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| "Be water, my friend." + Bruce Lee |
I have always loved Bruce Lee.
I have always loved water.
And I have always loved Mass.
And Michael Frost
has brought them all together.
Coming off the heels of one of my favorite 2024 reads, Searching for Enough by Tyler Staton, I'm excited to plunge into Mission is the Shape of Water: Learning from the Past to Inform Our Role in the World Today during Eastertide's 50 days of joy. And if you'd like to take a dip with me, here's an excerpt from The Shape of Water's Introduction that acts as a mirror to a previous post, "When the Rain Comes, the Desert Blooms."
"Be Water!"
The mission-as-water analogy ...
Water flows over hard surfaces
and seeps into dry land.
It diffuses into cracks and crevices.
Water flows over hard surfaces
and seeps into dry land.
It diffuses into cracks and crevices.
It can appear like a gentle mist,
or rage like a mighty torrent.
In the same way,
the mission of God's people
has always been like water.
In some contexts and eras, mission has crashed on the shore and swept away what was there before. At other times, it has risen slowly but inexorably. At other points, it has had to bleed into small fissures, almost unnoticed. In yet others, it has flowed like a babbling stream. It moves differently in contexts of persecution and violence, poverty and fear, wealth and pride.
As Bruce Lee put it,
"Water can flow or crash!"
So can God's missional people.
Thousands of Nameless, Faceless
The world is rarely changed by single heroic figures. The shape of mission is never epitomized by the life of one famous missionary, no matter how impressive their ministry was.
Mission is like water,
in that it flows most effectively
when hundreds or thousands of nameless,
faceless Christians humbly submit
to the task of contributing
their bucket to the torrent.
I remember having this idea surprisingly reinforced for me in a park in the American northeast. Tucked into the northwest corner of Massachusetts in the stunning Berkshires lies Williamstown, a small college town best known for being the home of the exclusive Williams College. I was passing through the area when my host told me Williams was famous in the world of American missions because it was where the 1806 "Haystack Prayer Meeting" had occurred. I was embarrassed to admit that I was unaware of what that was, so he took the opportunity to turn off the freeway and detour through the town. There, on the fringe of the Williams College campus, in a rather unimpressive park, is one of those metal historical markers that you find across the U.S. This one read: "On this site in the shelter of a haystack during a summer storm in 1806 five Williams College students dedicated their lives to the service of the church around the globe. Out of their decision grew the American Foreign Mission movement."
I had questions. First, how do you take shelter in a haystack? Aren't they just big round balls of cut grass? Well, it turns out that back in the nineteenth century, farmers used wooden frames, like a teepee, to stack newly harvested hay into a cone-shaped mound. They would leave the inside hollow to prevent it from fermenting and catching fire. The five Williams students had been meeting in a nearby grove of trees to discuss William Carey's book on foreign missions when a wild summer thunderstorm whipped up. Seeing the hollowed-out haystack in the nearby field, they made a break for it.
Makes sense. But how could something as prosaic as five young men waiting out a rainstorm in a haystack ignite the American foreign mission movement? In their hiding place, the five men continued their conversation and then prayed, asking God to reveal his will for them regarding overseas mission. Afterward, they sang a hymn. It was then that one of them, Samuel J. Mills, the twenty-three-year-old son of a Connecticut clergyman, announced loudly over the wind and rain, "We can do this, if we will!" The moment must have sent chills through the students. In his history of Williams College, Arthur Latham Perry wrote, "The brevity of the shower, the strangeness of the place of refuge, and the peculiarity of their topic of prayer and conference all took hold of their imaginations and their memories."
Like Droplets of a Mighty River
Flushed with enthusiasm, they decided to form a permanent prayer group on campus and called it the Haystack Prayer Meeting. I assume they chose a bigger venue than the cramped haystack because within a couple of years it had become a large student group called "The Brethren" (Williams was an all-male school at the time), whose purpose was to promote and mobilize students to foreign mission service. Two years later, The Brethren morphed into the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). In 1812, they sent their first missionaries to India.
I share the story because that nondescript park in Williamstown felt to me like the site of a modest fissure from which leaked a small spring, which would eventually turn into a torrent of mission.
The names of those five devoted students,
who met together near
the Hoosic River in Sloan's Meadow,
were recorded,
but they are largely forgotten today.
But from that small spring
flowed a river of mission work.
On the 150th anniversary
of its formation,
the ABCFM announced that they
had sent out nearly 5,000 missionaries
to 34 different countries.
Some of us will be called by God
to be at the headwaters of a new flow.
Others of us will be called,
like droplets in a mighty river,
to play our small part in
contributing to the surge of love and grace
throughout the world.
If only we are willing.
+ Michael Frost
Mission is the Shape of Water,
pgs. xvii-xx
Other inspiring 2024 reads:
Bonus post on revival:
May God's Kingdom come, His will be done.
Que le Royaume de Dieu vienne,
que sa volonté soit faite.
愿神的国降临，愿神的旨意成就。
Nguyện xin Nước Chúa đến, ý Ngài được nên.
Jesús nuestra Rey, venga Tu reino!
🙏💗🍞🍷👑🌅🌇
que sa volonté soit faite.
愿神的国降临，愿神的旨意成就。
Nguyện xin Nước Chúa đến, ý Ngài được nên.
Jesús nuestra Rey, venga Tu reino!
🙏💗🍞🍷👑🌅🌇
With anticipation and joy,
