"The mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations but has now been revealed." (Col. 1:26)

Running with the Wrights: In praise of mission tinkering

On this 100th anniversary of flight, let us praise these famous Wrights who, incidentally and unintentionally, model some outstanding missional thinking. We have more to learn from them than flight. A Knight Ridder article on the Wright brothers positively sparkles with mission-relevant thinking, creativity and ingenuity.

For instance: "While some would-be aviators had lifelong obsessions with flight, the Wright brothers were mainly intrigued by the technical problems of flight that had baffled others...They weren't in love with the idea of flying. They were in love with the idea of solving the engineering problem. It's what they lived for."

God did the preposterous: sending his son Jesus on a single-focused mission into a shockingly different culture than that found at the right hand of God in heaven. It just hadn't been done before, and it was what Christ lived for. Being faithful to our missionary God means that we, too, are called to think preposterously out-of-the-box to address problems in our world that have baffled others. We're called to fix our minds on mission tinkering, whether it's on problems on our block or around the world.

Some of our best missional strategists will be tinker-thinkers who don't approach the problem in the "usual" way. They may be those not so much in love with the idea of mission per se, but rather in love with the idea of overcoming particularly challenging social ills such as garbage-dump ghettos and outcaste groups. They may be in love with the idea of how to make the gospel relevant across huge barriers of resistant religions and cultures. They may be in love with the idea of tackling immense presuppositions about the way things are supposed to be that would keep people away from Christ.

By their unorthodox thinking about the orthodox faith, these mission tinkerers will succeed at freeing entire cultures into new, stunning eras of spiritual and community "flight.' It's an awe-inspiring thing to witness an indigenous church being born in an unreached culture - kind of like seeing that first flight at Kitty Hawk, I imagine. Churches involved with the PCUSA Frontier Mission Program and Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship get to be in on that kind of joyful discovery. It's unlike any other.

The Knight Ridder article notes that in June 1903, Orville wrote to a friend: "Isn't it astonishing that all these secrets have been preserved for so many years just so we could discover them!"

Like that, amazing contributions for the global church can be unlocked from tribes and cultures and people as they are given the good news of Jesus Christ and salvation in him and then develop their own vital understandings and applications of faith. What a privilege it is to be able to be an agent of God's discovery team - helping new human communities "take flight" after receiving the good news of the gospel, "the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations but has now been revealed." (Col. 1:26)

After unlocking the secrets of flight, the Wright brothers created the first airplane factory, the first airport and first flight school. Think of all the successive inventions that followed their breakthrough - instrumentation, beacons, enclosed cockpits, jet engines, Boeing 747s, even flight to the moon!

Missional followers of Christ today are on that same flight path. There are first partnerships for unreached people groups to be formed, first missionary initiatives, first believers to be won to faith, first congregations to be formed. And on and on: first indigenous pastor training opportunities, first ordinations, first missionaries sent out from a newly formed church... We need congregations captivated with the Wright brothers' audacity.

On this 100th anniversary of flight, let us praise tinkering mission-thinkers who will give flight to tomorrow's mission breakthroughs.

-- Dave Hackett