Matthew 5:13

"5:13'You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot"

The point of being disciples /prophets of Christ is to act as a preservative of the good and disinfectant of the bad. Now I come to think of it I don't think I have seen any church's mission statement put in terms that seem to echo this saying; yet it seems to me that as the first characterisation that Jesus gives to a band of disciples [=church], we should perhaps take it rather more seriously. What would it mean to take being salt of the earth seriously? First it would mean identifying what was good about society and people around us and striving to hold onto what is good while attempting to resist and push back what is wrong. Just doing it with that attitude of looking for the good first would make such a difference to the killjoy/down-on-everyone image Christians so often have in popular culture. In evangelism too it would mean listening first and identifying what was good and what God was doing in people's lives and trying to make sure that we held on to that before trying to link it up with the good news instead of assuming by our very methodology that people are totally without the good and God in their lives. At the same time our lives must be fundamentally attesting to the goodness, justice and beauty of God otherwise we are merely presenting an ideology [ie a way of looking at things that justifies status quo] instead of a way of being. That's what it means to lose our saltiness, I think.

Crosswalk.com - Matthew 5:13 - 15: