Challenging "Mission Renewal"

We're obligated to ask: are we in danger?

We’ve polished the phrase till it shines like a showroom window: “Mission Renewal.”

It’s pleasant to the touch and doesn’t stain the fingers. It smells faintly of clean linen, of committee rooms with filtered light and coffee that never cools. One hears in it a suburban atmosphere—light traffic, modest lawns, the soft industry of good intentions.

Health and healing, they say. A wholesome word, “healing,” and I won’t mock it; but set it down beside the child whose breath failed on a staircase slick with blood, beside the widow who sleeps with a knife under her pillow because a man once vowed to make her sleep forever, beside the family whose laughter was blown apart in a market square. Watch the word then shrink, like a flower laid on an anvil.

We’re not dealing with scratches. We’re not dealing with the summer colds of the soul.

What would “renewal” mean to a mother who won’t wash her child’s last shirt because it still keeps a little of her smell? Don’t hand her a pastoral brochure with pale-green leaves on the cover. She lives among the ruins where words fall through the floors.

When violence tears a hole straight through your life, there isn’t a breath left for abstractions. There’s only the night, and the night is long.

If “Mission Renewal” becomes an aromatherapy for consciences—God forgive us—it’s a sin dressed as a strategy. The world’s wound isn’t a misunderstanding solved by better facilitation. It’s Golgotha breaking through the pavement.

Our age put a lock on the shed where we stored the Cross, hoping to forget the smell of old wood and iron. But the Cross isn’t a museum piece. It’s the hinge of history. The poor carry it silently while we edit the liturgy of our comfort. And yes, I mean the poor in money, in safety, in innocence, in hope.

There’s a terrifying democracy to sorrow; it lays its head on palaces and tenements alike, though it lingers longest where the ground is coldest.

So what would mission be if it were more than wellness with a hymnal?

First, it would learn to speak the dialect of lament. Not the theatrical howl, but that stubborn psalm that keeps its place when all other furniture has been repossessed. A church that can’t lament with those who’ve been destroyed by other people’s hands—or by that slow murder we call indifference—has no mission except to protect its mirrors.

Renewal begins where we stop trying to launder grief. Sit in the ash. Listen till your ears ring. If there’s a therapy here, it’s the therapy of staying when escape would be so much tidier.

Second, mission would remember the grammar of judgment. Not the smug sentence against “them”—the faceless monsters in our headlines—but the burning verdict against our own complicity. Violence isn’t an occasional visitor; it’s the landlord of a world we’ve decorated. We baptize it with new names—policy, security, prudence—so we can sleep.

The Gospel doesn’t flatter our euphemisms. It drags them into daylight like stolen goods.

If “renewal” means we’re better at recruiting volunteers while refusing to unmask that which feeds on the weak, then it’s as useless as varnish on a coffin.

Third, mission would practice the dangerous art of presence. Healing isn’t always a cure; often it’s a shared sentence. Christ didn’t run a clinic; he lived in a body that could be wounded, and he kept that body vulnerable till a spear confirmed what love had already declared. If we want the kind of renewal that speaks to those who’ve lost children to bullets and friends to bombs, we’ll have to risk the proximity where the blast might take us too.

Fourth, mission would reclaim the sacrament of truth. Say the words that hurt to say. Name the crime. Name who profits. Name the ghastly arithmetic by which some lives are priced and others discounted. Then repent in public—not performatively, not as branding, but as obedience.

Repentance is the only door that doesn’t lock from the inside. The world sneers at such things because repentance makes you poor, and the poor are ridiculous until the day they save us.

Fifth, mission would become small enough to be held by the broken. Our programs often require a healthy participant—a person with transportation, time off work, child care, a nervous system not on fire. That’s not mission; that’s a club with good lighting.

The Gospel, which has a terrible habit of going where it’s least convenient, belongs in the waiting room of the emergency ward, under the flyover where the memorial candles gutter, in the apartment where the threats still echo in the air. If your renewal can’t survive the smell of bleach and fear, it’s not resurrection; it’s interior design.

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Does all this speak to the worst in us? It must. The mystery of iniquity isn’t an academic problem. It’s a beast with warm breath. The only speech it understands is the witness of a people who refuse to imitate it.

Don’t confuse refusal with passivity. The meek aren’t doormats; they’re the ones who won’t let hatred draft them into its army. Their gentleness is a weapon sharpened on the stone of the Cross. That’s scandalous, yes. It’s also the only politics of the soul that doesn’t end in a ditch.

Is “mission renewal” too shallow? Often, yes.

Too often it floats on the tepid bathwater of our optimism. But it doesn’t have to.

There’s a depth where the word becomes heavy enough to sink through our slogans. You’ll know you’re near it when your plans begin to look foolish, when budgets tremble, when respectability clears its throat and changes the subject.

Grace has a way of ruining reputations.

It bends down, touches the blood on the steps, and refuses to move on. It takes the last shirt from the drawer and washes it tenderly, even if the smell fades. Not because forgetting is holy, but because love can’t live without small obediences.

I believe this—no, I stake my life on it: the renewal worthy of the name won’t exempt us from the world’s night; it will give us lamps and send us out two by two, unarmed except for mercy.

It’ll teach us to keep the names of the dead on our tongues as prayers, not statistics. It’ll force us to learn the long patience of the God who doesn’t abandon cemeteries but walks among stones as if they’re doors.

Renewal isn’t a spa. It’s a tomb cracking. And the crack is scandalously small at first, the kind you miss unless you’re on your knees.

But it widens. It widens, and the air that comes through it is cold and clean and impossible to own. That air is our mission. Breathe it, even if it stings. Then go where it blows.