Matt and Michelle Norman
CBF Field Personnel, Spain
Baptist theologian Paul Fiddes has been a major influence in my (Matt) life as I reflect on what it means to practice my faith as mission. The context that Michelle and I minister in here in Barcelona is very relational. We often find ourselves having conversations about life, hopes, fears, God and Christianity over coffee or a meal. Meals here in Spain can take hours as one is expected to sit, eat and then enjoy each other in conversation called sobre mesa, translated as “around the table.”
At the core of most of the ministry that we do—whether with immigrant and refugee mothers and their children, giving food to people in need, coming alongside pastors as they seek to help their churches engage their local communities, developing trainings for church leaders and pastors who lack access to theological training, engaging in our community group, or simply reimagining what church looks like in such a secular, post-Christian society at our Mosaic ministry—is a focus on developing relationships.
When I reflect theologically on why building relationships seems to be at the core of all we do, Fiddes offers helpful insight. He observes that the theological idea of the Trinity helps to define what it means to be a person created in God’s image. Personhood becomes something tied to relationship. Being a person means having a distinct identity, an otherness that only makes sense relationally. Fiddes says that God is best described as an “event of relationships,” and “not as three individual subjects who have relationships.” Fiddes expounds, “Talk about God as an ‘event of relationships’ is not, therefore, the language of a spectator, but the language of a participant. It only makes sense in terms of our involvement in the network of relationships in which God happens.”
The significance of this perspective from Fiddes is that it helps one understand ministry as sharing oneself with another as God does within Godself. We find relationship at the core of all that we do here in Spain because God is relational. In the Trinity, we see God giving Godself to the world in ministry. Our missional call is to participate in this ministry by sharing who we are and by inviting others to share who they are as well. In so doing, transformation happens as God, present and ministering, helps us all become who we are created to be. This transformation is our hope here in Spain.