GraceStreet- a company of exiles

Good News

In Catch the Wind (1994) Australian theologian Charles Ringma offered this description:

“The missional church vision is not a programmatic response to the crisis of relevance, purpose and identity that the church in the Western World is facing, but a recapturing of biblical views of the Church all too frequently abandoned, ignored, or obscured through long periods of church history. It is a renewed theological vision of the church in mission, which redefines the nature, the mission and the organization of the local church around Jesus’ proclamation of the good news of the Kingdom. Missional Churches seek to respond to God’s invitation to join Him in His mission in and for the world, as a sign, a servant and a foretaste of His Kingdom.”

1. “not a programmatic response”  In contrast to many visions of church renewal or church growth, we must move beyond pragmatism. Missional church is not a solution for declining attendance or reduced giving. It is not a new outreach program, or indeed any kind of program at all, but rather a rediscovery and reappropriation of biblical views of the Church that have long been obscured. One implication is that we have some work to do to declutter and unlearn before we begin building.

2. “a renewed theological vision”  “Renewed,” not a new discovery but a reaching back to something that was lost. Missional church is a renewed theological vision of the church in mission, and primarily a recovery of biblical identity around the good news of God’s reign. As some scribe put it, (Bosch?) “it is not the Church of God that has a mission in the world, but the God of mission who has a Church in the world.” Our modern penchant to reduce the gospel to personal salvation or to the purpose of the church (as if mission were our possession) does an injustice to every theological category we know: Pneumatology, Christology, Soteriology, Missiology, Eschatology, Ecclesiology, Theology etc. The work of NT Wright and others in re-opening the discussion around the meaning of justification in the work of Paul and a reappropration of covenant language with reference to the gospel is helping us move beyond the narrative that has self at the center.

3. “church .. redefined.. around Jesus proclamation”  While mission precedes ecclesia (missio Dei) once the ball started rolling the movement is circular, interwoven like the double helix - church and mission. Church is “community in mission,” and mission produces shalom communities. But it is also critical to note that missio Dei means “Trinity-in-mission.” If we miss this piece we reinforce the cultural lens of individualism and then easily reinforce the privatist and dualist approach that is killing us. Here too “covenant” has a place.

4. “sign, servant and foretaste of His kingdom” Again, it is the kingdom that is primary. Jesus did not come preaching the Church of God. But here too there is reciprocity, and church and kingdom are neither identical nor separable. Who paints this picture better than Newbigin, with the Trinitarian lens: “The concern for mission is nothing less than this: the kingdom of God, the sovereign rule of the Father of Jesus over all humankind and over all creation. Mission.. is the proclamation of the kingdom, the presence of the kingdom and the prevenience of the kingdom. By proclaiming the reign of God over all things the church acts out its faith that the Father of Jesus is indeed ruler of all. The church, by inviting all humankind to share in the mystery of the presence of the kingdom hidden in its life through its union with the crucified and risen life of Jesus, acts out the love of Jesus that took him to the cross. By obediently following where the Spirit leads, often in ways neither planned, known, nor understood, the church acts out the hope that it is given by the presence of the Spirit who is the living foretaste of the kingdom.” (Newbigin, The Open Secret, 64)

Mission in Western Culture Project

M.J. Murdock Trust, ProVision Foundation, Maclellan Foundation, and several other private foundations. The Project is designed as a global initiative to address the question of a missional engagement in Western culture from the perspective of the local church (defined as congregations, house and simple churches and parachurch groups in a specific context) in order to understand the critical issues facing leadership development, discipleship, formation and witness in modern Western culture.

We see three elements as critical to our thinking.

01.Our Changed Context. We are now living in a changed social context, what might be described as both postmodern and post Christian. Western Society as mission field. A missional theology recognizes that Western societies are now, themselves, mission fields. This fact calls for more than new evangelism tactics. Modern evangelism developed in a time when people assumed the Christian story was a normal, regulative part of the culture within which they lived. Most folk knew the basic Gospel story in one form or another. Evangelism fulfilled the role of presenting an apologetic, which pressed for commitment. It worked in a world where the culture-at-large understood the basic Christian story. This is no longer the case.

02.Missio Dei (the mission of God). If the West, including North America, is once again a mission field where the central narratives of the Gospel are being either lost or profoundly compromised by other values and stories, then the focus of this mission is the God who has encountered us in Jesus Christ. The One whom we confess in the Trinitarian confession of Father, Son and Spirit. This may seem such an obvious statement that requires no explicit comment, but that’s not the case. In Western societies, churches have shifted their focus from God to how God serves and meets our needs. Jesus Christ has been packaged as a choice in the spiritual food court used to meet the private needs of individuals. The result is a debased, compromised, sterilized Christianity, which misrepresents the Gospel. The gospel is not just a matter of personal salvation; rather, it is a call to participate in the communal and global purposes of God. The biblical narratives revolve around God’s mission in, through, and for the sake of the world. The focus of attention is toward God not the other way around. The missio dei is about a God-centered rather than a meeting-personal-need centered understanding of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.

