Duty or Delight?
Missions WITH Joy
Like the proverbial frog in boiling water, after 15 years on the mission field, I realized my joy has slowly been put to death.
I’m not sure I would have seen a reason for it to be revived. Western theology tends to minimize experiential faith and maximize intellectual understanding. In this paradigm joy is a secondary or tertiary result of belief. Consequently, it seems that many of us who engage cross-culturally in response to the Great Commission are fueled by duty rather than delight. In the past few months, God has convicted me of my apathy (despair, even?) and all that it represents. He wants me to rediscover the joy of my salvation.
My eyes were opened while recently watching The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. It was in the final film, The Two Towers, when I heard an exchange between Théoden and his niece and adopted daughter, Eowyn, and felt as if my own adoptive Father was speaking directly to my soul. In a moment of utter disaster, when her heart had just been broken by unrequited love and her people are heading into the greatest battle of their lives, Eowyn asks, “What duty would you have me do, my lord?” His response came like an arrow to my heart:
“Duty? No. I would have you smile again, not grieve for those whose time has come. You shall live to see these days renewed. No more despair.”
I have been doing my missionary “duty” for 15 years. That’s not what my Lord wants from me. Instead, he wants delight.
Duty may propel me to proclaim the gospel, but only true delight will make it believable.
Charles Taylor explains in The Secular World, that the world has become disenchanted. This is particularly true in the West. In medieval times spirits were easily believed to be real and hell and damnation were broadly and deeply feared. But when we arrived in France in 2010, people were not the least bit worried about the eternal state of their soul. A gospel that spoke only to an eternity with God was deemed irrelevant. That is not so say there was no spiritual hunger—it was just not concerned with life after death. It was concerned with the here and now.
What makes the gospel message appealing is the fact that in the face of a broken heart, when war is raging all around us, we can actually smile again. Knowing that God will restore all things we are set free from despair today. But most Christians I know are anxious and perplexed (myself included) and I wonder if perhaps the world isn’t buying what we’re selling because we’re proclaiming a gospel without living in the light of its Truth.
I am not talking about a happy-clappy caked-on joy that ignores suffering and puts a shiny spin on disastrous events. Lament has a place. Grief is godly—but despair is deadly. Eowyn wasn’t asked to smile again once the war was won—but before the battle was even fought.
We’ve become a dour people, I’m afraid. Perpetual self-righteous older brothers refusing to party.
And so I’m on a quest to smile again.
To evangelize and disciple others out of duty is to proclaim a false gospel. When Peter and John were arrested for their preaching, they didn’t say, “Well, Jesus gave us this great commission, so we have to do it. Its our duty.” They were compelled less by the command and more by their own genuine experience (seeing and hearing) of Jesus. In fact, they were so delighted by what Christ had done for them, they couldn’t help talking about it! Mission, and ministry, must flow out of my own seeing and hearing. If I am not being continually re-enchanted by Jesus, delighted by all I know of him (BOTH experientially and intellectually), then anything I proclaim will ring hollow.
(By the way, the next thing that Eowyn does in the film is slay a dragon! I wonder if that dragon wasn’t a metaphor for despair.)