Western Mission, Church and the Evangelist

Is there a centre any more?

Western mission in general is involved in an enormous shift about how it understands the missional task. It is a Copernican revolution. This language always means that whole idea of where the centre is has changed.  

We used to think the Church was like the Earth and evangelists were like space cosmonauts shot out into missionary space to explore what was out there and bring back any discoveries or captives to earth, the only inhabited planet that exists, as far as we know.  Evangelists were sent from the church to recruit outsiders back into church.  

The revolution is partly in realising that the existing church is only one expression of being church. In the analogy, we have discovered it is only one planet.  There could be other ways to express being church. Other inhabitable places are possible.  As such there is no centre, only connections, as Canadian Alan Roxburgh explores in his little book The Missionary Congregation Leadership and Liminality.[1]  Worse what we have here, on the planet of existing church, is a way of being church, expressly designed to relate most to a world, that is passing away.  Church has worked hard over the last 200 years at becoming inculturated into the climate of modernism.  However today, while orthodoxy is vital, a rational church steeped in systematic theology feels cramped, over described and oppressive. An organizational church, deeply tinged with morphological fundamentalism, is unable to deny the charge of being dominantly an institution most interested in protecting the vested interests of its leadership class and the financial base to continue that.  Hence all the neurosis we hear about priesthood, episcopacy and maintaining existing structures.  Neither being rational or organizational make church top of most people’s wish list.  

The reverberations of network
This inherited expression of church is passing away in a yet more radical way.  For far longer, and so it is more shocking when it is challenged, the church has assumed that the only social reality was place.  So we created parish systems designed around place, and power systems around the possession of territory.  Boundaries defined and defended this.  We thought that was the only world that could be. Theology defended the centrality of place, from the creation of Israel, to the birth of town sized bishoprics from Ignatius onwards. We were right to relate to place, because it was so pivotal, but mistaken to think its significance could not, and therefore should not, change.

Recent proposed legislation in England to aid the creation of fresh expressions includes lines to placate the nervous. I quote from para 18. “Initiatives should supplement but not undermine the existing parochial system.”  This completely misses what is actually happening.  It is not the creation of fresh expressions that might in future undermine the parish system, it is that the social reality of network has already significantly undermined the parish system. What most good fresh expressions are doing is going out and entering the new reality that has already swum into view. This existing church fear about fresh expressions of church undermining the parish is unrealistic. Image a householder complaining that the presence in his garden of a seismological instrument, measuring movement on the Richter scale, is what has caused the earthquake under his property. Fresh expressions are the responses to, not the cause of, the disturbance existing church feels.

We are still working through what network means. But we should note that no way of being social is entirely benign, but then nor was place.  Because some places were wonderful, so house prices there went up and they became the enclaves of the haves. Some are dreadful and in our less enlightened moments we have deliberately sent our poor there, in others cases they just drift to our urban shadows, slums and shanty towns. Place is not inherently good.

In my judgment we are beginning to rethink our missiology in the light of network.  At least we have seen that we need to enter it, before we challenge it.  Because it could be constructed around the value of choice it will need a challenge to its social conscience and how it includes a healthy diversity.  This pattern, of entry leading to challenge, is one missiological lesson from a Christological shape.  Our ecclesiology is also going to have to catch up with network. 

I hope now you see more what I mean when I comment that the centre has shifted.  The existing church is not the centre of society any more.  It is at the margins and from it, apostolic bands are called to travel out, not to return to Earth but to plant further colonies of heaven wherever they end up.  The journey for missionaries and evangelists is no longer out and back, but out and who knows where.    

Facing both ways?
Missionaries and evangelists face an intriguing task that seems to push them in two divergent directions that could seem opposites, but are not.  

Detox from the Church
On the one hand, it is vital that evangelists are detoxed from any instincts they have to be too churchy.  I means by that, any Christendom instincts for evangelism just being spelt come, any touching belief that good worship will do the evangelistic business for all groups of people, or any firm hopes that the burning barns of the existing church will somehow be a good storage place for all the fruits of evangelism.  I am not even covering the need to be free from desires to be powerful, well thought of, ecclesiastically successful or comfortable.  I want to point out the need for evangelists shed all the first set of delusions and temptations.   I do recognize that many evangelists are already in rapid retreat from the church.  It is the last place they want to be. They find it deadening and stifling and they like being out there with the people. 

