PlowShear Partnership is a teaching and mentoring ministry to help church members discover their God-given vocations to serve Christ in the city and in the world (Acts 1:8).
Our priority in ministry is to develop a sense of partnership for all members of a church (Matthew 18:19-20) to serve together in works already prepared for them (Ephesians 2:10).
Our passion in ministry springs from seeing the Lord profoundly change lives in a multi-cultural church in New York City, bring to birth two daughter congregations from a long established church in the markedly unchurched Pacific Northwest, and plant both international and national churches in highly secular urban centers in France and Germany.
Our principle of ministry is illustrated by the plowshear, the leading edge of the plow. As it cleaves and cuts into hard ground, it pioneers in the advance of that plow, opens and brings up fresh soil for a new sowing of seed.
Even so, all the members of a local church can – in their partnership together, in their personal vocations, in their daily lives telling the gospel — pioneer in the advance of the Kingdom of God in a world now undergoing profound and dramatic change.
It reminds us how Jesus compared the vocation and work of a faithful plowman (Luke 9:62) to the single-minded servant of the King whose “kingdom of heaven is forcefully advancing” (Matthew 11:12, Philippians 2:10).
He spoke of that Kingdom reality as having broken into human history with his coming twenty centuries ago (Mark 1:15, Luke 11:20) – reality already, not yet finally disclosed. But declared by his atonement death on a cross and his bodily resurrection from the grave to be the Son of God, Jesus Christ now rules all creation.
The present age of conflicts, crises and so pervasive corruption must run its course – though God’s grace and mercy continue to bring about profound good, to enable great creative work, and to hold back total destruction. Yet the presence of the Kingdom continues to plowshear into the world and to fulfill God’s purpose for all creation – drawing men and women from all nations together into his church community for that day when all will stand before the Throne of God (Revelation 7:9, 21:3). When all will have come in – all who will complete that body of peoples — then he, the King, will come again and reign on a new earth and in a new creation.
Is not the cross of Christ the supreme sign of his plowshear work in human history? “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but for those who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2TxB857UTo
Contact: paasonen@gmail.com
Plowshear Partnership 