This past Sunday we had our first meeting in preparation for our Shelby Crossings mission trip to the Central American nation of Belize this summer. There will be seventeen of us going, including twelve adults and five youth, and we are excited about the opportunity to represent our church body in sharing Jesus and serving others in His name.

We talked Sunday about the fact that we will be traveling to a Third World country, where conditions will certainly be less than ideal, at least compared to our standards of comfort here in the U.S. We were also reminded in our meeting that since we will be going on a mission trip to a foreign country, by definition we will be "missionaries." You know, as in "Lord, bless the missionaries." So I hope you will join us in praying even now, 80 days before we leave, that the Lord will bless our trip, and that He will be preparing the way and opening doors for our ministry there.

Which brings me to the Blues Brothers. (Nice segue there, don't you think?)

Many of you probably remember, Jake and Elwood Blues, the fictitious characters who had their beginnings on Saturday Night Live back in the 1970's. Dan Ackroyd and the late John Belushi brought those characters to life as blues musicians, and though the band started out as more of a skit and a parody, their music was pretty good. Later, they decided to cash in on their popularly and recorded an album, which reached number one on the Billboard charts in 1978. Then they took it a step further, turning their characters into a movie, and in 1980 "The Blues Brothers" hit the big screen.

Full disclosure, I never saw the movie, mainly because of its R-rating, but I did hear quite a bit about it, including the one catch-line of the whole flick: "We're on a mission from God."

Apparently, the story line of the movie was--and consider this your spoiler alert if you haven't seen it yet in the 42 years since it came out--after Jake Blues got out of prison for armed robbery, he made his brother Elwood take him straight to the orphanage where they had grown up, so that he could fulfill a promise to visit the nun who had raised them. There they found out that unless the orphanage came up with a large amount of money to pay back taxes, it would have to close its doors. So the Blues brothers made a promise to get the money, though the nun assumed they would resort to their previous life of crime to obtain it. Instead, they got their old band back together and staged a big concert in hopes of raising the money. They ran into plenty of trouble along the way, and plenty of high-jinks ensued. Along the way, when they had to overcome obstacles, each time they reminded themselves, "We're on a mission from God."

Everybody wants to have a mission, a sense of purpose, a calling to fulfill. A reason to persevere in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. The Blues Brothers had a mission, and we will too when we head to Belize in July. But the truth be told, all of us, as followers of Jesus, have also been given "a mission from God" to reach out to our world with the love of Christ and share the life-changing hope of the gospel. In that light, each of us, when we wake up in the morning and pray for the missionaries, can include ourselves among that group.

Theologian Emil Brunner famously said, "The church exists by missions, just as fire exists by burning." He was saying that a church that is not "on mission" is like a fire that is not burning. In other words, there's no such thing; whatever it is, it's not really being a church. When we cease to be missional in our theology and our methodology, in how we think and in what we do, then we stop functioning as the New Testament church. We're merely a social club, interested only in our own comfort and well-being. However, one of the key things that truly makes us a church is that "we're on a mission from God."

I am excited about the opportunities ahead of us in Belize this summer, just as I am the weekly opportunities we have in our own community to share the love of Jesus and point people to Him. "Lord, bless the missionaries"...even if that includes all of us. I'm praying for you, as I hope you are for me, and I look forward to seeing you on Sunday.

--Pastor Ken