Because the centre has shifted, the journey is no longer the well known one of out and back to existing church, in which the evangelist does not have to think about church, just hope that the converts will survive it. They are not simply midwives who walk away after the birth, waving cheerfully. Apostles make disciples, not converts who they wash their hands of, and hand over to existing church.

So ironically while I want to get existing church out of evangelists, my concern is even more that emerging church is one of their abiding passions and deep understandings. They must learn to overcome their aversion to church, because they are being called to assist in the creation of what truly is church. So the detox business is not cutting them off from church – but more like encouraging them to learn to stop eating junk food, but learning to cook. “Super size me” church should not be on the menu.

Sharper about Church
This makes it vital that evangelists become far better ecclesiologists. I suppose that is a way of saying only if they are nimble and sharp about what church really is, will they have the adroitness and creativity to help fashion mission shaped expressions of church. Only then will they also have the skills and language to explain to the rest of the existing church why what has come to birth is a fresh expression, within the world church family, and why it is not a bastard child or a gross mutation. Beneath this, if they claim to love Jesus they will find he says Love my church.  It will not do for them only to be interested in Jesus and steadfastly to reject anything to do with his body.  In the end this would mean they are hating themselves and misunderstanding who and what they are. That is another reason why CA must choose very carefully what relationship with church is best.  Let me lay out some bits of a framework for this.

The relationship of church to mission
Mission-shaped Church was written in the context of a long held ecclesiocentric distortion that held church as central and primary. At best mission was one of her important tasks, but not part of her identity. At worst, mission was ignored by church, or reluctantly allowed overseas or done at home by second class people like lay evangelists.

By contrast evangelists can be utterly missiocentric. In this view the church has no place in the scheme of mission itself. It is reduced at best to being a slightly second best receptacle for what to do with the fruits of mission. At worst the church is a sheer obstacle to mission, an embarrassment to explain away and a hindrance to the spread of the gospel.  Both of these stereotypes we challenged, following thinkers like Dearborn, Moltmann 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”[2]  How are we to understand this area ?   It looks like mission and church are bound together, but in what ways ?   I agree with MSC that "the Church is the fruit of God’s Mission – those whom he has redeemed[3]"  

It is possible looking at the broad sweep of scripture to draw the process as a straight line from the mission of the Trinity, focusing in the sending of the Son, which led to the creation of the church.  In passing this does help justify the claim that historically speaking, at its origin, mission shaped church. But evangelists need to note that mission led to church, not just converts. Here is yet another link for us to thinking in terms of creating community – not merely winning individuals. The root metaphor for what is church, across both covenants old and new, is the people of God.  Here we are talking the language of persons and thinking in plurals not singulars; church is people having a shared parentage, origin, identity and intrinsic connection.  

But it is not so simple as thinking the church is just a product of mission, done by something or someone who is not church.  No sooner is Church the consequence of mission, than it becomes also the conductor of mission. Taking the fruit analogy, the church becomes also the bearer of the Gospel – it becomes the sower, as well as the fruit. Then the progression has necessarily become more complicated. Perhaps it is like the twin strands of mission and church intertwining in a spiral or helix.  And in this process, first one, then the other, is perceived as dominant. If first mission led to church, then church goes on outward in mission which leads to yet further expressions of church. And so the helix continues.

Please note it is not the case that church stays static and only evangelists or apostles move outward or onward in mission.  It is simply not true that they are not part of the church.

That’s handy
Take a simple or stupid analogy. I meet you for the first time and I will very likely put out my hand to shake yours.  In one sense you only touch my hand, but we both understand from that contact, aided by the movements of our eyes, our mouths that will attempt a smile and our words of greeting, that we are meeting each other as persons.  We are not fundamentally engaged in trading or comparing body parts.  My hand symbolizes me.  

