Radstock Ministries

Posted by Paul Williams.

'More farewells than Frank Sinatra...' as it was put to me by my friend and boss, Dave Welch. Well, there certainly were a few farewells, and a number of these have come from emerging mission partnerships at different stages of development. The picture above comes from my final commissioning service at St Mary's Old Harlow, where I have been privileged to serve for the last six years.

Then there is the London Russian Fellowship, which has adopted me as their first mission partner, as part of the vital work of getting mission into their DNA as they get going. IMPACT, a youth group based at the Church of the Good Shepherd, Romford, UK, have joined as part of a strategy of enabling a church-based youth group to ‘own' a mission partnership distinctly from the rest of the church. They have already established a connection with a youth cafe outreach in Udmurtia, central Russia, as they seek to embrace a Gospel context that is outside their local scene in Romford.

So what leads me to write of a Gethsemane moment? What leads me to write of loss, when there is such a groundswell of prayerful support and partnership at both ends of the connection? I think of Jesus in Gethsemane, in that time of desolation, away from his friends (who in any case had fallen asleep): Jesus whose very humanity raged against what was about to befall him; Jesus whose divinity riled against the cleavage that would come between him and his Father as he took the full weight of our sinfulness on the Cross.

Of course, I can't for a moment imagine what the second of these agonies of the soul must have been like: divinity has only ever been borne by one Man. But the first of these is easier for me to imagine, as I prepare to cast off everything (well, almost everything), I have known and to parachute into a completely different culture. As I let go of the trappings of existence in my home culture, including a minister's stipend and pension, and prepare for at least geographical separation from many friends I hold dear, the deeper the experience of loss, and the greater the realisation of dependence on God as never before.

Yet here in Jesus' agony, we see not just God's leading, but the intentional orientation of the will: "Yet not what I will, but what you will." These words are the ultimate expression of meek humanity: meek, not in the culturally-imagined sense of weak, but meek in the Biblical sense of a humanity with all its powers harnessed to the will of the Father. For me, the exploration of this is no mere academic excerise, something that the mind can play with at will. Rather it is something in which I am intentionally engaged, as I continue in this transitional process.

When Jesus sent his first disciples on mission in his Name for the first time, he gave them a paradigm that would serve as well for their discipleship as for the mission they were being sent on. Luke 9:3: "Take nothing for your journey, neither a staff, nor a bag, nor bread, nor money, and do not even have two tunics apiece." ..... The radical simplicity and godly dependence envisaged here are so easy to lose sight of when we are surrounded by material comforts of every kind. I used to think I travelled light in this world until I began the process of shedding my ‘stuff.' Yet it is just this kind of simplicity and dependence that proclaims judgment on a way of life characterised by acquisition and debt on the one hand; and on the other witnesses so powerfully to a better way of being and doing, that points to the Place where true treasures are laid up for the children of God.

My grasp of this eternal reality is inversely connected to my ‘need' to hold on to things I can't take with me, either to Mongolia, or into eternity (Matthew 6:21). This is the paradigm shift I am engaged with right now. What it has done is all too obvious to me, as I see my surroundings stripped almost bare; where it will lead me, only the Lord knows - and how exciting that is!