities. By virtue of being human, we are of this world—it was good enough for the incarnated Jesus, it must be enough for us. With Him, we reclaim this world as the loved creation of God and our God-given home. In a sense, we don’t belong to this world as it is (see John 17:14). But in a larger sense this world rightfully belongs to God and to His people—and it will be our eternal home—so we care deeply about it and its people.

And Jesus also sends us to be in this world. Like Jesus, we are called to care, called to serve, called to sacrifice. We are called to engage.

Faith that matters begins and ends with Jesus—and is focused on Him everywhere in between. But engaging with Jesus will always send us back to our time and place, to our communities and to our world, just as He was sent. This new collection of essays—Engage: Faith that Matters, drawn from a monthly online column for Adventist World over the past five years—wrestles with aspects of this faithful process, particularly as it calls us to engage with issues hurting those who are most marginalised and vulnerable.

A risk of talking about “faith that matters” is that, by implication, it might be seen as critical of other aspects and emphases of faith that also matter. In a sense, perhaps it is. But primarily only to the extent this world-engaged kind of faith has been neglected, downplayed or dismissed.

I hope these essays sound a call to engage more deeply with Jesus and, in turn, with His sending us into the world to love, to listen, to serve and to speak. It’s a call to be faithfully of and in this world, as disciples of Jesus.

Read, share, enjoy, disagree, think, do, engage . . .

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