By Dr Charles Leyman Kachitsa
As the year is coming to a close, it is natural that people look back on to the days gone by, which have accelerated down on to usher us on to another period of things and events we have yet to discover as new.
The young in the population look forward to adding another year with anticipation that they will be allowed things they never did at their previous age. Those in middle age, it is a different picture, most would be dealing for instance with the realisation that it would appear growing old is a reality and that one needs to act fast on things that are age dependent, that depend on your age being construed as not too old to engage or accomplish.
For the old, in old age, you suddenly realise and start enjoying the freedoms that old age brings. I have heard, there is that feeling of fulfilment that you will have no matter where and how your life has panned out to be, whether rich or poor. You come to the knowledge that after all is said, we are all humans, created in the same privileged way and dare I say with same life challenges no matter our race, creed, background or otherwise. Separation with earth does not matter anymore, you realise instead you need to always be one with the Most High, who has all the power, God.
The quotes this week are a final extraction from a book that advocates that life is about seeking and dwelling in the one Most High, being one with Him. I am sure that the few selected quotations below from this book will enlighten you to one or two life lessons. Read and enjoy:
PRACTICES FOR THE REFOUNDING OF GOD’S PEOPLE – The Missional Challenge of the West by Alan J. Roxburgh and Martin Robinson
“The Euro-tribal churches of Europe and North America were built on the promise of dominance – a center periphery world in which they were the primary drivers and beneficiaries. That story is over. It cannot be resuscitated. Latour’s question must be addressed by the churches: ‘Are you going to keep nursing dreams of escape, or are you going to search for a land in which you and your children might live …….. {T}here is no planet for globalization and we are going to ……. need to learn to change the entire way’ we live.”
“The word congregation is the common usage to describe a gathering of Christians. What does its usage suggest? I go to a shopping mall and congregate with strangers to whom I owe nothing. The people in the mall make no claim on my time, money, or life. One attends a concert or sports event, congregating with thousands of cheering, screaming fans. We might form emotional bonds with the people about us in our common enthusiasm, but once the game, play, or concert is over, we are strangers again with no claim on one another’s lives. To congregate is to gather or assemble. When this is the primary descriptor of church, we can too easily come to see church as a gathering or an assembly where something happens, where goods are offered for consumption, or where a concert or event is performed for us.”
“A renewed concern for the common good has taken place against a backdrop of huge change both in society and in the shape of the world Church. In terms of society, the period immediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, sometimes called the ‘end of history,’ signalled a shift from industrial societies to a globalized world of information technology. That shift has interacted with modernity’s turn toward hyperindividualism.”
“It has become an accepted fact among missiologists that mission has ceased to be from the West to the rest and is now from everywhere to everywhere. That is partly because of the growth of world Christianity so that there is now a viable Christian presence, seen or unseen, in almost every group of people on earth. But it is also because, at its heart, Christianity is a missionary faith. To fail to engage its evangelism, to spread the faith to new areas of the world, to see the conversion of a new people groups, seems like an aberration of the very essence of the faith. Mission, to the West, is partly an overflowing of this revival and missionary zeal, a determination to see the whole world as legitimately an extension of the mission field on one’s doorstep.”