Reading: 6.1—Life with God

Skill 6: Leaving a Gospel Footprint

This final skill, Leaving a Gospel Footprint, emerges from a transferrable concept that occurred to me a few years ago. Much has been said in recent years about a so-called carbon footprint. According to the Nature Conservancy (www.nature.org), “A carbon footprint is the total amount of greenhouse gases (including carbon dioxide and methane) that are generated by our actions. The average carbon footprint for a person in the United States is 16 tons.” A notion popped into my head, “What if we left a Gospel footprint wherever we go?” Using the quote from the Nature Conservancy as a template, we might end up with something such as this, “A Gospel footprint is the total amount of Gospel influence (including word, deed, attitude, behavior, etc.) that is generated by our actions.”

What do you suppose is the average Gospel footprint for an evangelical in the United States? I’m going to make an assumption and venture a guess, based on several decades of working with evangelical pastors, leaders, and congregations, that the average Gospel footprint for an evangelical in the U.S. is small, perhaps significantly small. I don’t have a metric or a means of measurement in this regard, but let’s just think about this in general terms. Consider these questions: What is the relationship between epidemic plateau and decline in the American evangelical church and the likelihood that the average Gospel footprint for an evangelical in the U.S. is small? What if, through prayerful vision, strategy, training, and implementation, this average Gospel footprint could be expanded by a factor of 2 or 5 or 10 or even 20? The Nature Conservancy is advocating for a decrease in the carbon footprint, but we’re going in the other direction, praying and working toward an exponential increase in the Gospel footprint. As Paul instructs and inspires in Ephesians 6, “Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and, as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace,” (Ephesians 6:14-15). Let’s get our Gospel shoes on and move into the harvest with a readiness given by the Gospel of peace, leaving Gospel footprints everywhere we go.

6.1 Life WITH God: To leave a Gospel footprint, pastors and leaders must make personal spiritual formation a priority. The truth is that you can’t take someone to a place you haven’t been or to a place you have been before but drifted away from since. If your calling and intention is to flood the harvest with the Gospel, you must be immersed in the Gospel yourself, right now, not way back when. One challenge for the evangelical Great Commission pastor or leader is to get so invested in the mission of reaching the community that the mission itself becomes an idol. The effective Great Commission pastor or leader will remain plugged into the vine (John 15), living life with God and not just a life for God. 

At the GO Center, we feature an approach to revitalization that is built on two platforms: Spiritual Renewal with Strategic Initiative. We highly recommend one book resource that connects with each of these platforms. Granted, many books might qualify to serve these roles, but it’s unproductive to overload leaders with too many resources, so we narrowed the field to one each. For Strategic Initiative we recommend Simple Church: Returning to God’s Process for Making Disciples by Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger (mentioned earlier) and, for Spiritual Renewal, our selection is With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God by Skye Jethani. Here’s a peek at With:

Wrong ways to relate to God:

Life Under God – win favor and control God by combining rituals and morality.

Life Over God – God, the watchmaker, wound the watch; we understand and control.

Life From God – we believe in a God who exists to satisfy our consumer desires.

Life For God – we live to accomplish his mission, however we define it, doing before being.

Right way to relate to God:

Life With God: The LIFE WITH GOD posture is at the core of the cosmos: God the Father with

God the Son with God the Holy Spirit…God himself came to be with us – to walk with us once again

as he had done in Eden in the beginning. Jesus entered into our dark existence to share our broken

world and to illuminate a different way forward. His coming was a sudden and glorious catastrophe

of good (With: Jethani. p. 101).

I’m not so sure about the use of word “catastrophe.” I might have gone with something such as “cataclysmic,” but I get it. The coming of Jesus changed everything and the key is to abide in Him because He is the vine and we are the branches (John 15, again). For the branch to live it must be connected to its source of nutrition, and that is the vine, Jesus Christ who is the Son of God and God the Son. Life WITH God, life WITH Jesus through the power and agency of God the Holy Spirit, is where the action is, and life WITH God is essential to church revitalization.

FYI: If you have or know of another book that serves this purpose and prefer to go with it, by all means do so, but, if we’re talking armor, With is my weapon of choice.

Here’s another question to consider: If your life is NOT with God in this abiding sense, who or what is your life with? You’re abiding in something or someone whether you realize it or not, and it might be good to identify what that something or who that someone is. What is influencing your life and ministry, and where is that influence coming from? What or who is feeding your mind, your heart, your soul, and what fruit is that influence producing? Remember: we’re focusing on leaving a Gospel footprint. Is the footprint you’re leaving a Gospel footprint or is it something else?

