“he prefers partnership to mere accomplishment”

Michael Frost and Alan Hirsh, The Shaping of Things to Come

There’s a riddle in the Talmud that goes like this, “If God intended man to live by bread, why didn’t he create a bread tree?” And the answer is that, in fact, God could have created a tree that produced crusty loaves of bread, but he prefers to offer us a grain and invite us to buy a field and plant the seed. He prefers that we till the soil while he sends the rain. He prefers that we harvest the crop while he sends sunshine. He prefers that we grind the grain and knead it and bake it while he gives us air in our lungs and strength in our arms. Why? Because he would rather we become partners with him in creation.

Of course, God could simply supply our every need and solve our every problem. But our God invites us into a creative partnership with him. . . . We suppose he could have converted the whole world by now, but he prefers partnership to mere accomplishment (159).

Aaron Orendorff

It is striking and admittedly a bit jarring to entertain the thought that God “prefers partnership to mere accomplishment.” My basic orientation towards the two is exactly the opposite. I see partnership as the means and accomplishment and the ends. In other words, I regard accomplishment as the point and operate as if the real business of life was about “getting something done.” God, on the other hand, appears to think quite differently about the matter. The real business of life is partnership itself. Relationships are ends (not means) and “getting something done” is in many ways little more than a clever and handy excuse to partner.

Why?

Because God is interested in people, not projects. Real people demand real relationships. By inviting humanity into the process of creation and recreation—by making us agents of his kingdom’s coming—God is deliberately forfeiting productivity for the sake of process. He is saying (on purpose), “Yes, I’ll get less done and it’ll get done slower and there’ll be a lot more pain in the getting, but that’s the way I want to go. I want to go the way of people.”

In a similar way, we must begin to see our own relationships as ends in and of themselves. We love because we’ve been loved and because loving is good (morally and existentially), not because loving gets us somewhere. How would our approach to work, school, family, ministry and life all change if we adopted the same attitude as God? How would our approach to people be different if they themselves were what we were after and not what they might do for us?

Evangelism and Being Authentically Human

Rebecca Manley Pippert, Out of the Saltshaker & into the World

Our problem with evangelism is not that we don’t have enough information—it is that we don’t know how to be ourselves. We forget we are called to be witnesses to what we have seen and know, not to what we don’t know. The key on our part is authenticity and obedience, not a doctorate in theology. We haven’t grasped that it really is OK for us to be who we are when we are with seekers, even if we don’t have all the answers to their questions or if our knowledge of Scripture is limited.

But there is a deeper problem here. Our uneasiness with non-Christians reflects our uneasiness with our own humanity. Because we are not certain about what it means to be human (or spiritual, for that matter), we struggle in relating naturally, humanly to the world (22-23).

[T]o share the gospel we must share out life, our very selves. If we don’t grasp that Christ has freed us to be authentic, we will see evangelism as a project instead of a lifestyle. And we will tend to see non-Christians more as objects of our evangelistic efforts than as authentic persons. . . . Evangelism involves taking people seriously, getting across to their island of concerns and needs, and then sharing Christ as Lord in the context of our natural living situations (28).

In Jesus . . . we have our model for how to relate to the world, and it is a model of openness and identification. Jesus was a remarkably open man. . . . We must learn, then, to relate transparently and genuinely to other because that is God’s style of relating to us. . . . We must open our lives enough to let people see that we too laugh and hurt and cry (30).