Come Further Up! Come Further Out!

“I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here.
This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.
The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this.
Bree-hee-hee!
Come further up, come further in!”
– Jewel the Unicorn –
The Last Battle – C.S. Lewis

The simple invitation uttered throughout the final chapters of the Chronicles of Narnia series’ last book has long been a beautiful invitation to consider a new world. Through vivid imagery and imaginative descriptions, Lewis pictures a world beyond Narnia, a “deeper country” where everything “means more.” His protagonists are invited to explore this new country by coming further up and further in. For Lewis, this is his picture of what the New Heavens and New Earth will be; a heaven and earth like this one, but transformed into something deeper and weightier, where we will spend eternity exploring a new world. Many readers, myself included, have had their imaginations captured by Lewis’s simple yet profound invitation. We long for the day to begin “Chapter One of the Great Story…which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

And yet, while we await that new world to come, Christians find themselves presently caught in the tension of the now & not yet. Theologians have often referred to this reality as inaugurated eschatology. In one sense, the new world has been inaugurated by Jesus’ crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. For those in Christ are after all New Creations (2 Corinthians 5:17). And yet, we are awaiting the day when the Kingdom will be consummated and full redemption is realized for both us and all creation (Romans 8:23). And so, we live in the tension of the now and not yet, with an invitation to begin to experience now what will ultimately come to be.

But why are we left in this tension? Scripture points time and again that it is for the sake of the mission of God (Matthew 24:14, Acts 1:8, 2 Peter 3:9). That is, for the purpose of the gospel going forth to all peoples so that all have an opportunity to respond to the invitation of God to be part of His New Creation. The church exists for the sake of God’s mission. As OT Scholar Christopher Wright notes, ” [I]t is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world, but that God has a church for his mission in the world. Mission was not made for the church; the church was made for mission—God’s mission.”

Therefore, the church exists in the already-not-yet Kingdom for the sake of God’s Mission of redemption. This reality, mixed with C.S. Lewis’ imaginative invitation, has inspired the title of this blog and website. For a while in the world to come, we are invited to come further up and further in. In our present reality, I believe we are invited to come further up and further out. Or, to put it in the invitational words of Jesus, to Love God and Love Others. It is this amazing intersection between theology and missiology, between loving God and loving others, between thinking deeply and living misionally, between being in the world but not of the world, between culture and the church, between…well, I think you get the idea I want to explore here. And I hope that whatever this site becomes, it will help us all to Love God more and live more intentionally for His mission in the world.

So, fellows traveler, I invite you to come further up and come further out!