Vision and Action

I have just finished Tom Wright's For All God's Worth: True Worship and the Calling of the Church. I enjoyed what Wright says about worship, and worshipping as we should, but also inspired, and challenged, by what he goes on to say about the church's calling. We need vision; but we also need action, and the two need to interact and balance each other. "Vision without action would indeed be escapism; action without vision is blundering folly. We have a fair amount of both in the church and the world at the moment,"

It all too easy to put too much emphasis on one, and it might be either, with the results that Wright identifies.

He also reminds us, and this is another important that God uses us as we are. The Bible is full of stories of reluctant responders, and we may well be in that category, but it doesn't mean that we are not called - "That’s the great joke of the gospel. The minute you think you’re good enough for God, God says, ‘I’m not interested in people who are good enough for me.’ And the minute you think you’re too bad for God, God says, ‘It’s you I’ve come for.’"

As Wright also says: "The ground is level at the foot of the cross; the only people who are excluded from the party are those who exclude themselves, by supposing they don’t need the cross, don’t need God’s forgiveness, don’t need the free love of Jesus, in the first place."