This is who we are

One of the reasons for reading up on this subject is that the work we're involved in - helping to build a student movement in Greece that trains believers and reaches unbelievers - is (hopefully!) of long term use here! One of the features of European evangelicalism that we've been able to learn a little about over the years, is the profound inward-looking nature of the small communities of Christians, either locally as in larger countries like France and Italy, or nationally in smaller Balkan countries where networks or relationships exist across the whole nation and down through the generations.

That's not to say that we're not too inward-looking in the UK (or anywhere else), but the extent to which that seems to be true here is quite hard to appreciate until you've been here a little while.

Everyone is cousins with everyone across the churches!

Anyway, the point is this:

This is what I've been reading today. Exodus 19 is a passage that defines who we are as God's people - and it leaves you in no doubt that our very identity and purpose is to represent God among the nations of the earth, to be the bearers of his word and his character and his will.

There is simply no room for us to think of ourselves as here for ourselves. The question is: how do we effectively work to bring about the change that we so urgently need to see, from inward looking to outward? From turned in on our own needs and concerned for our own continuation, to being turned outward to the need of those around us for knowing God and for the growth of his church?

At the end of the chapter that surveys the whole Bible with reference to passages that pick up on the universality of the Abrahamic blessing ('all peoples on earth...') and the particularity of Abraham as the means of that blessing ('...will be blessed through you' - Gen 12), Wright makes the clear and incontrovertible point that Israel's election as God's treasured possession is no different from ours: election is for mission.

We have been chosen so that others might be blessed. Whatever one thinks of election, we need to think this!