Mission Shaper

Fill up your heavenly home, Lord,
Incarnate love for those driven by world-weight purposes
Further towards the cliff's bone-grey edge;
Flesh out our mission to become your body;
Melt us into grace for broken citizens
No longer dithering between departure gates
But sitting in the lounge where you're tuned off the tannoy.

Right where he stands, defiant,
Where she despairs of meaning,
Aching without alignment,
Raging at betrayals
And hypocrisies,
Send us robed in the humility of all we share
With every neighbour dechurched,
To reveal the vulnerable whisper at the heart of hopeless,
Jesus, among his own.


We need to be your oil-stained, water-puckered fingers
Baptising into radiance the flaked exhaustion of consumer chaos.
Long we looked away, pious and uncomforted
Tongues locked against repent
Ritualled in our culture
Charity disembodied, compassionless,
Guarding our arches and blue carpets
Against His own,
Afraid we might leak out
And be found threadbare as scarecrows in the living field.
Harvesting with blunted blades,
Hearts on our personal rockets to rapture,
Pushing outsiders (for surely, wasn't that their name?)
To the front pew (or chair, if we'd lost that age-old fight)
If ever they braved a way in
To bewilder and keep them alien and safely peregrine.

Father, forgive; Merciful Lord, have mercy
On us, confessors and professors of your radical journey,
That we have mapped it static
With our dowager's hump of stubborn rooted pride.

Now teach us who count you creator, Saviour,
The obedient walk on your light-drenched, narrow path,
Not past our neighbours to holy huddledom,
But to kneel where we always knew they were,
When our eyes were averted from wandering loved ones
For whom their Lover Lord weeps and waits and longs.