Truly mission-shaped church?

 

What’s good?

Many factors do encourage me. The energizing support of Archbishop Rowan has been crucial in imagining a climate of possibility. Steven Croft and Paul Bayes are two key figures to help ensure the issues won’t go away easily. Steps are being taken to create legislation for fresh expressions, not least those which serve networks. Criteria to identify, select, train and deploy pioneer leaders are under active discussion. Many dioceses have put on events, through Synods, Clergy conferences and CME days, to open up the issues. Other players, like Church Army and CMS are planning to deploy more of their people, in teams, to create mission-shaped fresh expressions of church. Best of all, there is every indication of more fresh expressions of church out there, than we first thought.

What’s missing?

Yet missing elements could undermine most of these gains for which I am grateful. I observe a dumbing down of the report’s content. Charitably this may be in order that the majority of the church can make some positive response. Thus a congregation hitherto worshipping using BCP can claim that starting a monthly family service is a fresh expression, for them. I have discovered that the term Fresh Expression usually takes its reference point in the past of the church, not the future of mission. So many fresh expressions are not mission-shaped at all. All these games stand to lock us up more firmly in Jerusalem mode and will never free us for the outward journey, in the Sprit, that Christ envisaged and Acts 1.8 records.

Repentance leading to change of mind

Virtually none of the strategies I read, presentations I hear, or training material I inspect,  sound any note of calling the church to repentance over serious mission failures. I am ashamed that, as MSC notes on page 37ff,  40% of the population have had some experience of Church yet have left and not returned. Was it all their fault? The same pages tell us of the 40% non-churched. For a national church, the overall number of the people that deeply alienated from us is very disturbing. Anecdotally it seems the chief culprit for the gap to both groups is the lack of an authentic and attractive quality of community life in local  congregations. In short the main reason they are not in church, is because we are. Despite this, within us there is a deep resistance to making missional community part of the DNA of church. It is as though public worship and pastoral care are the dominant Anglican genes, while evangelism and mission are recessive. Where does any of this surface in our public prayers of confession or intercession?

Dying to Live is the hidden heart of the report

In gardening to grow a plant you must sow a seed. Seeds left in an unopened packet cannot be described as planted. They must be taken out of the packet and buried in the soil. That means an intentional end of their existence. But then something related to the seed, but different from it, starts to grow up, as 1 Corinthians 15 teaches. Translate that dynamic into the process which occurs in a mission context.  

The seed stands for the incoming team, bearing in their bones the essence of the gospel and of the church. They came from some particular sending church, with its own manifestations and culture. They have to be willing to set aside those preferences and likes, to find how to be church and how to communicate gospel in the context to which God sends them. This seed thus dies to its previous identity, to take root in the cross-cultural context. The key missing principle is that seeds must be allowed to die.  This is what it is to be mission-shaped.  It is exemplified by Paul saying in 1 Corinthians 9  “to the Greeks I became as a Greek”. Today for Greeks we might read Pagans or Consumers. This seed will then become a body, a plant, that it was not before. Dying to Live is inherent in the creation of fresh expressions of church. It is central to the church planting discipline and process. As such the planting analogy has real strengths. It conveys by analogy, what should occur theologically, in all cross cultural mission.  

The report Mission-shaped Church  addresses this in its 3rd chapter on lessons from church planting and 5th chapter on theology. The heart of this instinct is not the gardening analogy. It comes from the teaching of Jesus from John 12 and seeing dying to live as normative for the church. He saw his own life and ministry as a seed that would die; only by this could new life come as he was raised by the Father, and would this lead to the creating of much fruit. Moreover in the same Gospel comes the other cardinal text, John 20.21 – “as the Father sent me so I send you”. Here is an indissoluble link between Christology, Missiology and Ecclesiology. Evangelicals elevate scripture but here are ignoring the centrality and inescapability of dying to live, by contrast to their “come to us as we are” mission styles. Catholics love to talk of the church as the Body of Christ, yet where are the death and resurrection patterns for them?  

Dying to live is the bedrock for so many other themes that Mission-shaped Church commends. It is the most  demanding aspect of the double listening to mission context and inherited tradition. It is congruent with the Incarnational way of mission.  It is the precursor to be able to see enculturated expressions of church. It underlies conviction about the reproduction of the church and is essential toward diversification of church into different contexts. Its self sacrifice is perhaps the deepest counter cultural critique of consumerism which must occur as Gospel and Church take shape in this dominant mission context.

If we cannot countenance dying to live, we have missed the heart of the report and it will be impossible to be truly mission-shaped; worse we shall fail to live out the patterns of Christ and one of the significant opportunities of this generation will probably pass us by.

 
Dying to live is central to seeds.

George Lings

May 2005