Missional Church described by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I picked this up(read-copied) this off of www.inhabitatiodei.com Inhabitatio Dei

It is so truth filled that I could not NOT use it.

"Our church has been fighting during these years only for its own self-preservation, as if that were an end in itself. It has become incapable of bringing the word of reconciliation and redemption to humankind and to the world. So the words we used before must lose their power, be silenced, and we can be Christians today in only two ways, through prayer and in doing justice among human beings. All Christian thinking, talking, and organizing must be born anew, out of that prayer and action. . . . It is not for us to predict the day—but the day will come—when people will once more be called to speak the word of God in such a way that the world is changed and renewed. It will be in a new language, perhaps quite nonreligious language. but liberating and redeeming like Jesus’s language, so that people will be alarmed and yet overcome by its power—the language of a new righteousness and truth, a language proclaiming that God makes peace with humankind and that God’s kingdom is drawing near. “They shall fear and tremble because of all the good and all the prosperity I provide for them” (Jer. 33:9). Until then, the Christian cause will be a quiet and hidden one, but there will be people who pray and do justice and wait for God’s own time."

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Thoughts on the Day of Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge,” in Letters and Papers from Prison, 145:389-90.

intentional attentiveness

The hot weather we are having has me thinking about summer. Spring is a time of plants sprouting up. Fall is a time of harvesting fruit from the plants that we saw arrive above ground in the spring. Summer is a “middle place” of waiting, between spring and fall. I recently read this quote by Sue Monk Kidd from her book, When the Heart Waits, “We seem to have focused so much on exuberant beginnings and victorious endings that we’ve forgotten about the slow, sometimes tortuous unraveling of God’s grace that takes place in the ‘middle places.’ ”
Certainly summer is a wonderful time to enjoy warm weather, family, picnics, and the Horton Bay General Store. These are the very reasons that the living Christ invites us to journey through summer on a path of transformation and not merely stagnant waiting. The key is intentional attentiveness in the present moment. That same attitude or characteristic was the key ingredient of Jesus teachings among the disciples. Intentionally being attentive to God within us, God in others, and God in all creation in the here and now. Not distracted by what the future fall seasons may bring or anchored in the great springs of the past, but simply being intentionally attentive to the present moment activity of God. Writer Cam Yates calls this being a “prayerful presence” at every moment.
How might you foster an intentional attentiveness to the present moment in your life this summer? In what ways might you use different senses to be attentive to God in you, others, and the world in the present of every moment? How can you participate with God and be a “prayerful presence” for yourself, others, and the world? May your experimenting in being intentionally attentive in the present moment this summer give you glimpses of “the tremendous thing that Christ means to make of you”(C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity) through your experiencing of the “unraveling of God's grace” that occurs in you.