The following is an older post from an older blog that came out of my trip last January to the Sundance Film Festival. I’m posting this series in anticipation of a new gathering our community is hosting later this summer around the medium of film (details coming soon).

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Being missional can seem so complicated at times. Don’t evangelize – embody. Don’t attract – incarnate. Don’t preach – narrate. Don’t segregate – integrate, and while you’re at it, feel free to congregate, as long as you don’t spectate. Whatever you do, don’t isolate yourself from culture, but while you’re busy engaging be sure not to capitulate. Don’t pursue your Christology at the expense of your Pneumatology or your theology won’t be Trinitarian enough for your ecclesiology. In which case, everything is just plain buggered.

Fortunately, we have friends to help us keep it all straight: Newbigin and Shenk, Roxbourgh and Gibbs, Allen and Wright (not that Wright, the other Wright), Bosch and Moltmann and Yoder and Volf and VanEngen. Missiology can’t seem to restrict itself to just one discipline, so, fortunately for us, nearly every theologian has something to say about it.

I’ve read these authors and more – and their insights are invaluable. But what if there’s less to mission, not more? What if “God is always at work” simply means, well, that God is always at work? Can we be both the subject and the object of mission, all at once, without even knowing it? Is this how Jesus could passively heal people at times, apparently without being directly engaged in the act himself?

In the span of seven minutes tonight I saw a little girl lose her front tooth, her older brother viciously ridicule her for it, her mother abandon the family, and her father drift into emotional oblivion. I also saw the miracle of silent repentance, compassion, redemption and hope caste entirely in a glance between the father and son, simply because the son, after all that ridicule, somehow decided to be the tooth fairy.

This is all depicted in the Angelus Award Winning short film “Small Change,” by Australian writer, director, and editor Anna McGrath. It’s an unassuming little film somehow full of innocence despite gloomy circumstances. Best of all, the straightforward story-line and frugal dialogue leave ample space for reflecting on the lingering impact of the human highs and lows portrayed in the film.

For example, there’s no possible way the older brother – only 11 years old – could possibly have planned the depth of redemption his random act of compassion would have. His anonymous gift liberated his sister toward joy and self-assurance, relieved and reassured his grieving father toward hope, and strengthened his own heart toward unselfishness and maturity.

He couldn’t possibly know he was doing God’s work.

Neither, it seems, did Anna McGrath. “Small Change” was a student project, fulfilling her film school requirements, and although cinema is her passion telling a story of redemption and human dignity apparently is not. In the film-makers Q&A tonight Miss McGrath talked about simply wanting to make a film about “losing a tooth,” and “a tooth fairy who forgets to show up.” In another interview on Youtube she expresses utter bewilderment that her film has actually touched people: “I never had the intention of Small Change to have the affect that it seems to have…”

She obviously didn’t know she was doing God’s work.

And yet, she was. By giving her gift to us Anna McGrath has hitched herself to the Holy Spirit like a sail unfurled might unwittingly catch the wind. Perhaps it was her spiritual posture, her humility that made her accessible to God, or simply her dumb luck to be in the right place at the right time when God decided to blow into the room and display random revelation through a seven-minute movie about about the tooth fairy.