03.Missional theology sees the Church (the people of God) as a contrast society. We recognized that our culture continues to move through massive levels of discontinuous change, which is rapidly de-centering the church from its former place at the center. This raises fundamental questions about the relationship between Christian life and the pluralist culture in which we live. In terms of the latter, the message of Jesus is the breaking-in of God’s Kingdom reign into the world. Therefore, the church is the called-out community of God in midst of the specificity of a culture. The church is an ecclesia, which means an assembly that has been called out in a public way as a sign, witness, and foretaste of where God is inviting all creation in Jesus Christ.  The church, in its life together and witness in the world, proclaims the destiny and future of all creation. The God we meet in Jesus calls the church to be a community of people who no longer live for themselves and their own needs but as a contrast society whose life together manifests God’s future for the whole of creation.

To this point, questions of a missional engagement with Western culture have been asked from within academic and theoretical frameworks. While this approach has yielded a rich and growing literature around questions of missiology, ecclesiology and culture it has not yet appropriately engaged with local churches and leaders in ways that significantly effect their understanding and practices of leadership, discipleship, and witness/evangelism. A missional ecclesiology, at its core, must be rooted in a local context. It must provide the skills, capacities and on-the-ground training needed to enable churches and leaders to develop mission-shaped communities and ministries to engage neighborhoods, networks and specific groups with the Gospel.

The project will involve working with local churches, missiologists and church leaders in the United Kingdom, Europe, Africa, New Zealand and Australia. We are planning to engage conversations about forming a similar team in Canada.

The project is shaped around several key elements, processes and phases:

1. Local Churches and their narratives: Partnering with local churches to understand the narratives shaping people in these churches and their contexts.
2. Local Narratives and Scripture: Bring these articulated narratives into dialogue with Scripture so that in each local church people are looking at the relationships between the ways Scripture reads these narratives.
3. Articulate Themes: On the basis of 1 and 2 identify themes and issues specific to geographical areas and those that are present across all systems.
4. Participant Reflection: Partner with local practitioners, theologians, missiologists and others to reflect upon these themes and issues in order to address ways in which local churches might missional engage their contexts from the perspective of ordinary men and women in local churches.
5. Experiments: Design a series of experiments that engage the overarching themes in each specific to each context. An action-reflection model called Missional Action Teams will be used.
6. Reflect, Learn, Experiment: Reflect upon these experiments and design further experiments.
7. Implications for Mission-Shaped Leadership: Assess the learning in terms of implications for the formation of mission-shaped leadership in the local context.
8. Resources: Develop training resources for local churches and their leaders.
9. Missional Implications: Reflect upon the theological and missiological implications of this project for a missional engagement with contemporary, western culture.

“Missionary zeal does not grow out of intellectual beliefs, not out of theological arguments, but out of love.”

 

Roland Allen

Moltmann Reflections

 Julie Clawson at www.onehandclapping wrote this...

At one point Moltmann, spoke about the two crosses of Christianity – the real cross at Golgotha and Constantine’s dream cross (a discussion I assume he develops further in his book, The Crucified God). The cross that appeared to Constantine in his vision was the cross of empire and violence. It was used to conquer, oppress, and destroy opposition. His cross is one of power and domination, not of response and reconciliation. But it is Constantine’s cross, and not the cross of Golgotha, that the church has most readily accepted through the ages. Moltmann mentioned that it was the precursor of the Iron Cross and Victoria’s Cross – crosses that spoke not of the sacrifice of Jesus, but of empire and political maneuvering. We place that cross on flags to demonstrate the forced acceptance of a political interpretation of Christ. Accepting Christ and his cross has become about accepting the empire’s official version thereof.

Moltmann suggested instead that we need to go back to the origins of our faith to find a new future for Christianity in the world outside of imperialism. We have so confused the cross of Constantine with the real cross of Christ that we fail to understand and honor what the cross truly means. We honor our idea of a powerful, vindictive cross instead of a suffering cross. Unless we break from this idolatry, the problem of the Church causing pain in this world will continue.

