George Lings

Church for the 21st Century 

I want to paint a mental landscape.  It has a backdrop and a contrasting central feature, to which various elements contribute.

The Backdrop is the depth of crisis in the wider church.

I' m not going to develop themes like the drop in attendees, changing frequency of attendance, the absence of youth and twenties, problems over pensions, the solvency of dioceses, the reduction of numbers of full time clergy.  The details are disputed.  Interpretations range from the upbeat view, "it’s making us leaner but fitter” to "when was anorexia ever healthy?” 

Whatever the facts exactly are, there is a loss of credibility about church.

So Mike Riddell in Threshold of the Future [SPCK 1998 p.1] can speak of the church in the West as being like a dying patient who struggles, through denial and bargaining, to accept the terminal diagnosis given.  We can be negative and shriek, "we can't go on like this much longer" or we can be positive and think we are being offered the most open chance, for 100's of years, to re-imagine church.  I dare to think this may be more radical than the Reformation, but I hope it will be less divisive. 

Of course the negative and the positive are connected.  The credibility crisis gives scope to imagine the future.  Note the words of an African Christian, "nothing will happen until you are desperate enough".  I guess it is a gift, and a judgement of God, that the backdrop of our day is the church's loss of credibility. If then there is a future for the church, it can only be because it is a transforming church.  There are books now that play with such titles.  That is, the church needs to be in the process of itself being transformed by God, to meet today’s mission challenges.  By the grace of God it can be his transforming agent in human lives. 

The backdrop to today's canvas is gathering clouds and a darkening sky.  Yet it makes what is emerging stand out all the brighter.  My job is to track and understand an extraordinary wide variety of new expressions of church.  From it, I know there is creativity and hope. What also fascinates me is that there is some commonality in their search.  In varied ways they are posing the question “what is Church”?  Earlier I rashly suggested that transforming church in our day could be as radical as the Reformation.  Let me unpack that. 

Transforming Church is becoming Counter Cultural 

At the reformation most of the church did not escape the clutches of the state.

“Christendom has become so at home in European culture that it has become the folk religion. Western Ecclesiology has developed in this insular context. It was non-missionary and focused on conflicts between various Christian groups.”
Wilbert Shenk - from 1998 Transmission in tribute to Lesslie Newbigin p5

We have inherited no mission passion in our DNA but rather an instinct for triumph over the views of other deluded or dangerous Christians.  Today we are being firmly elbowed to the margins; we are invited to offer a religious veneer to the ideal of good citizenship, to provide the volunteers for local charitable work, or to add tone to a state occasion.  But to say "Jesus is Lord" or "Jesus is the Truth" is utterly non-PC.  I hope we have the humility to learn from Anabaptists and any other counter cultural groups who refuse to be bought by the state, yet who will not withdraw from engagement in public life.

"Before Constantine, the church was a subversive counter- culture operation. Since then it has had an authenticating role. The time has come for the church to become counter-culture, prophetic, developing a theology of resistance/ insistence.” 
Robert Warren: 1997 paper Towards an Anglican Theology of Change p.3

We are being exiled from our previous position in the centre of society, excluded from using power because it will rightly be seen as oppressive and reactionary.  As "resident aliens" let us continue in vulnerability, to sing the Lord's song in a foreign land - for some will listen to the attraction of godly powerlessness. 

Transforming Church awaits the renaissance of Community

The Reformation, though it put a bible in people's hands, did not challenge the renaissance focus on the individual.  Now new energy is coming via learning from God the Trinity.  Their loving life is the most powerful case for thinking of the church as loving community. 

“Creating community is at the heart of the Christian theological tradition in the doctrine of the Trinity. Individualism, separateness and fragmentation give way to individuality, mutuality and belonging.”
Mike Lowe, A Church Without Walls : Grove Pastoral 63

Indeed the very phrase "the image of God", thus re-interpreted, challenges the legitimacy of individualistic thinking.  So Descartes was mistaken to assert "because I think, I am" - rather it is truer to say, "because I love and I belong that I am".  It is no accident that Descartes made his discovery when he was by himself, shut up in an oven.  So to talk of the Church as a mere assembly or gathering is inadequate, for church is not fundamentally an association of individuals, even if they share a joint call.  Deeper community is demanding yet authentic. Vanier, a contemporary apostle for community reminds us. 

"When Jesus sent his disciples out on mission he told them to be poor to take nothing with them. And he told them to do things that were impossible to do all by themselves. so it is for all missions. Communities and members are called to be poor and to do impossible things such as to build community and to bring healing reconciliation forgiveness and wholeness to people." 
Jean Vanier Community and Growth pp87-88 

I have argued elsewhere that a worship centred approach to mission will now only work for a small minority made up of the older members of existing church fringes.  I have come to think that even process led evangelism - so well done by Alpha - has a shelf life.  Those tired of spin will sift our words. Suspicious post-moderns will rightly deconstruct our verbal claims and try to work out what power over them we seek.  Those hurt by the church won't stay around long enough to listen.  Those furthest out in mission are finding the call is to demonstrate the Kingdom in the quality of community life, before anyone will even ask questions.  You could read booklets Encounters on the Edge 1, 2 or 6 to find out how that works.  Note this: the counter cultural early church did not do their evangelism through worship - they shut the pagans out.  They didn't do it mainly by words; it was the quality of their communal life that counted.

