MSC 1 Changing contexts  

What is MSC?  

·        What is intriguing is that it tells the rest of the Church of England what it is already doing about creating fresh expressions of church, across the range of churchmanship.  In one sense it’s a collection of short stories illustrating the new variety, explaining their specific character, and showing what is already possible.[1] It’s part of a longer story, most obviously being the successor to Breaking New Ground, published in 1994. MSC shows major changes in context since then and explores significant improvements in understanding of the discipline of church planting.

·        It’s also a map of today’s home mission field, marking diversity all over it, with varied expressions of church emerging by response.  This view enables future navigators to find better ways to be church, that are more likely to connect with a changing society and then thrive.

·        It is becoming a round table, enabling permission-givers and pioneers to sit down together as creative partners, from an agreed starting point,  in order to start and sustain what is needed.

·        It’s a key resource for trainers and will help this subject area to become a normal part of professional theological education.  Only “mission-shaped” ministers can hope to lead “mission-shaped” churches.  They will need “mission-shaped” training.  

In all these ways it is part of a deep re-imagining of church.  ABC RW remarked “the most creativity period in ecclesiology for several hundreds of years”  

One reason for the re-imagination is facing up to a changing context. The England , which its churches exist to reach and serve has significantly changed.  The changes are so widespread and so far reaching that it is more helpful to think that the Church's task is cross cultural mission.  Mission has come home.  This is something people have been urging the Church to face up to since the 1944 report Towards the Conversion of England .  Lieut Col. Oldham introducing that debate in June 1943 said “This country has in fact become for the Church of England not only the nearest but the most important mission field in the world.  

 Only a mission-shaped church can fit with God’s missionary intentions to engage with people wherever and however they live.  Only a MSC can travel into this changed world and see parts of it transformed by and for Christ. What is this changed world like and how does that affect how we understand church ?

There is a seismic shift from a somewhat unified society to a more fragmented society; contributing factors are trends in employment, increased mobility, changes to family life patterns and so more single households.  The predominance of entertainment and leisure also accentuates personalised culture.  The effects are that Sunday is under increased competition. In the ensuing diversity of life patterns that people have and the group they form, “no one form of church will be adequate”.p13  The call to diversity of expressions of church is a crucial idea.

 At the same time, and not least because of various media of electronic communication, the dominance of territory to confer identity is being replaced by network.  Clearly, place still exists. That will not cease to be so.  However who we know, not where they live, is more significant.  In a fragmenting society, people are choosing how to connect.  Surveys show fellow hobbyists, friends and colleagues matter more than neighbours.  Our neighbours may be strangers to us.

So we face a change, from ministry centred what we called “where people live”. This is now often only where people sleep, so we have to move to mission to how, not where, they live.  Incarnation will have more interest in the how than the where. Just as Jesus was sent to a culture, the house of Israel , not the parish of Bethlehem or deanery of Galilee .    To enter such a fluid world, expressions of church will be non-boundary rather than cross-boundary.  To achieve that, we need a shift to seeing existing parochial, territorial boundaries as permeable.  This language of permeability reflects that boundaries will not be obliterated, but they should no longer be seen as proscriptive and restrictive.  

If the first two are dynamics of changes within society, the third marks the shift of the status of church in relation to society.  The MSC report takes no view of a chronological order or causal connection of these factors, but notices they co-incide.  The demise of Christendom and arrival of post-Christendom, mean Christian identity is no longer conferred on the population by the culture and its values are no longer normative.  So most young people do not know the Christian story.  To register as “Christian” in a national census, may not claim more than being white and nice.  Now church monopoly on truth, let alone attendance, is perceived as being ludicrous.  Multi-faith options and combinations are expression of choice.  To this should be added data suggesting that, by 2015, those with confessed allegiance to Paganism will be as numerous as practising Christians.  [2004 Pagan Fed 300,000] All these factors mean that our long lived and much loved “come to us, we are available and accessible” strategy is virtually totally out of date among the under 35’s; “…mainstream culture no longer brings people to the church door”.   

In the past  They might come for the hatch, match or despatch departments, or it might be that a crisis made them turn to the church.  Then our job was to help them from interest to commitment That is less and less true. We are either invisible or unattractive.  Church is often seen today as a relic of the past, an example of religion not spirituality, an institution past its sell by date.   Today the culture doesn’t bring people – so we must go to them. But few churches know how to do this. It is so foreign to deep instincts to separate church and world or only to rescue people out of the world.  In a 2004 book The Shaping Of Things To Come, the authors Frost and Hirsch call this church operating in attractional mode. They call for a change to incarnational working. I prefer a wider term – the church recovering a sense of  the apostolic. But either way, the apostolic or incarnational journey to form Fresh Expressions of Church, out in the world, seems uncertain. What it will be seems hazy. Centred in Jesus and those who follow him yes – what else is less sure.

