Bray-Missionaries.org: At 60 the Horizon Starts to Change

By Dr. Bill Bray

As I turn 60, the horizon is changing a lot faster than it used to. The colors are deeper and richer. I not only treasure each day; I think about legacy, and not just to my own children and grandchildren. This is a year of celebration but I’m still far from ready to declare it a personal "Feast of Tabernacles"!

The old "prophet-writer" in me still yearns to churn out more and better media messages; the "apostle-missionary" in me still wants to gather more souls to Christ. However, neither goal satisfies my full spiritual longings at this point in the journey.

I sense a stronger obligation now to extend God's rule both further and deeper into the culture—and the surreptitious style of "Jesus the Coming King" makes a lot more sense to me in a world where "faith" divides as often as it unites.

As a result, on my birthday weekend, I laid out six "lifestyle" themes or resolutions to guide my thinking in the years ahead. Hopefully, this changed thinking will lead me to live more as Jesus did. It is a worldview alien not only to the American way—but to my past ways of confrontational ministry. (In the natural, I'm still prone to be more like Peter the activist or Paul the propagandist.)

These "lifestyle" themes are deeply Biblical yet they are not the comfortable "church-talk" or "playbook" responses which are such clichés in the world of organized religion.

I share them because like all good vows, they require witnesses to work! Plus, I cannot walk this path alone. God never intended us to attempt his way of life solo.

So here's my "Six at 60":

First, may God help me to better recognize his sacred, intended order in our universe and the world in which he has commanded us to occupy and prevail.
Second, may God help me create spiritual environments where transformation can take place without dictating formulas—even the good, religious ones that I have grown accustomed to over the last 40 years of ministry.
Third, may God help me live and work with people based on discovering new relationships of mutual trust and understanding.
Fourth, may God help me heal and reconcile the fragmentation around me and enter into unions with others that create general and specific solutions to problems I have tried to tackle all my life—endemic problems like disease, exploitation, hunger and homelessness.
Fifth, may God help me to maintain a balance between a vision of the whole design and the functionality of the parts.
Sixth, may God help me to more fully recognize and fulfill the dynamics of service within the family and political orders that God has ordained to bring healing, justice and salvation to the poor, the hurting, and the powerless.

In other words, I want to better bear his light in this world. By his grace, I want to do this more fully than before; in ways that attract and reveal the Light to those still in darkness. What I'm talking about is doing missions in a new and larger way, entering doors and principalities which we usually write off as taboo or impossibly shut. Yet no gate is shut to us. Christ promised to open doors that dark forces have shut tight.

Can I make this journey alone? Absolutely not, I repeat—isolation is not His way. I am believing and praying for others to join me on this next stage of my spiritual journey.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Dr. Bill Bray has been a journalist, missionary and humanitarian since 1966. He turned 60 on February 23, 2007.

Tax-deductible contributions for the support of Bill & Ivy's Missionary Ministry may be given online, or should be sent to CIS, INC. MISSIONS, P.O. Box 6511, Charlottesville, VA 22906. THANK YOU.