For over two hundred years we have suffered a dreadful institutional divorce between mission and the church. It is almost as though the church of the late 18^th century was so unwilling to engage in meeting those outside itself, that the hand of welcome severed itself from the body, and flapped both self-consciously, and sometimes self righteously,  outwards and onwards, to greet those others that its parent body continued to spurn.  Was it then any wonder that the body that lost its hands found it more difficult to greet others in future ? Was it any surprise that those other beings that met only a hand, thought they too should be hands, not bodies. Yet as they watched for longer they saw there were also bodies without hands, but they learnt that these bodies were more secure and had self determination over hands, so at certain points they decided to outgrow being hands and to become more handless bodies.  

It is a revolting picture, but not totally unfair to the history of mission in the world church.  We created missionary societies that all swore were not churches.  They went and created missions that also were not churches, but subservient to them and dependent on them for foreign aid.  When we decided those missions could become churches, at that point they stopped being missions and stopped being missionary too.  Abuse and damage crosses the generations like cancer and repeats itself.

In my judgment, we live at a time of special reconciliation.  In church planting, in the creation of fresh expressions of church, we have seen these divisions crossed, mission and church have met and kissed one another, we have seen hands and bodies reunited as they were intended to be in the economy of God.

Church as bearer and embodier
Fruit and Sower is part of the picture of the relationship between church and mission.  Another pair of words continues and even develops the theme of intimate connection. It is not only true that the church is the bearer of the message. This suggests that Gospel is a package which the church carries in its hand, but which is essentially separate from the body that bears it. This view colludes with the picture of evangelist as messenger, and it supports the frequently cited view of evangelists: Jesus good, church bad. The worry about that last tag is that so often it is deserved. But if church is bad then what power does Gospel have to change people?  

The language of the New Testament tells us church is more than the bearer of the message, it also embodies the message.  This is related to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.  Through the gift of grace and the transformation he brings, we the church experience the first fruits of being in Christ, not just Christ being in us.  We enter something of the loving life of the Trinity and we get our first glimpses of heaven.  The Spirit is a real deposit, not just a promise of some money later.  We see Christ in one another and how we treat each other will be how we treat him.  This is truly astonishing stuff, but the language of the New Testament, for what the Holy Spirit does, encourages it.  His fruit actually grows in us.  We are that new creation in Christ, that 2 Cor 5 talks about.  Christ in you the hope of glory, a dwelling place in which God lives by his Spirit (Eph 2.22).  

I know what the evangelist means when he says “don’t look at me, look at Jesus” but frankly it is not what Paul says when he urges “imitate me as I imitate Christ”. Once more this fits with being the community who are living out being God’s people. When this can be seen in corporate life, people will listen to what we have to say about it. The church is being rightly provocative.  

So the church, the people of God, don’t just carry a message in their hands or even in their heads. They are the message.  How odd and vile then to imagine that the good news can or should be separated from the body, which embodies the good news. When I shake your hand – it is I that I am greeting you with. Without that, my hand is telling you a lie.  

Can church be an agent?
But we need modesty about what the church can do. Though it bears and embodies the message, I think it is however dangerous and presumptive to talk of the church as the agent of mission or of the kingdom. I agree we the church are part of the process, but I know we ourselves cannot confer that which has grasped us.  We live, with the life of Christ within, but are powerless to transfer that life to others. Lesslie Newbigin is thus I think right to insist this role of agent belongs to the Holy Spirit.  God alone brings life.  We are branches who have been grafted into the trunk (Romans 11).  We are not the trunk that sends up the sap. We receive it, flower, fruit and give seed. But then this task of begetting life goes outside our control and competence. Jesus said without me you can do nothing – in terms of giving life.

That does not mean we the church, the people of God, have no role whatever. Those who embody the message show something essential. Those who are sowers have a life enabling task. So the church is also to be welcomed as a sign of the kingdom.  This is linked to its role as witness.[4]  Here let me very briefly explain why I think we can use kingdom texts and direct them to the church. Perhaps it is like this. Kingdom texts act as a calling to the church, not a description of the church. The kingdom is always wider and wilder than church usually becomes. The kingdom texts alert us what the church faces as a challenge to become, not to what its face already looks like.  

Within that understanding, the church being a sign works very well.  Signs are always less than what is signified.  You could have the most expensive sign ever designed that said “ Toronto – X kilometers”, but even the least impressive bits of Toronto would be more real and more important than the sign.  So I am not surprised that the church is less impressive than the kingdom, but nevertheless I want it to point in the right direction. 