Some readers of MSC will note that there has been no discussion of another broad feature, the shift from modernity to post-modernity.  Opinions differ as to whether post-modernity truly exists, though a particular philosophical view called post-modernism undoubtedly has its proponents.  Some would rather talk of late, or even liquid modernity.  In practice, many people are transitional about these shifts.  On the one hand, they value truly modernist technology in areas such as transport, phones and computers. They want them to be consistent, reliable and predictable. Yet on the other hand, they desire freedom to differ on issues, unlimited options to choose, looseness of social conventions, and tolerance about personal convictions above all.  What is clear is that modernism is over.  By this I mean convictions that everything important is knowable, achievable and rational, and that science and faith operate in different compartments of facts and values. Moreover human beings, with their science and minds, can scale whatever heights are ahead of us.  Such a defined world, such word-based, head-centred processing and such optimism over humanity is no longer the mental address most people live at.  Choice,  Doubt, feeling and mess have shouldered their way to the table.  With such shifts, the church must also engage.  This affects the style in which any approaches are made, rightly forcing us away from reliance on mission as detached propositional faith, argued by an individual, or from authoritarian and moralistic church groups.

 A fourth strand of change in society is allied to this. It is the shift from an emphasis on production to consumption.  This has brought increased emphasis on the individual and that personal choice and attainment of pleasure is a matter of right.  Of course the advertisers and producers ensure that this supposed right is never quite attained, with relentless advertising to ensure the demand is insatiable.

Another baneful effect of this emphasis, is the creation of an underclass and excluded class of the poor.  Their responses in a fed greed or an excluded anger are easily led into debt or crime.

 A number of people see consumerism as the leading ideological challenge faced by the Church. I think of David Lyon Jesus in Disneyland  [p. 145], Craig Bartholomew Christ and Consumerism Paternoster 2000, Lesslie Newbigin in various books. MSC concurs – [see Chairman’s introduction.]  Grace Davie talks of this shift from a culture of obligation – “I ought, my duty is …”  to the culture of consumption   In this society, creating diversity of expressions of church is both obvious and necessary.  Note how even our normal language adopts this; We even “buy into” ideas. In such a world  no one way or style can suit all, let alone attract all.  This break with past monopoly shifts us uneasily yet further along the road of working out how to express unity across widening diversity.   

Some have questioned whether MSC is too consumerist driven.  The consistent view point is summarised early on: “The gospel has to meet people where they are, before it can enter and affect their lives.”  [cf p 87] I agree but think this is shorthand. I would add it is half the picture. Talk of Gospel is not enough. The Church, as community, also has the same function of entry and affect upon a culture. Moreover it goes through a similar process.  Church is formed in and for a culture; then by its reading of the gospel and the convicting ministry of the Spirit, that community becomes progressively shaped around the values of its Lord and Founder.  It will find itself becoming more counter-cultural and its inner communal life should both demonstrate and bolster the counter-cultural values it claims.  But it must enter a culture first to have any effect.  

Chapter 1 of MSC needs reading along with the latter parts of Chapter 3, pages 36-41.  The latter offers us a way of reading the contours to the mission field at home.  It distinguishes between four groups. 

Attenders 10%

Fringe 10%

Then the dechurched – 40% people who have left the church – split equally between those open to return and those so wounded by the experience that they are closed to return.

Then finally those who have never been, except Granny’s funeral.   The non churched are 40%.

The research cites Richter & Francis 1999 book Gone but not forgotten.  

You will notice the language of the unchurched is not used. The reasons are easy to state.  

Unchurched is dangerous language.

It is equivocal – unhorsed – I was once horsed. Uncivilised – I was never civilised. It is unclear

It is bad language tactically. Confusing the needs of two different groups.  It is unhelpful

It betrays Christendom  thinking – the illusion that all people are ours and they have only got to come back. For the non churched this is neither true nor how they see it.  So it is Untruthful

With all these tribes, as it may be helpful to see them. the rates and proportions vary.  The larger percentages of the non churched tend to be more obvious north rather than south, among the poor than the rich, in urban as opposed to rural contexts and among the younger generations.  So in industrial East Sheffield the non churched might be 80% of the population.  Nevertheless, this shift towards a non churched population will be broadly true of most first world countries, except the USA, which is entering this set of changes more slowly because of its far higher residual church attendance, which Grace Davie attributes to the absence of a church state link.[2]

 MSC then argues that the resources for, and basic approaches to, these groups in society are different and that the non-churched group will become more and more dominant.  Moreover we point out this is not where the church conducted most of its evangelism in the past, having focussed on the fringe and the dechurched.

 However even this concerning picture may be too positive.   By looking at attendance figures over the century – we can plot the red line which shows the falling percentage of those who were in church under the age of 15.  This then gives a different proportion over time of those we should think of as non churched.

If the groups are age weighted, then the de-churched are 30% and shrinking, and the non-churched are 60% and growing.  Inherited ways of being church and even doing most of our evangelism henceforth will only tend to help a reducing minority of people. We are doing the vast majority of  our fishing in a shrinking pond.   The problem is not the bait – it is less fish.  

So MSC concludes from the mission survey that the parish system alone can no longer fulfil its missionary purpose. It and its churches are not designed to connect with network, they are stuck in attractional mode which is ironically becoming less attractive.  We need to shift to mixed economy thinking which welcomes both inherited and emerging expressions of church.  We need the humility also to realise that there are only expressions.  No one way of being church can do it all or for all. Mixed economy sees different expressions can do different things is a learning to be glad.  

It is as though we exist at a time of the tides changing.  As individual waves roll up the beach, its not always easy to tell when it has shifted from one phase to another. But I would put it this way. The tide of mission and ministry in the Come paradigm is flowing away and the Tide of Mission and Ministry understood as Go is flooding in .