Our Place in this World
Take the time to read John 17, a prayer of Jesus.
Throughout the chapter, Jesus repeatedly differentiates his disciples from what he calls “the world.” The difference, Jesus maintains, is one of belonging. The disciples are different because they belong to Jesus, not the world, and therefore strive to not conform to the world’s values. Even though Christians do in fact conform to the world’s values sometimes is beside the point. In the eyes of Jesus, what makes his disciples different is not first and foremost how they live (though it is very important), it’s to whom they belong. Another way of saying this is that Christian identity is always positive; we’re defined by what we are – people who find their identity in Christ – not by what we are not.
This positive way of framing the difference between Christians and non-Christians is a helpful reminder that we are to have a positive influence on the world and not have a passive, ‘I don’t care’ attitude and seclude ourselves from the world.

New Testament scholar, Richard Bauckham, summarizes this approach: “The way of Jesus’ followers is the way of Jesus himself – the Jesus of the Gospels who moved freely wherever his love was needed, compromising himself in the eyes of the holier-than-thou, but disturbing and attracting precisely by being so positively different from the ordinary way of the world. To belong to Jesus requires the courage to be different, to be like Jesus, actually for the sake of the world. And to belong to Jesus sets us free to be in the world, where people need us, where God needs us, without succumbing to the false gods to whom too many in our societies are enslaved.”

Summarizing these thoughts I believe our mission can simply put this way:
We are to –
Seek, See, and Be Jesus; Here, There, and Everywhere.

Love in Christ,

Pastor Dan