Let’s consider the purpose of Church at the Mission today? Why are we here? What is the mission of Church at the Mission?
Our mission, why we are here and what we should be doing, is not something that we come up with ourselves. Who is the head of this church. It’s not me. It’s not Rick Tobias. It’s not the board of Yonge Street Mission. Jesus is the head of this church. Since he’s the head of this church, it’s up to Him to decide what we’re about.
He gives us human leadership to steward His church (which is pretty amazing when you think of it) but it’s His call what we’re about. It’s His call. His calling. Let’s look at what Jesus said was His own personal calling:
Luke 4:14-19
Luke 4:14 Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. 15 He taught in their synagogues, and everyone praised him. 16 He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. And he stood up to read. 17 The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: 18 "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor." 20 Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him,21 and he began by saying to them, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."
Jesus says, quoting from Isaiah who had written 750 years earlier and then applying directly to Himself…He says that He has been anointed, and He has been sent on a five-fold mission.
Now we’re going to look at this passage more closely, but as we’re doing that I want to point out another passage of Scripture that might help us to see how it is that what Jesus is called to, His mission…it is also our mission.
John 20:19 On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you!" 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. 21 Again Jesus said, "Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you." 22 And with that he breathed on them and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit.
So as we think about Jesus’ own mission, let’s do so understanding that as God sent Jesus into the world, Jesus sends us into the world; as God the Father anointed and empowered Jesus to fulfill His calling, Jesus, God the Son empowers us by sending us the Holy Spirit.
Preach the good news to the poor
How did Jesus do this? He gathered around Himself a community (that’s what Jesus’ disciples were and are – His community). Then He went around other communities and taught the way to God; He went to people who were sad and lonely, or to people who had it all, understood them, and then spoke Good News to them.
And Jesus sends us. How does CATM preach good news to the poor? There are so many ways that people from this church do this. Let me mention just a few. Rob and Gary Oliver are out in the community or hanging out in front of their place just loving on people. Hearts attuned to God’s love and to the needs and cries of the people they meet, and they share good news. God loves you. Jesus died for you so you can be free.
Esther Lashambe goes from drop-in to drop in sharing her life with people who often really struggle and are misunderstood. She loves them. She gives herself to God and God uses her to touch lives.
Others here do it in their own unique way. As a church, we must always share the good news of Jesus Christ with those who will hear it. And Jesus said the poor in spirit, those who recognize their need for God, are especially blessed.
How are you sharing the good news? You will encourage others when you share how God is using you to touch lives.
Proclaim freedom for the prisoners
Jesus lived as a person truly, deeply free in every way. His was the perfect picture of a liberated life. As a free person He proclaimed what He lived. You and I as members of this church are on a journey toward living free.
Jesus is our emancipator, the One Who has broken our chains and is breaking our shackles. As we go deeper into Him, we get further away from the chains that bind us, and we learn how to get free quicker when we mess up.
When we talk to others about our own struggles to live as free people, our own growing commitment to living in Jesus and growing deep roots into Him, we perhaps help people to realize that spiritual freedom in Christ is a for-real thing that’s worth pursuing.
At the same time, we understand that our spiritual lives and the other parts of our lives are not separate, they are one thing. Everything is spiritual. So we visit the prisoners, we befriend those coming out of jail; we advocate for those caught up in human trafficking. No one person does all of this, but, as the body of Christ here and connected to the worldwide body of Christ, we raise up a Christian voice to work to liberate those in bondage.
Who do you know that is in bondage? Point them to the One is truly free and who brings liberty to the captive.
Recovery of sight for the blind
Jesus made the blind to see and the deaf to hear. Those were impressive miracles.
Far greater was another kind of miracle that Jesus performed. He helped me, who was blind, to see His glory. He helped me who was convinced that God did not and could not exist, to see just how beautiful and real He is.
He revealed the true nature of God to people, took the veil from their eyes and enabled them to see. And when they could see, everything changed.
In his book, An Anthropologist on Mars, neurologist Oliver Sacks tells about Virgil, a man who had been blind from early childhood. When he was 50, Virgil underwent surgery and was given the gift of sight. But as he and Dr. Sacks found out, having the physical capacity for sight is not the same as seeing.
Virgil’s first experiences with sight were confusing. He was able to make out colors and movements, but arranging them into a coherent picture was more difficult. Over time he learned to identify various objects, but his habits--his behaviors--were still those of a blind man. Dr. Sacks asserts, "One must die as a blind person to be born again as a seeing person. It is the interim, the limbo . . . that is so terrible." To truly see Jesus and his truth means more than observing what he did or said, it means a change of identity.
