The Relationship between Mission and Community

Openness to the Mission-shaped Church thinking
In the westernized parts of the world I have visited over the last two years, the church climate towards the issues raised by Mission-shaped Church (MSC) is rapidly changing for the better.

Only small parts of the church still believe that all is well and are in denial of both the decline and the ageing of most of the church, to the point that it will be unable to reproduce another generation.  

There are still some significant players who believe that improving the dominant parochial medieval models we already have, will be sufficient to attract enough of the right kind of people and so ensure their medium term survival.  Of course, they don’t put it like that.

But surprisingly, more of the church is very open to the agenda of fresh expressions of church.  The MSC report has been read far more widely then ever expected.  It has traveled across both the globe, and the denominational landscape, more easily than we the writers expected.  There is also more creativity out at the edges than we saw in the previous wave of church planting in the 1980s and early 1990s.  

There is a level of support from the centre, from Archbishops, General synod motions and Diocesan Secretaries that I have never seen before.  The creation of the Fresh Expressions team in England again is without parallel in the Anglican history of church planting.  The embracing of research findings from groups like The Sheffield Centre are also widely welcomed respected and used. In Australia a task force has been set up and is in the final stages of drafting its own contextualized version of the UK Mission-shaped Church report.  

A weather forecast?
However, at the same time, our mission climate in westernized nations is very mixed.  The English love to talk about the weather, so let me call several things the sunny periods.  I think of younger groups that are more pre-Christian than post Christian. They therefore carry less negative baggage about Christianity with them and conversation with them is easier than with their parents.  The sheer publicity level about, and resultant positive image of, Alpha makes it possible for more people to explore faith than before.  Quite balanced articles about it appear in the British serious press.  Its dynamic of enabling belonging before believing is significant and diagnostic for all process evangelism.  We have learnt to reconnect faith and food.  The interest in spirituality, and greater social freedom to talk about these issues, is also an opportunity.  It is also a problem in that Christian are often thought only to be religious, not spiritual, so John Drane has recently written a book called Do Christians know how to be Spiritual?  

Some of the clouds and rain in the current climate are that we live in an often self-centered, consumer driven, society in which unwillingness to commit to more than myself is rampant.  All institutions are suffering membership hemorrhage.  I read recently that Greenpeace lost 85% of its membership worldwide in the 1990s.[1]  The welcome demise of Christendom, together with the rusting through of the iron cage of Modernism have the downside that Christians and the Church are seen to be part of the problem of what is passing away, so people do ask, how can they be part of the solution for the future ?  The credibility gap of the church is massive and the ignorance gap about Jesus is also very wide.  A teenager was heard to ask, “At Christmas, why do we sing about Wayne? ”  When asked what he meant he replied, “Oh you know the song … A Wayne in a manger”. The proportions of the population who know our story and are only waiting for someone to enliven it and call them to join it, is diminishing. In England, we think that group declines by 8% of the population per decade – and it may be only 30% now.

All this could, and sometimes does, make us an anxious church. This poses dangers for when we are anxious, we do not communicate well. Either we are silent for fear or we burble before we listen.

I believe our confidence must be rooted in what is true.  In a pragmatic age we may be tempted to think that what works must be true. But power and deceit can appear to work in the short term and we need deeper foundations than that, on which to build, and to identify truths which will govern what we put into practice.

Trinity and missionary ecclesiology  

It is a helpful truism to state that best theology starts with the topic of God.  So the first quote from the theological chapter of Mission-shaped Church reads, “Any theology of the church must ultimately be rooted in the Being and Acts of God.”[2]

            The report continues:
"When Christians speak of ‘God’, it is as shorthand for the Holy Trinity. Two things follow from this. First, God has to be understood relationally and communally. ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who mutually indwell one another, exist in one another and for one another, in interdependent giving and receiving.’^[3] Second, God is a missionary. We would not know God, if the Father had not sent the Son in the power of the Spirit."[4]  

If I then put those two factors together it becomes sense to describe God the Trinity as community-in-mission.   Both factors are true but I want you to notice the order of the words in the phrase.  It reflects that the Being of God is prior to the Acts of God.  The Trinity are to be thought of as communal before they are missional. “Mission comes from the Father, through the Son, in the power of the Spirit”. MSC p.85.  The words “ Mission comes” tells us that it comes from something else.  If it comes from something else, it cannot be the starting point. 

Mission cannot define the church
This runs contrary to what a lot of respectable books by mission minded people will tell us; take the view of the highly respected Eddie Gibbs. I quote from his recent book following Church Next, called Leadership Next.