Jesus, I think, was likening church to a sign when he spoke of the effect of his people as being like a city set on a hill or a light in the house.  They point to a greater reality.  They show something which enables a view to be had.  David Bosch writes “Jesus’ ministry of erecting signs of God’s initiatory reign was emulated by the early church. Christians were not called to do more than erect signs: neither were they called to do less.”[5]  

Church and mission are intertwined in scripture. It is only our flawed history that has institutionalized the split between them. Mission and Church are not so much fish and chips, different products that we have learnt to like eating together, but they are more like chicken and egg. The one leads to the other and after a time it is genuine difficult to say which came first. If we are among the eggs in which there is the hope of future life, we do well to remember who gave us birth, who kept us warm long enough and what it is that we shall become if we hatch. Cluck Cluck.

Keep up with shifts in what is church
The founders of apostolic communities need some ways to know what is church, not least if they are not going look exactly the same as the inherited expressions.  We do need to know generic values expressing the essence of church that can be applied to any context and with any size of church grouping, whether a small cell or a large Cathedral sized gathering.  Knowing deeply and simply what Church is helps us as through the mission context what is healthy and valid church comes to birth.  

Let me now show you a brief outline of how even the classic four marks of the church are changing in their meaning.  This is an example of how today’s church planters need to have more rigorous training in church thinking, to be able to argue the case for the legitimacy of what they do, and the validity of what has been created through a mission-shaped process.  

As it was
In the past, from about the time of Cyprian who wrote in 250 AD we have spoken about the church being One Holy Catholic and Apostolic.  These words have become part of our creeds and so passed into tradition as having authority and weight.  But notice first the order of the four words.  I suggest to you it is not an accident that One begins the list.  That is not because One comes before Two, it is rather that the then understanding of the word One governs all the others.  Cyprian was a Bishop who was also a Roman Lawyer, writing against a backdrop of schism on the part of rigorous enthusiasts, who accused him of liberal compromise.  Nothing much changes.  As a Roman he understood that the Empire was One because it was united under one strong rule.  That strong rule was delivered by one army that had one way of doing things.  Cyprian in his book actually likens the Church to a Roman Camp.  The whole point is that a Roman Camp on Hadrian’s wall was exactly the same pattern as a camp on the Danube or in Palestine .  Cyprian did not do fresh expressions of camps.  So oneness in the church meant unity and uniformity.  

The Church as Holy in an empire that was not yet Christian was also very clearly about being different, a whole church being separate from the world and separate for Christ. Catholic was being changed at this time from its earlier meaning, of the whole church in a particular place, to the meaning most think of today – that it is universal. Of course in Cyprian’s time that meant a uniformity across the totality.  Oneness clearly controls what catholicity must mean. Being apostolic meant looking back to the one foundation that had been laid, both in the tradition of the message and the pattern of handing on leadership over the generations, to maintain that universal oneness – both now and with the past.

This view works as a summary of Roman based church understanding from Cyprian to 1950 – in the view of Avery Dulles.  Note what is at work as operative forces in its construction: control hierarchy, the past, validation of the present and a "come to us" attitude.  All of this is linkable to the view that oneness, meaning unity and uniformity, is the controlling force.   

Is now… and ever shall be?
Let me contrast that now to a Trinitarian and also mission-shaped church view of what the four marks may mean.

The oneness of the church is not a borrowed view from the cultural inheritance of Empire.  It goes much further back and higher up. It is derived from the Trinity.  Oneness is about a quality and unity in relationships in the Christian community.  Oneness exists to express, in practice, the kind of relational qualities of the Trinity and of the body of Christ.  The Trinity show us the quality of diversity held in unity because of their eternal and interpenetrating love.  This creates a shift in basic theological understanding from the organizational to the relational and from uniformity to the more complex but more flexible unity in diversity.

Holy is most about being caught up into who God is and so his purposes.  It is therefore about seeking God himself and becoming like him in his holiness and his being which is community-in-mission.  Without the transformation that should gradually result, whatever our worship tastes or preaching preferences these are only outward and possibly hypocritical forms of engaging with God.  The point of all public worship is transformation of the Christian community so that it will live out, when dispersed in mission, what it asserts when it is together.  

