The Fruit of Hope: Mission

The first post in this series looked at nurturing hope. Here, I want to think about its fruit.It's not an accident that people into the missional church movement are also often rooted in the sort of eschatology emphasized by theologians such as N.T. Wright, Scot McKnight, and Jurgen Moltmann. These theologians focus on God's intent to bring about the redemption of creation—the reconciliation of all things to God. The sort of hope that this kind of theology cultivates points towards mission as its natural fruit. Here are four ways that a robust sense of hope moves us towards mission.1. Hope helps us deal with the brokenness that we experience in ourselves. Hope allows us to see our own conversion as something that has begun but which is not yet completed. Our own discipleship has a trajectory, even if the specific turns and twists along the way remain mysterious to us. In hope, we see ourselves as in the process of being formed, and that takes place for and by God's missionary work in the world. Thus, mission is no longer something that we only see as being given to the elite super-spiritual, but is something for all of us. It is not for those who have already arrived, but is a part of the journey towards God's future, the source of our hope.2. It allows us to engage in broken systems. As hope grows within us, we we have new energy to struggle against the dark powers of the world, knowing that God will indeed defeat them in the end...their ability to crush and grind people is destined to fall, and when they are defeated, the systems they use to break people will crumble to. That knowledge allows us to actively subvert those systems through story and action, even while facing the frustration that comes from facing their current powers. I know this particular point sounds super nerdy and theoretical, but there's one last one that we meet every day:3. Hope sustains our ability to love people. People are tough to love sometimes, and there are moments when our frustrations with their behavior can overwhelm our loving desires for their well-being. That's just speaking about the people we already have affection for—we still have to deal with the surely strangers who rub us wrong from the beginning! Hope can help us deal with those frustrations. It provides us the resources to be able to see people for what they can be, rather than only as they already are. Realizing that everyone we meet is on a journey frees us to think about how our relationship with them, even the smallest interactions, might move them along the way towards wholeness. I think this is part of Jesus's own way of dealing with people, an imitating it is a step on the path of discipleship.4. Hope broadens our vision. It's perhaps most obvious how this happens temporally, as we expand our view from the present moment towards a long view. However, hope properly conceived also contains within it a vision of how God reconciles all of creation, and so we find it broadening our field of vision spatially and relationally as well. We begin to see how God's mission, and perhaps to some extent our place in it, relates to all humanity and the wholeness of God's world. Hopeful people see beyond themselves.