Let’s look at a couple of examples. Example 1: What’s influencing me? One strong influence in our culture today is, well, our culture. It seems that the slippery slope of ethics, morality, sexuality, and values in general that our culture tiptoed onto back in the 60s and 70s is now a full-scale avalanche. Its presence is virtually inescapable and, like moving water, is bound to erode even the strongest rocks. What was unthinkable not that long ago has passed through being permissible to being prevalent and is now vying to be the norm. Let’s call that a secular culture footprint. To what degree are those footprints influencing and impacting you? Is there still a defined black and white in your worldview or is more and more disappearing into the gray?

Example 2: How are you influencing others? Consider your life outside of typical church involvement, life in the community, life in the harvest. Is the Gospel being seen in you as you move through your day, week, month, year? Are you leaving Gospel footprints? To be clear, I’m not talking about pounding people with your Bible and leaving Gospel bruises in the community. I’m talking about your mindset in your interaction with people, your prayer preparation for whom you might engage on a given day, your providential availability to be used by God in various ways to bring light into darkness. 

OK – let me run a risk here and dive a little deeper into this idea of providential availability. What exactly is providence? I’m going to lean on Dr. Wayne Grudem for a reasonably tight working definition. In his Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, he writes:

We may define God’s providence as follows: God is continually involved with all created things in such a way that he (1) keeps them existing and maintaining the properties with which he created them; (2) cooperates with created things in every action, directing their distinctive properties to cause them to act as they do; and (3) directs them to fulfill his purposes…Under the general category of providence we have three subtopics, according to the three elements in the definition above: (1) Preservation, (2) Concurrence, and (3) Government (Systematic Theology: Grudem, p. 315). 

With this backdrop I want to move in closer to (2) Concurrence. Regarding Concurrence, Grudem adds, “God cooperates with created things in every action, directing their distinctive properties to cause them to act as they do,” (Systematic Theology: Grudem, p. 317). My observation is folks often mistake coincidence for providence. Someone will say, “I ran into so-and-so at Starbucks the other day. It was providential.” Hmmm…was it providential? I think probably not. More likely it was coincidental that these two people, who happened to know each other, both decided to go to the same Starbucks at the same time. To me, this is random, purposeless; just one of those things. By this standard, virtually every movement of every person throughout every day would be providential; spiritual micro-management. While in a general sense, nothing falls outside of God’s sovereignty or His providence, for that matter, I don’t think this is what the providence of Concurrence is about. 

My sense is that true providence engages God’s specific purpose. So, for example, let’s say that God is moving in the heart and mind of someone who is still lost in the harvest, beginning to draw him or her to Himself, to the faith. That person decides to go to a particular Starbucks on a particular day at a particular time. Meanwhile, in another lane, a solid person of faith has been routinely praying for opportunities to engage with people on a spiritual level, has prepared to do so with training of various kinds, and has developed something of a track record of having such conversations. That person decides to go to the same Starbucks on the same day at the same time and finds himself, finds herself, standing next to the person being drawn by God toward the faith. With spiritual antennae up, a spiritual vibe is picked up, and a brief conversation begins. Maybe that leads to sitting down at one of the small tables to talk further, maybe that leads to a decision to get together another time, or maybe that leads to exchanging contact info, or who knows what else. That, in my mind, is providence at work. It’s intentional, it’s strategic; it’s purposeful.

Now, let’s get back to providential availability. I want to make an analogy, here, that considers sanctification. God, of course, through His Holy Spirit, does the heavy lifting when it comes to our sanctification. However, we have a volitional role to play, and we contribute to our own sanctification either positively or negatively, depending on our commitment to our growth and maturity. We work with God, or we work against God as He sanctifies us. Similarly, we have a volitional role to play in providence. We can contribute to being used by God providentially either positively or negatively, depending on our commitment. In the case of our Starbucks examples, the positive and the negative are on display. Positively, our solid person of faith, in life WITH God fashion, intentionally committed to engaging in the harvest and went to Starbucks in anticipation of, perhaps, God’s providentially providing such an opportunity. Our other Starbucks-goer, however, simply went to Starbucks for a beverage and ran into an acquaintance.

All this is to say that we have the capacity to make ourselves providentially available, providentially useful, through prayer, through intentional preparation, through practice, and through moving through life with the spiritual antennae up. Common sense tells us that God will use such a person to bring about his purposes providentially. This concept can scale up to engaging a congregation generally in its ministry in the harvest, and the congregation that is providentially available will be providentially used as it leaves Gospel footprints all across a community. This is a church that God will use to grow His kingdom.

Jethani’s book, With, cautions against doing over being. However, to pit these against each other creates a false dilemma. It’s not doing or being; it’s doing and being. More appropriately, it’s being then doing such that our doing emerges from our being with God, the productivity of the branch’s abiding in the vine. 

Leaving a Gospel Footprint is founded on life WITH God as true followers abide in Christ as the basis of their being and intentionally make themselves providentially useful as the basis of their doing.