Part 4 of A 10 Part Series By Rev Kurauone Mutimwii - (Uniting Presbyterian Church - Masvingo)
Crisis Of Capacity
Mark 6:36 "Send them away, that they may go into the surrounding country andS villages and buy themselves bread; for they have nothing to eat.”
6:37 "But He answered and said to them, “You give them something to eat.” And they said to Him, “Shall we go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread and give them something to eat?”
******
The disciples looked at the multitudes and saw that it would cost all their savings to address them but could not possibly believe that even Christ would help them.
Capacity is about containment, and the ability to accomodate, carry, and put in more.
It is also about the art and skill of packaging and fitting in more.
Capacity is about creating more room, more space and embracing the inclusivity in leadership.
Besides the crisis of compassion, the Church is in another crisis of capacity.
The Church does not think it has adequate room, enough to carry and contain the people and their plightful issues.
That time when we looked at how the Church, deficient of compassion turns away desperate people and prevents them from fully enjoying the privilege of being invited into the presence of Christ, to partake and share in the life and blessing of Christ.
The Church often does that not necessarily because it wants a monopoly on Christ but because it is overwhelmed by a deep sense of incapacity to contain and address the needs of these people.
The Church would rather opt for a smart move to stay clean and abstained from the responsibility of addressing the needs of the people than to risk its failure and expose its incapacity.
Incapacity renders the Church missionally incompetent and irrelevant, and who in a right mind would risk something that can quickly turn you expendable if you fail to deliver.
The Church wants to be relevant as an institution of social importance deserving audience and to be consulted in the input of public decisions or policies and for quite some time it has been clamouring and lobbying for that space.
The Church argue about, its mission, its mandate and its constituency in the country as compelling reasons enough to accord it a place of respect, big brother, patron/matron and relevance, yet in its response to the various needs of the people, it shies away, distances itself away from the hyper sensitive needs of the people for fear of failing to deliver on account of its lack of Capacity.
In as much as it is clamoring for such recognition as a relevant entity in the national space, the Church is overwhelmed by the strong detrimental sense of being underresourced and deficient of the capacity to fully accomodate people and address wholistically, the issues bedevelling the nation politically, economically and spiritually.
The Church would rather go before God to bemoan and express its intention to abscond from the viral issues of the people, than to pray for means and courage to face them.
Probably it is because it has no guts, the courage and the brevity to stand for what is right, stand alongside what is marginalized, or endangered and what must be done to stir the country into the right direction.
The Church perceives that is not united enough, without one voice and cannot adequately confront the elements of oppression and fight as one front.
The Church staggering with the burden of incapacity is actually very instrumental in hindering the desire of Christ from being fulfilled because it always projects its incapacity to do what God wills for his people.
When Christ invites those people into his presence to offer them solutions to in their desperation, refuge in Him, to carry their burdens or give them rest, and to give them something to eat, then his beloved Church of Disciples would be busy beseeching him to send the people away and praying them away.
Because when the moment comes for the Church to provide leadership to the Congregation of the vulnerable, as always, the Church stammers, cannot speak up, wraps itself up in complicated unreachable theological concepts, and the church find itself under - resourced to give them something to eat, other than the Church sending people away to carter for themselves.
We have been part of that Church that never said or did something courageous enough to make a resounding impact, when people were being killed in political violence, when they were displaced and denied equity in economical violence and when they were denied justice in constitutional violence.
When they gathered around our Lord Jesus Christ, we were there in our theological reflections, presenting our academic thesis but at most praying them away and urging our Lord to send them away because we could not help them at all.
This is probably an unfortunate outcome of the Church is reading its relevance from a wrong script and building its capacity from a wrong manual, a script and manual fashioned by the elements of this world from which it becomes obvious that the Church will dismally fail execute out with perfection.
If the Church is to provide shepherdlike leadership that can, it must always be consciously aware that the immortalized relevance and capacity of the Church is Christ composed, manualised and scripted.
It oozes out the word, mind, heart, will and action of Christ in this world and that script is the one the Church must roll out when confronted with the difficult situations of the people.
The Christ script that will demand the Disciples to take up their crosses Christ even through situations they must put their heads of the block of martydom.
I must admit that these are deep ends of the terrain, frontiers only the few are willing to tread and in most cases, the Church cannot risk skating on such thin ice when it is not prepared to walk on water.
Jesus Christ response and biggest lesson to the disciples (Church) faced with a multitude of hungry, everwaiting, desperate people was to challenge those disciples (Church) never to send people converged around the presence of Christ without giving them something to eat.
I must suppose that Jesus Christ knew that the Church is capable of securing food to feed those people and it must do that in obedience to the mandate from Christ.
The Church, by doing that would rekindle a new and dynamic way in which people expresss their faith and belief in God who constantly prove to them that He is able to do exceedingly abundant, beyond their dried up imaginations and aspirations.
It is the duty of the Church to practically proclaim to those seeking hope, that great God of the Church can turn around their situations, reconfigure their destinies and rebuild their aspirations.
That when a Nation are converged around God, all things are possible, nothing becomes something, lack becomes abundance, less becomes more, tests becomes testimonies and the worst becomes the best. Shepherdlike Leadership must equip and empower people with capacity to believe that in the presence of God, they can transform their respective communities and saturate it with hope.
The Church must never send people away back to their homes before or without feeding and empowering them this kind of food.
When the Church sends such satisfied people away, it is nolonger just diversion of responsibility but the missional commissioning of the hopeful who are being send out as fully equipped Agencies of transformation.
The Church do understand the basic socio political and economic possibilities and impossibilities around prevalent in our time.
She knows the cost it would take to fully address the situation at hand but one thing the Church is slowly losing touch and often not seriously considering is that She have Christ and is operating in obedience to his Call and commission.
Hear Oh Church, Jesus Christ commands us never to send people away before we give them something to eat.
No comments:
Write comments