Sacramental Missiology

I often talk about God being present and active in the world; I cannot believe that there are no-go areas for God. I believe that God is in the darkest places. However, I have always had a tension about this approach, which is quite simply: ‘If God is everywhere then conversely God is nowhere’.

There is a real statement of hope in the idea that God is in all things, but at the same time there is also a deep naivety to it. There was a time when I was in Namibia, 100 or so miles south of the Angolan borer and we had to go to a water hole to collect water. People travelled from miles around to be there, I encountered real poverty and malnutrition there and this had the potential to crush any sense of hope that I had…And yet deep within me is the theological conviction that God was there; that God can be and is revealed in the hardest places. To distinguish that flicker of light would distinguish the light of the world.

So I’m caught in a place of dialogue, a place where these two, perhaps opposing ideas, need to work out how they can co-exist. As I reflect on this I’ve been reading about the sacramental potentiality of the universe, and this is enhancing the dialogue and helping me as I explore missiology. If we have a missiology that is focused on the belief that everything has the potential to be sacramental it significantly opens up this conversation. By becoming sacramental the objective reality becomes a window into the sacred – a piece of music has the sacramental potentiality within it, but it needs to be recognised and named. Even in the darkest places there is the sacramental potential and often this sacramental potential is bursting to be released.

I’d suggest that sacramental potential is always there but it can be latent. The sacramental potential of the ordinary is always there, and the role of mission is to name and open the sacramental potentially in the ordinary everyday. The role of the missionary is not to take God to a new place, the role of the missionary is to open people’s eyes to see the sacramental nature of the ordinary, and through gazing at the ordinary the extraordinary person of Christ.

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