Catholic is also relational more than organizational and about living connection with other Christians beyond our circle.  This is living out the truth that none in the Body of Christ exist for themselves, or by themselves.  It is expression of a deliberate interdependence.  Paul urges this value in 1 Cor 12 within his image of the Church as a Body.  All of us came from some part of the wider church.  We are called to relate together.  Catholicity connects local church to the wider church now. It celebrates the connection of the church of earth with the church in heaven.  It facilitates the church of now learning from the church from history.  Fresh expressions will need this to be a living and significant part of their identity if they are to be healthy themselves and to be a blessing to the wider church, not just an irritant.  Once again the fierce individualism of evangelists does not fit well here and is once more challenged.   

Being apostolic is a summary of what I have been saying about the way that marks and patterns of Jesus in mission becomes ours. The sending in mission embraces the breadth of the holistic mission of Jesus.  Its Jesus shaped pattern of humble entry to any culture will eventually by followed by challenge to that culture and formation of disciples called out of that culture yet able to continue to relate to it.  This outward journey is our apostolic call; we follow Jesus the Apostle who sends us, as he was sent.  

Of course this apostolic part of being the church is the bit that makes the evangelist zing. This ties most closely with their calling and charism. But you cannot derive the other words or their meaning from simply being more apostolic. Jesus himself did not just engage in apostolic mission, he deliberately spent time with the Father, staying with the influence and agenda of the Holy one.  He lived and taught a Oneness with the Father and the Spirit and grew a oneness with the disciples, indeed he spent inordinate time with them.  He drew on the tradition of the Old Testament, notably Abraham, and the transfiguration shows his catholicity of relationship with Moses and Elijah.  Jesus lived all four marks, so that pattern needs taking on board.  

Look at the different sorts of understandings that underlie and drive the four words.  The motivators are relational values not organizational controls, they are about exploring the future, more than rear facing to the past; they go outwards in mission not inwards in worship and pastoral care.  

A change of shape
I guess we are coming from a distortion in which the oneness held sway for cultural reasons.  We are experiencing a mission-shaped change in our theology, away from One and Holy as dominant.  Impelled by our understanding of God as Community-in-Mission, I confess aided by our desperate state in western mission, I see that the shape and emphasis has changed.  The relational and the missional are becoming the energy poles.  It is vital that it remains both of these.  Again I say, do not put all your eggs into the basket of evangelism and being apostolic.  We neglect identity as part of the whole at our peril, we are called to grow effective community as the best sign of mission and all of it is ceaselessly to be renewed by the search for God and the holiness that grows by being with and in him. 

The challenge from our mission context has shown us that a calling to the creation of fresh expressions as the most obvious way to pursue a calling to be an evangelist.  Our theology shows us this cannot be individualistic and must be communal.  Our history tells us of an unfortunate split of church and mission and the theology of church and mission tells us it is high time to heal the wound or rather sew back the severed limb.  As part of the church, evangelists are called to love the church, rejoice that they are part of the church and become very skillful in assisting in the birth of further expressions of church.

All missionaries to the West and evangelists (and their societies) must choose very carefully what relationship with church is best.  In one sense we have no choice.  We are part of being church and any other view is schismatic and even heretical.  

To be utterly absorbed back in to church is a dangerous future. When the World Mission Council became part of the World Church Council on this basis of an ungodly division, mission and evangelism were swallowed up and went off the agenda for decades, overwhelmed by social action and world at the centre agendas.  Of course much of the inherited church is an enormous problem, but the response to stay as far away as possible – like the separated hand – is theologically wrong and now tactically bad news because we are into creating what theologically are churches, even if they don’t use that name.

Do remember if this seems daunting that the Church has been here several times before and the creativity of the subversive renewing and outward sending Spirit has found a way.   What has been usually important is that the emerging and the inherited keep talking and relating. Then some of the whole body enters into what God is doing.  But even then there is the danger of domestication and the process may well begin again.

For Reflection

·         Think back to your own experience of training. What were you taught about the church?

·         How much of this was negative and perpetuated the church/mission split?

·         Assessing our current context – both tactically and theologically – what now should be in the training of our future leaders?