About Dynamis

We don’t just need good ideas in order to live God’s way. We need God’s life and God’s power. We have the joyous privilege of participating in the coming of God’s kingdom on earth. This participation requires more than our dedication and zeal, more than money and skill–it requires God’ s power to be at work in and through us.

Dynamis is one of the words in the New Testament for “power”. The Holy Spirit empowers us to live in Christ and walk in God’s will. God will not call us to do anything–without giving us the capacity to do it.  Participation in God’s mission not simply the strenuous effort to obey God’s will by our own discipline and resolve.  Rather it is our joyous participation in God’s life by the Spirit. The focus shifts off of us and what we’re supposed to do–and on to God, what God is doing, and how God is empowering us to participate in it.

The power of the Spirit penetrates and propels us to share in God’s love transforming the world.

The Early Church Fathers described the inter-relationship between the Three Persons of the Trinity: Father, Son and Spirit as each so interpenetrating the other that this create their Oneness.  Similarly, they explained that the Divine and Human Natures in Jesus Christ we’re interwoven so that they couldn’t be divided or mixed. At the heart of God’s creation is this Divine Dance, the interpenetrating and interweaving of God’s nature and ours in the bond of love.

The transformation of our lives and world is God’s work and God’s mission–not our own.  However, we have the joyous privilege of participating in it.  The truth is, the People of God don’t have a mission in the world. The God of Mission has us, as God’s People, in the world.

To walk with Christ by the Spirit is to participate in the “divine dance of love”. God invites us to walk together as we see signs of God’s Kingdom penetrate every aspect of the world. The following pages are filled with resources to help followers of Christ participate more fully, freely and joyfully in God’s great work in the world.

About the author:

Tim Dearborn:  Forty years ago my wife and I had a conversation with a man in the Swiss Alps that could have changed my life. When we asked him what he had done before retiring, he said, “The same thing as now. I am a man with a friend. That’s my job, that’s my reason for living, that’s the justification of my life. Who is my friend? My friend is Jesus.” In him we encountered an invitation to an identity shaped by God rather than by us, and a purpose focused on loving God and other people through God, rather than focused on ourselves and our attempts to do things for God.

In the decades since that encounter, I’ve journeyed the more common, self-made path to define who I am—focused on roles, responsibilities and results. I’ve had the privilege of serving as a pastor of a church; professor of theology, mission and social ethics for Seattle Pacific University, Fuller Seminary, Regent College, the University of Aberdeen and the Faculte de Theologie Evangelique in Paris; staff member of World Vision US, and for ten years with World Vision International. I’ve had the privilege of more education than I could live through a PhD in Theology from the University of Aberdeen, a Masters in missiology from Fuller Seminary, a Masters in Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam from Harvard Divinity School, and a degree in history from Whitman College.

I now find myself returning to that conversation with Herr Heiniger. My attention is drawn to learning how to live in the love of our God, Father, Son and Spirit; and how to enjoy being immersed in the messiness of life as God seeks to love others through me. I may have a PhD in the theology of grace, but am continually learning how to allow grace to move from my head to my heart.

My prayer for you is that you would not have to wait forty years to catch up with the good wisdom of Herr Heiniger. It is the truth which our world is dying to know.

Tim Dearborn can be contacted at dynamisresources@gmail.com

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