“Not so patiently waiting” - Advent Musings #1

Well it’s that time of year again.

Santa, Christmas trees, decorations, trees, parties, presents, turkey…  It all sounds so great right? Everyone loves Christmas right?

Well, not so much.

While Christmas for some is definitely full of life and joy and peace and is something to look forward to with great expectation and excitement, for others it is a season to be tolerated. It is one where some put their heads down and say to themselves “it’ll be all over in a month so I’ll just grind my way through it until it’s over.”

It is a season of being reminded of old family wounds, loneliness, and isolation from loved ones.

For those who know little about what Advent means, it is the season leading up to Christmas in the Christian calendar. The word ‘Advent’ gets its origins from the Latin word ‘adventus’ which means ‘coming’. So as we enter the Advent season Christians are invited to think about the coming of Christ, and we reflect on what that means in past, present and future tenses. Christians remember that Jesus came as a baby, a Palestinian Jew to be exact, around 2000 years ago. He came as a fully human baby who also happened to be the Messiah, the saviour of the world. So we Christians remember the mystery and wonder of this historical event during Advent.

Christians also are to reflect on how Jesus affects us right here and right now. We believe that Jesus is the King of Kings today. We only ‘bend the knee’ to one King and His name is Jesus. Our allegiance only rests in Him and in no one or nothing else. So we are reminded during Advent that when we have a choice of bending our knee to ‘Caesar’ (which in our case could be anything from money, to the government, to our addictions to things like shopping, materialism, individualism…) or bending our knee to Jesus, that our decision must be obvious. Jesus is our King today, and not just someone to remember who came 2000 years ago.

But then we also think about who Jesus is for the future. And that is where the waiting and the patience comes in. Christians believe that Jesus will come back at some point to make everything right. At this moment, the world is not all right. If one needs proof that not everything is perfect, they’d be advised to just watch the news tonight for 5 minutes for a rude awakening.

And here at Gateway as we walk alongside folks who live on the streets, we are reminded every second of every day that the world is not right. When we hear the horrible stories of abuse, violence, rape, neglect, and poverty, we know that the world we live in is not all right.

And so at Advent we Christians ask the question, “How long Lord will you wait to return to make everything right? How long must we wait? How much more pain do we have to witness? How long before it all goes away?”

Are we to wait patiently? Yes. Do we wait patiently? For me the answer to that is no; my patience runs thin.

But at Christmas, we Christians are called to watch, to wait, to hope, and to be ready for Christ’s final return once and for all. That means that we don’t sit around and do nothing but we work tirelessly to bring hope to people while we wait as patiently as we can. And in the midst of that waiting we get little glimpses of hope and new life. We get the privilege of witnessing amazing things. We see lives changed before our eyes. We see people who came here without hope, leave us with new hope. We see people who come here with no life, get raised from the dead.

And over the next few weeks of Advent, I will share some of those stories of glimpses of grace and hope here.

So, Happy Advent. Let’s together stand against the tide of our westernized Christmas filled with manic consumerism and madness, and wait and work with the hope that at some point in time all of creation will be made whole and right.

Shalom

Dion

Writer: The Concise Oxford is written by Dion Oxford who, along with his wife, Erinn, and daughter, Cate, live in Toronto, Canada and are committed to journeying alongside people in the margins of society. He and Erinn have spent a combined 30 years working amongst folks who are living on the streets of Toronto. Dion is a recovering Salvationist who currently worships at an evangelical Anglican church but still works for The Salvation Army at the Gateway, a shelter for men experiencing homelessness. He and his wife see the solution to homelessness as the church taking seriously the two great commandments of loving God and loving our neighbour. He likes to read, write, fly kites, cycle long distances, watch TV, play in his band and hang out with his friends.

Tags: feasting, mission, poor

Officer training models

Paper title: Emerging models of training for officership in The Salvation Army
Author/researcher: Gregory Morgan
Country of origin: Australia
Publication/completion date: December, 2006
Length: 107 pages
Keywords: Officers, training, The Salvation Army, mission, ministry, equipping
Abstract: The Salvation Army needs action-oriented officers… for it to accomplish its mission. But here comes the crunch: they need to be informed men and women of action… it is high time to discard forever the false presupposition that has dogged us as an Army that higher education and action are opposites. It is wrong to think that you choose between the two, and that you cannot have both… As a Salvation Army we need leaders who are both scholars and dynamos: informed men and women of action. (Larsson 2005: 5)

This statement from the then world leader of The Salvation Army, John Larsson, succinctly encapsulates one of the challenges The Salvation Army has faced historically and continues to face today. Scholars and dynamos are required and possible. But they are difficult to deliver in a movement that is activist to such a degree that education and deeper thinking can be viewed with suspicion. However, we must cast aside our misgivings as we consider what it is that is required in the training of officer leaders for today and into the challenging landscape of twenty-first century society.

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Tags: equipping, ministry, mission, Officers, The Salvation Army, training

Meaning of salvation

Paper title: What is the meaning of salvation in The Salvation Army today?
Exploring a theology of Social Service and Holistic Mission
Author/researcher: Jason Davies-Kildea
Country of origin: Australia
Publication/completion date:
Length: 128 pages
Keywords: The Salvation Army, Salvationist, salvo, salvation, theology, mission, holistic, social service, evangelical, poor
Abstract: The Salvation Army, through a multitude of social services right across the world, is involved daily in saving people from the devastating impacts of poverty,  homelessness, addictions, unemployment and a wide range of other predicaments.   However, the dominant internal rhetoric about salvation would appear to suggest that theologically these efforts are at best secondary to an evangelical mission of  conversion.  What good is it to save people’s bodies if their souls are damned to hell?  A critical task of this study will be to explore theological notions of salvation which encourage a holistic view of mission, with the potential for reuniting the social and evangelical purposes of The Salvation Army.  It will be demonstrated that this broader view of salvation reflects the early history of The Salvation Army, has a solid scriptural basis and also fits within a number of other contemporary theological frameworks which are based in the life experience of the poor and oppressed.

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Tags: evangelical, holistic, mission, poor, salvation, Salvationist, salvo, social service, The Salvation Army, theology