You and I, in the way we love people, the way we care for them and the manner in which we conduct ourselves, can be what God uses to open people’s eyes and hearts to the reality of His love, the truth of His existence and the power of His presence in a life.
To release the oppressed
There are accounts in the gospels of Jesus dramatically releasing people who were oppressed by demon-possession. Again, those are pretty dramatic stories that start with someone in their state of bondage and oppression and end with them being freed.
Such dramatic things still happen today, I have no doubt, but for me the more impressive way that Jesus helps the oppressed is almost so subtle that if you blink you might miss it.
In nearly all ancient cultures, one of the most oppressed groups was not an ethnic group or a religious group. It was women. Women were the property of men. If a woman’s husband died, she was nearly defenseless in a very cruel world. Women could not have political power for the most part. Female babies were often put to death in what was, absolutely, a man’s world.
Jesus surrounded himself not just with women, but with men and women. You get the sense from reading Scripture that Jesus made no distinction in value between men and women. That was, in a way that’s hard for us to understand, incredibly radical. And Jesus’ attitude toward children was equally embracing and accepting.
In being so open-hearted to those who most people dismissed, in being so kind to those who were accustomed to being treated poorly, like second-class citizens, Jesus released the oppressed.
Pastor Jan and others of you here in this room, work toward releasing the oppressed by imparting dignity and respect to women caught in the sex trade, to addicts and to those who society tends to dismiss.
So we can ask ourselves…who do we see on a regular basis who might be oppressed, who would benefit from being treated as an equal? Good questions to ask.
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.
Jesus referred here to the Jubilee, the time commanded in Scripture that was to occur every 50 years, where that might cause bondage would be set right. Property would return to families, slaves and prisoners would be freed, debts would be forgiven. Jesus is the Jubilee…the One who comes to let us know that God is for us, and if God is for us, who can be against us?
We proclaim this as we point people to Jesus, the lover of their souls.
What’s Unique About CATM?
How are we uniquely sent into the world by Jesus?
Let’s think about CATM for a moment as we consider Jesus’ calling, our calling in this community.
First off, we’re a church that is part of a mission. Normally you think of a church supporting missionaries, like we want to support Cindy Lai in her missionary calling to Papua New Guinea.
Church’s and groups of churches called denominations will send people away on missions, and those who are sent often establish missions abroad where the needs of those community are met and the gospel is preached.
Here, Yonge Street Mission planted a church. Why? Originally is was because people at our Evergreen branch were coming to Christ and we would try to connect them with local churches.
More often than not, there were cultural challenges in those churches that made it just too hard for these young believers to feel at home in those churches. So they would come back to us, by the dozens, asking us to be their church. They learned of Jesus at the mission.
They saw God’s love in action at the mission. They came to faith at the mission. They were often baptized by mission staff. “You be our church!, they would say. And after about a hundred youth said this, we realized God was talking to us.
So we planted a street church. Pastor Jan and I were part of that church. Eventually that church ran its course, to make a long story short, and the mission decided that what we needed at the heart of YSM was a church.
So much of what YSM does looks like social work, and our Christian identity can get a little fuzzy for those who use YSM’s services, especially because we are very gentle with people. We don’t hit people over the head with the gospel. We respect people, we respect their cultures and their religions and feel no need to force Jesus upon them.
But the complication there can be that the mission’s Christian identity can suffer a little. So in order to strengthen the core of the mission and to cement its Christian identity for those we serve, we planted a church.
So…our in our DNA we are close to the community, we are close to the street, we are close to those who some consider on the margins of Toronto.
We are close to those living with poverty. That’s important to understand if you want to understand this church. We as a church were called into being in part to be the heart of Yonge Street Mission. That’s important, because if you know anything about YSM, you know that it works to help people to build brighter futures.
At the same time, we don’t discriminate against people from different stations in life. Teresa Lai is a student at Knox College and she had a school assignment to shadow me, or follow me around for just 15 hours a few months back.
She came from a church with a strong single culture and that was strongly unified, she felt, because most of the people there were basically pretty similar. She wrote a reflection after her time in a few of our services and our small groups. She wrote: “I was astonished to see that there is a strong unity within CATM despite the diversity.
I soon found out what holds them together as one body of Christ is their strong sense of community and the feeling of “I belong here”. The Holy Spirit is undeniably present among them.
It is even more surprising that this strong sense of community is not threatened by outsiders like me showing up occasionally and sitting among them as they were studying the words of the Lord, having fellowship with one another and praising God with their might on Sunday”. That’s the view of a guest of CATM.
I’ll tell you honestly, when I consider how we’re doing as a church, I don’t think about our numbers. They go up and down. Always have and always will. I don’t think about our offering. Up and down too.