“The church must reestablish the priority of the Great Commission. It is the Lord’s mandate that defines [his italics] the church as people who follow Christ ... with a vision for Christ’s reign on earth. It also drives the church to turn from an inward focus that invites the world to come to a church that disperses to... every power centre and every segment of culture.”[5] 

I agree with his earlier words that the church needs to repent of “moral failure and missional ineptitude”.  However, I do not believe that our distortions and failures should make us overbalance in the other direction that makes mission primary to our identity. Mission does not define the church, though it is an intrinsic activity of the church.  In the life of God it is the same. Mission flows out of how God is, the Trinity are community-in-mission.

So Theologians rightly teach that the immanent trinity is prior to the economic trinity. In ordinary language that is saying, the being of God is prior to the activity of God. Being comes before doing. In the same way it is always a mistake to think people can derive their identity from their activity. Being busy is not purpose. Even being purposeful does not account for who we are. It is who we are that determines what we should do.  We must always take those categories in that order.

It is odd. We desperately need a Mission-shaped Church .  But to really discover the best way to be Mission-shaped, and to be the church God intends, means we should not start with mission. The Trinity show us that Mission is not the starting point.  Mission itself proceeds from the inner loving community life of God.

The centrality of community
If I were asked what one phrase best sums up all I have learnt in the nine years of the research life of the Sheffield Centre, I have little doubt what it would be. “The centrality of community” are the words I would choose.  I have seen it manifested as the fresh starting point in mission, arrived at intuitively by pioneers wanting to connect with those furthest away from us in our mission fields.  I have then noticed that this dynamic of growing community, works for mission to all sectors of society, not just those furthest away.  Few people hate being loved.  Truly loving accepting community is always attractive and demanding.  So Graham Tomlin has written a commendable book, The Provocative Church . Take one quote:

"It’s not so much a lack of truth… but a missing connection between the words uttered and the style of life that results from it: a lack of authenticity, of depth, of correlation between words images and reality[6]."  

Evangelism can work when Church life makes watching people ask questions.  I have also learnt that community was the most effective and enduring dynamic in the missionary life of the early church. As such, we are only rediscovering old ways.  That is part of what the word Fresh means.   Beyond this, more recently, I have come to see that this is not merely tactical wisdom, though it is that. The centrality of community connects with the deepest strands of our theology.  Who is God, and what the Trinity show us they are like, is foundational for being Christian and being Church.  

The challenge to individualism
Is it mere accident that this call to community is also a profound challenge to the individualism of our age?  Notice that we never speak of the individuals of the Trinity. We always speak of the persons. What is the difference? Individuals exist by themselves, but we are persons because of relationship with others. You can have individual things, but person things is a combination of words we don’t use.  Only together are we what we are. I am told Africans utterly disagree with Descartes. It is not the case that because I think, I am. It is because we are, I am.

In addition, is it possible that in loving, giving and receiving we can go beyond the sterility and addiction of the getting of consumerism? Consumerism is the bane of our age – alchemy wrought of individualism, materialism and hedonism, peddled like drugs to create its own intentionally insatiable demand and defended by the barons who produce it. Only communities of resistance, themselves being transformed by the Spirit of Christ into attitudes of voluntary giving, will enable persons to break free of their consumerist addiction and live counter-culturally.

Trinitarian community also stretches us beyond the functionality of mere team work.  Team is language that still has too much of the willing association of individuals.  In Australia and New Zealand, I joked that people had heard "Perry Como", watched "Perry Mason" but never encountered "perichoresis". This unfamiliar technical Greek word sums up the interconnection, interplay, interdependence and interpenetration that the three persons of the Trinity live out.  The Rublev icon of the Trinity, show the three, each of whom looks away to the other.  This conveys something of this ceaseless flow between them.  Nothing happens to one that does not affect the other.  The Bible has an echo of this thought in its language of marriage – that the two become one flesh.  No wonder marriage is recognized as the smallest community.  Paul picks up something of this interpenetration of lives when speaking about the church in 1 Cor 12.26 “If one part suffers every part suffers, if one part is honoured, every part rejoices with it.”  John’s letters speak of the Life which was with the Father and appeared to them. They heard, saw, looked at and touched it, and Christians now have a living partnership with the Father and with his son Jesus Christ.

