What is your mission?
I am a first-generation immigrant pastor from Korea called to do God’s mission in the United States. Whenever I hear the word “mission,” I think about what I as a young boy saw from the TV series called Mission: Impossible, first aired in late 1960s and early 1970s in the US. I like its signature music. What impressed me most was the recorded message delivered to the agent: “Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to face your fate. Pursue us, you will be caught. Resist us, you will be killed.” And the last line of the message was the best: “This message will self-destruct in five seconds.” Boom! It is gone! I think the secrecy of the mission and the willingness of the agent to accept his or her own fate must have excited me. Do something by any means necessary and accomplish your mission!
I also think about a movie titled The Mission (1986). This is my favorite movie, and I like its signature music too. In this movie I learned about a real mission impossible that is to love (even to death). My favorite line is Father Gabriel’s response to his disciple, former Captain Mendoza. The latter decided to fight for the lives of the Guarani people he loved, while the former decided to die with them. Father Gabriel could not bless Brother Rodrigo as the latter decided to bear arms. He said, “If you die with blood in your hands, Rodrigo, then you betray everything we have done! You promised your life to God! AND GOD IS LOVE!” Let go of yourself and let God be your God!
I have been struggling between the message of the TV series Mission: Impossible and that of the movie The Mission. For I really want to accomplish something of my own accord, but at the end what I am called to do is to do nothing of my own volition.
There is an open secret that God is love and this message, whether recorded or not, does not need to be destroyed in order not to be shared with others. Sharing this open secret in our words and deeds is what our mission is all about. And there is another open secret that mission is not ours, but God’s. The Christian mission concerns this double open secret: that God is love and that mission is God’s mission.
The key for this double open secret is, of course, Jesus Christ. I can sing the following line confidently: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” But can I do the same with the following line? “Jesus sendsme, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
As we envision our mission within God’s mission in this pandemic era, I have found an old catch phrase of a Christian organization called Youth with a Mission (YWAM) helpful: “Know God and Make God Known.” God made Godself known to Abraham and his descendants, including Jesus Christ, and sent them to the world so that they could make God known. Those who know God and are sent to the world are witnesses. Read Isaiah 43:10-12 and 49:6b. The same reference you can find in the writings of Luke, that is, Luke 24:48 and Acts 1:8. In and through these witnesses who participate in God’s mission, “all nations will be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). According to Paul, this is “the gospel in advance” (Galatians 3:8) announced to Abraham. Just as Abraham was invited to do God’s mission, so we are invited too. And the good news is that this message will not self-destruct in five seconds. The invitation is still open to many.
What is my mission? To accept the invitation and to know God and make God known in the midst of the pandemic. What is your mission?
—Rev. Dr. Gun Ho Lee
Organizing Pastor
Korean Presbyterian Fellowship
Greenville, North Carolina, USA
Organizing Pastor
Korean Presbyterian Fellowship
Greenville, North Carolina, USA
A native of South Korea, Rev. Dr. Gun Ho Lee holds a Ph.D. in history (mission and ecumenism) from Union Presbyterian Seminary, Richmond, Virginia, specializing in the history of the World Council of Churches. He is particularly interested in articulating thenature and functions of the church in a religiously plural world from the perspective of God’s mission and developing partnership in God’s mission among congregations of different cultural backgrounds.