You know how I evaluate how Church at the Mission is doing? I simply ask, how do families feel coming here? Do they feel safe and welcome and loved? How do addicts feel? Do they feel embraced and cared for and loved? How do our youth feel? Are they included in the life of the church, are they supported and are they loved? How does the prostitute feel?
Is he or she comfortable coming in here and finding grace and strength to live life and move toward the life they really want, do they feel loved?
We’re also not a ‘judging’ church. There’s a Simpsons episode where the Flanders family goes off to camp to learn how to be more judgmental. Pretty funny. But very specifically, we’re not a church that spends any time judging people. At a basic level, we’re pretty convinced that God is actually our judge. And we know that we will be judged in the same way we judge others.
That might not seem like much, but, you know, we’ve lost people because of it.
I’ve had to tell people that we’re not a church that thinks the best way to help people grow is by criticizing them or pointing out what we think are their flaws. I’ve told people that really believed we should be like that they should really consider if they want to be coming here, because we won’t bend on that point. And so people have left. And that’s ok.
We’re not anywhere near a perfect church. There’s tons of other churches out there. Something for everyone. But here, we will always err on the side of grace, on the side of compassion, on the side of gentleness. We can’t be any other way. It’s in our DNA.
We’re also a church that loves kids and that loves kids in the service doing what kids do, which is pretty unpredictable and occasionally chaotic.
I was at another church in North York recently and there were around 1000 people in the sanctuary. Someone had a baby who would occasionally let out a cry, as babies tend to do. Each time the baby made a sound, the woman in front of me would clearly demonstrate her irritation, often leaning in to the person beside her and commenting how rude it was for the parents to dare have their baby in the service.
Let me be clear. Babies are welcome here. Adults are expected to be adults, babies are expected to be babies. Children to be children, youth to be youth, you to be you. Babies are a part of our community, not an irritant, not a distraction. Loving one another means loving our families. If you get irritated with kids being kids, consider it an opportunity to learn patience and grow in grace.
We’re also kind of eclectic. That’s a $10 word meaning we’re a little bit of everything. Teresa Lai thought we were Anglican because Pastor Ronda led communion when she was here. When I lead worship it probably feels like we’re Baptist. When James lead worship it probably feels like we’re charismatic, when Carny leads worship and when Jan leads worship its different again.
We experiment with different things in our service. We tell people to sit or stand or dance or breakdance or worship with flags or march with flags or…you get the picture.
However it is that you want to worship God, it’s good. Just let it be real. Don’t fake anything. If you’re feeling awful, don’t stay away. Come and be yourself, be quiet. Be reflective. If you’re feeling awesome, come and dance your heart out to the Lord in the beauty of His holiness and love. And all points in between, come as you are. Come as you are.
We’re also not a personality-driven church. Some churches depend on the personality of their pastor to move forward. You know why we usually have different speakers up here, why I’m not the only one who preaches in this church? I don’t want this church to become dependent on me.
I plan to be here for a long, long time if God wills it, but one day I’ll be gone, and I’m determined that this church will continue to rise up and know why it’s here and continue to exist for the glory of God.
Finally, something you’ve heard me say before, but I really don’t think I can say it enough. You know, we want you to be blessed. We want you to meet God here. We want you to be encouraged and we want your family to have a spiritual home in a great place. We want you to grow into all that God wants for you.
But honestly, we’re not here for us. We’re here for this community. We are a good news outpost of people who are learning to follow Jesus ON MISSION. We are here to worship and to study and learn in our services and in our Academy, and then to GO. This neighbourhood, this community is full of people who need Jesus.
Full of people who need God, full of people who need love, full of people who are heading toward a Christ-less eternity. You and I are called to love this community, to love them to Jesus Christ, to BE Jesus to them, to BE living epistles.
We need to be being whole-heartedly committed to Him as the one love above all other loves, and because of this we must be committed to loving one another and loving the stranger. We need to be committed to accompanying others on their journey, to always being open to new people. We need to become spiritually and emotionally prepared as a community to embrace all people, including the poor and the poorest of the poor.
Loving Jesus means reaching out and living the gospel, being people of good news. It means being prepared to answer people when they ask, “Why do you care about me?
Why do you spend time with me? Why do you bother to help me dream?” It means being ready to say that most simple and meaningful of things: Because God loves you, because He sent His son to die for you. Because you are my sister, you are my brother.”
Let us embrace the mission of Jesus and together wrap our minds around that fact that Jesus has sent us into the world to continue His mission. We are a unique church with a unique DNA, uniquely brought into being by God who has a purpose for us…that we might show forth the glory of Jesus Christ, that we might gather together people of all nations, tribes and tongues, rich and poor, and very, very poor and that we might grow together to be God’s hands and feet in this community.
