“Passion for Jesus and Compassion for People” was the mission statement of a church I helped to plant in Edmonton. This mission was a concise expression of the kind of person I most wanted to be in my late teens and early twenties. In everything I did, and in every way I expressed myself, I sought to communicate that one ideal. It remains an important bellwether for me and I think it stands up as a helpful articulation of the gospel call for the Christian church as a whole.
Part of why I like this statement is its unambiguous Christology. Without some conviction that Jesus is the embodiment of God (or at least uniquely revealing of God), it would be impossibly tempting to change the phrase so that it might read, “Passion for God…” That it reads “Jesus” rather than “God” is, for me, an important feature. The Christian church is not a collection of theists, but rather a collection of people who have been called out by Jesus to share in his Great Work, namely, his self-emptying love of the world. This self-emptying love means making a choice to identify with the poor and the victimized even if it comes at a steep personal cost. As the Apostle Paul says, the self-emptying love of Christ ought to lead us, his followers, into self-emptying lives of faith (Philippians 2:1-11). It is into this kind of life that we are baptized, and so it seems important to me that the Christian faith be articulated with reference to Jesus, our leader and the one on whom we depend for guidance and grace. For it is in living anew through the death of Christ (Romans 6:1-5) that the church can become a sacrament in the world, the embodiment of God’s compassion and love for all people.