Between Already and Not Yet

I’ve been looking for prayers that go together with the Mission Stories DVD resource I’m working on, that help us with the transition into becoming compassionate and generous communities. Here’s one I’ve used a few times before, written by Terry Falla and published in Be Our Freedom, Lord.

Our God, you call us to be a community of change, to act with you in transforming the world into the community of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
Through his life and death you have shown us that to accomplish our mission you require us to live in the world but not of it;
That we cannot escape from the world and be faithful;
yet, neither can we be so enmeshed in the world that we lose our souls.
We confess, Lord, that we find your call to live simultaneously in this world and in your community,
to live all the time on the border and always risk disagreement and error, to be difficult and demanding.
Nevertheless, in the strength of your love, renewed by your grace, and confronted by your word, we commit ourselves to you as a people to whom you have given a peculiar memory –
A memory of being called continuously to leave where we are, and to go somewhere else and be someone else, a people never staying still or holding on to present understandings and ways.
We commit ourselves to you as a people to whom you have given a peculiar vision – a vision of a world not yet realised and yet already come;
A people from whom you demand dissatisfaction with life as it is, whom you haunt with the promise of a new age, and pull toward its fulfillment.
We commit ourselves to you as a community to whom you have given a peculiar hope – hope that gives meaning to life as a pilgrim people on a mission under the power and purpose of the gospel;
A hope that proclaims that persons and institutions can change,
that people and public orders can be transformed to embody more fully your will for justice, freedom, harmony, community, and peace.
We come in worship to praise you for your mercy which is more than our minds can measure,
to confess that we have wavered in our loyalty to you and to celebrate the presence of the risen Christ in our midst.
We come and we ask in the name of Jesus our saviour that you will judge our sin, shatter our complacency, speak to our fears, strengthen our resolve, and then send us into your world to discern and do your will.
Amen