How does God guide us?

I used to think I knew the answer to this one quite clearly: God's got a plan for our lives which is set in stone because it's there from all eternity, and so all we've got to do is find it out - by prayer (understood as getting us to conform to God's will), reading the Bible, and "circumstances" (along with a bit of 'prophecy' if you're a charismatic) - and then just do it.

This has never sat easily with me. The trouble is that it can't ultimately matter whether we "find it out" or not, if it's going to happen anyway. I've never been philosophically happy with explanations along these lines that still try to give us "freedom" of choice, or even "responsibility" - because no matter how I look at it, it's just not real.

When I've voiced these doubts to others schooled in the same nursery, the standard response I get is along the lines of "you're just trying to gain autonomy from God - it's just your sinful tendency to resist submission - it's just man-centred Arminianism in another form - etc..." But is this all right?

What I've been learning recently about God as Trinity and his relationship with space and time, suggests a different possible paradigm that may be more faithful to the Bible's testimony, and philosophically more satisfying as well.

God does not know everything about the future, because he only knows what is knowable. This is not to diminish the omniscience of God or his glory. The glory of God is seen in his turning everything to the good of those who love him; his omniscience is seen in his knowing everything that there is to know. But we need not limit the freedom of human agents which God has condescended to give us. Yes, God has plans for us. Yes, God works in us to will and act according to his purpose. But we can always refuse him. He gives us that choice.

I'm not sure how this works out in all its implications. But if it's correct - even if it's heading in the right direction - it means we have responsibility that's deeper than I ever thought we had before. Before, the universe as I understood it was just working itself out like a book that was already written and published. Now it's a drama, and the script is not finished.

What if we realised - just as an example - that our progressive destruction of the earth is not an inevitability? Now, OK - I recognise we all have a natural bent towards sin, but are we taking seriously what the Bible says about our redemption? And about the earth to be redeemed along with us, for that matter? It's not all about "going to heaven", after all, is it...?

I'm beginning to see that God's "destiny" (if I can talk in these terms) is bound up with ours, and ours with his more than ever. We are his fellow-workers. Wow...

How does that relate to guidance? Well, for one thing, nobody knows what I'm going to do tomorrow. God may know every single possible thing I might do, but he hasn't pre-ordained any particular one of them. He may well have particular purposes for me tomorrow (I guess he does) but I don't have to go along with them. But if I don't, and I sin instead, I've no-one to blame but myself.

But what if a choice presents itself that's not between good and evil, or good and better, but between good and good? Or if I really don't know which one is better? Surely that's where the Bible, and circumstances, and prayer come in - only prayer is something different, because there's a possibility (and it is only a possibility) that God might actually change his mind and do it my way.

I can see the Calvinists rising up in horror... but Moses did it. Oh, that's just an anthropomorphism - God doesn't really change his mind.

But only because your hermeneutic (and philosphical view of God) says he can't. Now who's limiting God?

Incarnational mission...

I'm struck by something I heard this week: missionary humility should be demonstrated by seeking the privilege of joining someone else's group, not by offering the 'privilege' of joining the ours.

Too often we Christians have been afraid of contamination, afraid of 'wasting time', afraid of having nothing to write home about (literally). But surely it's only when we learn where people are and become that (not just study it) that mission is done on the right basis.

This fits with what I'm learning right now about a new paradigm for mission: post-colonial, post-modern & incarnational.

How does this fit with the Great Commission? It fits because every Christian is commissioned to the same work - "we have this ministry" - not just the 'missionaries', but everyone. It fits because fulfilling the Great Commission is not just about 'going to heaven' but about right here, right now. And it fits because God is not calling his Church out of the world but into it, into a world which itself is being made new and will be redeemed, along with everything we do in it that reflects God's image and his glory. [these ideas come from Darrell Cosden: The Heavenly Good of Earthly Work (Paternoster: 2006), but he claims - with some justification - a higher authority...]

So where does preaching the gospel fit in? Don't worry, I haven't given up on that. But I wouldn't do it in a vacuum, lest I suck all the life out before I even begin.

As a Christian, I am a missionary, an evangelist and a theologian. This is not so much my choice: anything else would be a contradiction in terms.

David Smith, a lecturer at the International Christian College http://www.icc.ac.uk/, where I'm a student right now, writes this:

"Missionaries, evangelists and theologians who seek to break new ground at the frontiers of cultures and religions must also seek to cope with the tension between the new and the old, encouraging the emergence of fresh forms of Church while remaining in fraternal dialogue with the congregations from which they have come, always seeking to remind brothers and sisters at both ends of this spectrum of their primary and overarching identity as members of the new humankind brought into existence by the redemptive love of God revealed in Christ."
[Mission After Christendom, Darton Longman & Todd 2003]

Here is where I see myself - a member of redeemed humankind at the cusp of shifting paradigms without and within. On the Way, for there is only one; On the Way, for life is a journey, On the Way, for I certainly haven't arrived there yet.

How do I know the Way? I don't - a lot of the time - if by that you mean all the answers, or even all the questions... But I know one who is the Way. And he'll get me there, wherever I'm going.