Love is the foundation

Unless and until Church is deeply and effectively communal, we shall neither follow the example of the persons of the Trinity, nor connect well with God’s world nor make much impression upon it.  So to live out being community, in limited imitation of the Trinity, is the primary call of the church. That is why Jesus, in the great Commandment, speaks of the centrality of the loving of God, of others and self. Any insistence on the Great Commission that eclipses the Great Commandment once more distorts the relationship between being and doing. It will rob the commission of its centre, its authenticity and its best message. That is why Paul writes 1Cor 13 and why John’s epistle makes love the hallmark of the church. Without it the church is not the silver God intends, it becomes dull and cannot reflect the communal love of God, which itself began the whole of creation, salvation, called the church into being, and works ceaselessly for transformation – when eventually the community of heaven will be disclosed.  The story starts in the community of God and the closing shots are of wider community restored.

The biblical call is to make disciples who are witnesses to the person and events of Christ.[7] Disciples are called into corporate communal following of Jesus and being in relationship with him and with the others who follow. Jesus took care to repeat the Trinity pattern and ensure they were with him, [Mk 3.14] long before he sent them anywhere.  Even then he dispatched them two by two. Trinity initially sounds heavy stuff.  Take it relationally and it is clear but it demands the priority of community.

When I use the word community, some people imagine I think it must be gathered under one roof, that it means endless introspection and disengaging from the world.  I cannot imagine why they think that.  The Trinity show us community can be either gathered in heaven or dispersed in the Incarnation.  It is about values not locations.  Also love in the Trinity did not remain inward focused, but naturally poured out into creation and then the costly engaged process of salvation.  To be Trinitarian is about following their identity of community-in-mission.  If people want further material on the strategic necessity for the priority of community then read Encounters on the Edge No 30 pp 1-15.

 

Christ-shaped ecclesiology
Within this section I begin with the Incarnation partly because it starts the process and because it is a favourite Anglican word in missional and pastoral circles.  But I turn to this pattern more because of a deeper conviction that Christology should lead to Ecclesiology.  If we want to know what it is be Mission shaped, we should look to the patterns of the divine missioner.  If we want to know if fresh expressions are theologically legitimate or even possible, it is relevant to explore our understanding of Christ who is the definitive expression of God on earth.  Jesus himself said “he who has seen me has seen the Father,” Hebrews 1.3 speak of the Son as “the exact representation of God’s being.”

Some people ask can church be freshly expressed and remain authentically church. If we know what church is, how can that change? Will not change be necessarily for the worse? So the leader of an Anglo Catholic priest's society wrote to me with an invitation: “New ways of being church is, we realise, just jargon from a catholic point of view – could you talk about church ways of being new? ”  

I agreed with him that there are no new ways of being church.  In serious theology either something is church, or it isn’t. There might be renewed old ways of being church but that is rather clumsy language. Hence in writing MSC, I advised the group to reject the term, new ways of being church, which they accepted and recommended we adopt the language, of fresh expressions of church.  In writing MSC we wanted to hold that church is church – but to explore that how being church is expressed, can change in a principled fashion.  

Incarnation
As I have thought about this since MSC, I have come to think that Incarnation is brilliant at doing this.  It is additionally helpful because some of those against the idea that fresh expressions are possible, invest heavily in the theology of the incarnation. Let's start unpacking this through the early hymn Philippians 2.  It celebrates glorious and sacrificial changes undergone by Christ.  At the same time the text commends that we are to have the same attitude. What changes were embraced? He who was God made himself nothing. He who was equal with God took the form of a servant. He who is divine became man. He who is eternal, died an obedient and shameful death.    

My point here is that these willingly embraced changes are examples of fresh expressions.  This new life of the God/Man was a fresh expression of the Son being the second person of the Trinity.  It is both true that the divinity of the Son was not distorted or eclipsed, but that this incarnation had not been seen before.  In that sense it was a change and even novel.  It was not a change that destroyed or compromised God the Son’s identity but rather, we could say, freshly expressed it.  

Then change continues.  Jesus the God/Man lives out an open, not a totally pre-planned life.  John’s Gospel shows him actively seeking and responsively following what the Father is doing.  The relationship with the Father is creative and open.  Jesus also experiences changes that happen to him.  He appears limited by people’s lack of faith in Nazareth , disappointed from time to time with his disciples, surprised and delighted by the faith of the Roman Centurion.  His suffering and struggle in Gethsemane are presented as real, not pretended.  Throughout the Crucifixion narratives, his understated suffering is clear and real.  