I found the image fascinating. When the cross becomes our shield and sword instead of a symbol of hope, our faith becomes about struggle with the Other instead of love of the Other. Instead of acknowledging that through Christ’s suffering, all can be reconciled, we desire to forcibly make others think as we do. But conversion through coercion is not a reflection of hope and love, but of fear. If we cannot let the other be who they are and encounter the cross on their own terms, then we have forsaken the cross in favor of empire (be that a political or ideological empire). I fully agree that we need to return to the real cross, but I also do wonder what the future would look like apart from this need to use the cross to justify our disrespectful and inhumane treatment of others. A cross that embraced the suffering of others and helped them develop hope from that suffering instead of causing that very suffering is a vastly different sort of cross; and a church that shunned the cross of empire in favor of Jesus himself would be a very different church.

Leader :: Shift

One of the large shifts that is happening as we attempt to find the center in this missional conversation is from the church at the center to God at the center, and His purposes in redemption. “It is not the church of God that has a mission in the world, but the God of mission who has a church in the world.” (Bosch) He is forming a people for himself. At the core of that purpose, we are formed for mission — to partner with God in both performing and proclaiming the good news. God is faithful in keeping his promises to Abraham, promises we inherit in Christ.

So if this is the core of God’s purpose, then governance and leadership in the ecclesia must align around this center. Lloyd Ogilvie, in 1967, asked three questions.

* What kind of people do we want to deploy on mission?
* What kind of community creates that kind of person?
* What kind of leadership cultivates that kind of community?

What is God up to? He is sending us back to ancient wells. As Robert Webber put it, “We can only see forward as far as we can reach back.” The Spirit is helping us re-member - connect with our historical identity - in order to know ourselves and reach for God’s future. Without memory - one of the fundamental dynamics of the table - we have no future. That is practical eschatology.
“Do this in memory of Me.”

Busyness, of course, is not peculiar to the pastoral life; it is endemic to our culture.. We need a strategy that takes into account [the] two sets of demands that seem to cancel each other out.. The first set of demands is that we respond with compassionate attentiveness to the demands of the people around us.. demands that refuse to stay within the confines of regular hours and always exceed our capacity to meet them..

“The second set of demands is that we respond with reverent prayer to the demand of God for our attention, to listen to him, to take him seriously in the actual circumstances of this calendar day, at this street address, and not bluff our way through by adopting a professionalized role. This is a kind of attentiveness that we know from instruction and experience can be entered into only slowly and deliberately. There is a large, leisurely center to existence where God must be deeply pondered, lovingly believed… It means entering realms of spirit where wonder and adoration have space to develop, where play and delight have time to flourish.

life in the margins

Terry Veling an Australian theologian offers a wonderful reflection on life in the margins.

“…Many [people] occupy [a] space of marginality, living on the edge of a tradition in which they feel both the need to belong and the impossibility of belonging. Marginal hermeneutics suggests that the interpretive space of “the margins” is a creative, productive, vital site of receptive and critical engagement with a tradition’s enriching and distorting effects, and with our own contemporary questions and concerns.”

 

Alan Roxburgh offers some additional thoughts as key elements of the leadership we need in our churches today:

 

1. The ability to see with the eyes of the outsider

 

2. a confidence in and readiness to be among the ordinary in the local, in the belief that these are the places where we discover and learn if we are willing to attend, and

 

3. A spirit that doesn't simply accept the established catergories but is willing to imagine and thilknk outside that world....

 

Trinity and equality

Timothy Radcliffe, author of the very good, Archbishops of Canterbury’s Lent Book 2009 – Why Go to Church? The Drama of the Eucharist speaks powerfully about the Trinity.

How the Christian doctrine of the Trinity might guide a response to social problems today and how might Jesus' last conversation at supper with his disciples inspire constructive sexual ethics? Timothy Radcliffe is an Oxford-based Dominican friar and former Master General of the Order. In a recent lecture in Brisbane, to mark the 150^th year of the Catholic Church in Queensland (more info here), he explored how Christianity can thrive in the 21st century and how Christians can be authentic in Western society - avoiding both the ghetto and assimilation.

Here’s an excerpt:

 

“…So what has the doctrine of the Trinity got to do with the 21st century? What's it got to do with kids who are unemployed looking for jobs, what's it got to do with young married couples struggling to make sense of their lives? What's it got to do with dialogue with Muslims, what's it got to do with us as we face the crises of our age? I would say absolutely everything. Here you have a love which is utterly free of domination, a love which is completely unpatriarchical, unmanipulative, which gives entirely to the other, the Father sharing all that he is with the Son, even His divinity, and that's the mystery of love which we spend our whole life engaging with. The moment when a teenager falls in love for the first time, maybe has a crush on his or her gym teacher, they're beginning to explore the nature of the Trinity. They don't realise it probably. Or young parents struggling to understand how to bring up kids into equality and mature, adult, free love - they can teach us about the nature of the Trinity. A God who is merely isolated, all by itself in some remote stratosphere could never love us…” you can listen to the MP3 at www.abc.net.au/encounter/stories.