The Church is facing a pandemic, a virus. According to Mark Greene is it called SSD. He says "Globally, 98% of Christians are neither envisioned nor equipped for mission in 95% of their waking lives. BUT just imagine if they were..." What is SSD? "The Sacred-secular divide". The Church, he says, is guilty of dividing life into the 'sacred, religious bit' and the rest. We're good at recognising the sacred bit, but not so good at helping people deal with the rest of life. How does the Bible relate to the world of work? How can we help young people develop a Christian view of the maths or the physics they study at school or the books they read for English? How can we help the parents who are bringing up their children and trying to work at the same time?
SSD has limited mission in 4 ways:
- geographically - usually to within a few miles of the church building and/or far, far away
- personnel - mission is seen as the province of church-paid people
- time - SSD tends to confine most people's mission activity to their leisure time, evenings and weekends
- Scope of the gospel - and the message we share with others, that is no longer about all our life and all our being.
"we have a small percentage of the Church taking a partial gospel to far, far fewer people than are actually known by the Christians in our congregations." "Churches have to realise that the core of their calling is to be disciple-making communities whatever else they do." (Bishop Graham Cray) So why is life a peach and not an orange? Because an orange is made up of segments that you can pull apart and we have been taught to think that God is more interested in the religious segments - prayer, church, worship - and is not interested in work, sport, school, hobbies. The peach is a whole fruit, all together. God is interested in all of our being, all of our life, all of our community. Overcoming SSD can: expand our vision, inspire our mission. release our churches, broaden our minds, enlarge our hearts. nourish our souls, thrill our spirits, free our imagination for faithful following and fruitful living in all of life. I'll lend you the whole essay if you like; it is called
The Great Divide by Mark Greene.