Early on the Christians had to counter the claim of the Docetics that Christ only seemed human.  He was like Clark Kent who is really Superman and only appears to be human.  The reality of Jesus’ suffering was part of the evidence to say no to divinity merely posing as human.  Jesus was truly human and so things happen to him, he was not insulated from them.  Then, supremely, comes a change that happens to Jesus. In the words of the hymn “tis mystery all the immortal dies.” This had not ever happened before.  It was an unimaginable change.  Moreover the pattern of change continues, in that Jesus is raised on the third day; it happens to him, he does not raise himself.  The language uses a passive tense in Scripture.

Incarnation embraces continuity and change
There are two concurrent realities. Firstly, there are continuities - the divine identity of God the son, his relationship to Father and Spirit, his moral perfection, his commitment to the mission and to the disciples. Secondly, the changes are in whatever was set aside by becoming Incarnate, the process of becoming enfleshed, the ups and down of where the mission took him and notably his own predicted process of dying and being raised to life.   

How we hold change and continuity together is a key issue behind the creation of fresh expressions of church.  How can it really be church and be freshly expressed? Are both together possible? The Incarnation says yes it can. Incarnation is also crucial in asserting that Mission can shape Church. It was so for the divine missioner, so why can't that principle be applied to the church he founded and with his patterns? This point about patterns is part of his own Resurrection teaching – “As the Father sent me, so I am sending you.”   It is not just that he here is copying a sending action of the Father, rather he indicates that the process of continuity and change, which he exhibited in his apostolic mission, will be ours as well.  So continuity and change over can be held together. Jesus is theologically the best and utterly sufficient example of this. That is part of what double listening will try to achieve.  But double listening is only the tool to deliver this, not the example that validates it.

It is the incarnation that opens up the possibility of principled change whilst keeping continuity.  Fresh Expressions is about holding onto both. The call is to be truly church and truly changed, shaped by being the mission to a particular place or culture. But the changes may be as far reaching and surprising as was the incarnation.  

I wonder what it was like in the counsels of heaven when the angels were first told that this is what the Trinity had in mind.  “It hasn’t been done before” might have been an objection even then.  I imagine the Father replying.  That is true, but it is not the point.  

Death and resurrection – the heart of the call  
Now balance requires I put a caveat on how much we can take from the Incarnation, rich though this seam is for mining material for missionary ecclesiology. The New Testament talks of the relationship between Christ and his people in a number of ways: Head and body, Branches and Vine, Bridegroom and Bride. But what is the central and determining mark of this union with Christ? Is it about the Incarnation or about Death and Resurrection? I share the view expounded by Newbigin[8] back in 1953 that textual evidence and liturgical practice are massively in favour of the latter. I am not talking about dividing off the Incarnation from and the Passion.  I entirely agree that the process of the Son taking flesh is essential to all understandings of how the Atonement works. It is always folly to divide Incarnation from Death and Resurrection. However which of these two is given as the pattern for our union with Christ?  Which bit of the whole process are we most called to emulate?

Here the evidence stacks up. Romans 6 majors on our union with Christ; it describes our relationship as entry into his death and Resurrection. Baptism from then has celebrated our union, not into the Incarnation, but into Christ’s death and Resurrected life. Communion centres on his death and the life he now offers.  Within it, Incarnation is mentioned in passing as part of the salvation process. The Christian sign has never been the stable, it is the Cross. The sign of the hoped for victory which at present still is hidden, is the Resurrection.  This is the breaking in of the future, or the first fruits of the Kingdom.  Paul speaking about his life and identity in Galatians 2 does not exclaim I have been incarnated with Christ but “I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live and yet no longer I but Christ lives in me.” 

Conversely, the New Testament knows of no extension of the Incarnation; Jesus returns to the Father.  Indeed he himself teaches that it is necessary that he goes away.  There is no command that the incarnation is to be continued in us.  We are already enfleshed and human, so we could not take that road even if we wished.

It looks like dying to live is truly central to the patterns of Christ, in describing the nature of our union with Christ and so also for communal missionary ecclesiology.  In all cases what we need to attend to is the patterns and dynamics of the mission of the Son. The incarnation underpins a process of entry to culture; in this process there is both continuity and change; this validates the creation of fresh expressions of church through a mission-shaped process.  Death and Resurrection epitomizes the disclosure of the counter cultural kingdom and are central to the good news to tell others. But that willingness to die, in order to live, is also the hallmark of missionaries who will put down their preferences so that the fresh expression of church which is born is truly mission-shaped church, not an imported church-shaped mission.

 

For reflection
·     How can we train their people in holding together these Jesus shapes and patterns?

·     How can we help them understand that Christology must shape ecclesiology and missiology?