"Monastic life may seem utterly out of tune with the spirit of our times, yet if we are entering another Dark Age, it may be to the wisdom of such a way the Church of today needs to turn … I sense that the renewal of both the Church and Society will come through the re-emerging of forms of Christian community that are homes of generous hospitality, places of challenging reconciliation and centres of attentiveness to the living God."
Brother Samuel SSF 

The Franciscans know how to connect up the counter cultural and the communal, to bring together the spiritual and the missional.  Or consult Alan Kreider's Grove Liturgical study no 32 Worship and Evangelism in Pre Christendom to have that claim demonstrated to you. Link it to a line you do know: "See how these Christians love one another". 

In the re-birth of community and missionary orders I see one sign that... 

Transforming church includes the Rebirth of Apostolic

The Reformation was not radical about ministry. Clerical single priests were only replaced by Clerical married pastor/teachers.  Ephesians 4 tells of 5 church ministries as gifts of Christ.  In pioneer contexts all are needed.  Those sent by God - the basic meaning of apostle, need to hear God - the function of prophets, so they may tell the good news of Christ, the role of evangelists, and only then will there be anyone to pastor and teach.  Christendom thought and taught the first three became redundant. wakefield1.jpg (49158 bytes) Only in 18th century Britain did we see the re-emergence of the evangelist in response to widespread lapsing from faith.  Despite 200 years of evangelism since Wesley, we have lost ground, becoming marginal to society and forced into pioneering once more.  Not surprisingly what have we seen? - the re-emergence of apostolic and prophetic ministries.  Those called to start new things, not just add to old ways.  However, the past evangelism context and the current missionary, or apostolic, one are different.  This is a change of mindset for the church heading into 21st century.

The church has often had an uneasy relationship with its evangelists.  They prefer to relate to the world and the church is glad their disturbing influence occurs out there.  But everyone has known the agreed task set has been to go out from the church to win people back to Christ and the Church.  Christendom could only conceive of a mental journey back to existing church.  If however we are now in a mission field, with many characteristics of a pioneer field, then I consider we are shifted into the world and gifting of the apostolic, not merely the evangelistic.  We cannot simply evangelise and bring people back to a church they have rejected and which is foreign to their culture.  The apostolic task is more exciting and more uncertain - to be sent out to journey with God and them, finding with them, not forcing on them, forms of indigenous church that will continue to speak to their culture. 

Transforming Church is a Response to mission

The Reformation brought in change driven by Scripture. In our day change is being driven by a shift in mission context. Yet I would argue change today is not just enforced adaptability, nor begrudging recognition of a new call. Change driven by mission is deeply biblical order. 

At its very start in the New Testament the Church was a response. Theologically it was a response to the Mission of Jesus, its attitudes were shaped by the Values of the Kingdom, it was propelled into surprised existence by the Reality of the Resurrection of Christ which became central to it's message, and it was empowered in this evolving mission role by the Giving of Spirit.  The Great Commission is but a capstone to a very much bigger mission shaped wall.  Take any one of those realities away and the church would have been different, if it had been at all.  In that sense the church is not a primary theological reality but a secondary one.  It is derived not absolute.  The Church is first the consequence of mission before it is the conductor of mission.  Response is part of its founding calling, so we can welcome becoming counter cultural, more community based and apostolically directed.

How in such a significant set of changes will we preserve the essence while allowing the forms to transfigure.  How will enduring marks of the church be allowed to test what emerges? 

Transforming Church needs 4 dimensional reality.  Up In & Out and OF.  It's essential for church to face upwards to God and grow into his holiness which is bound to be counter cultural.  To become like the one we worship is the best test of worship.  We need to face inwards to one another and grow into the oneness of loving, accepting, diverse community shown us by the Trinity.  This will model what others desperately seek.  We are called to face outwards to those not yet like us, by the Apostolic mandate of Jesus who said "As the Father sent me, so I send you."  This mandate has never been withdrawn. 

But there's one more journey.  Belonging is more than local identity.  Believing is more than what my particular group thinks now, Behaving has criteria set by the ancient scriptures.  The first three factors are good, but they are only 3 out of 4 enduring marks of what it is to be the church. 

As the new emerges it will be essential to affirm the OF journey which is knowing ourselves to be part OF the Church catholic.  We are called to face backwards into history to learn from the wisdom of the past church, we are invited to face sideways in partnership with the wider church now.  Whether we like it or not, we are part of it, because there is only one Body OF Christ.  We will be tempted to write off the old as fussy, stuffy and irrelevant.  I'd call it pride.  We may be seduced into thinking we are free to abandon it.  I'd call that schism.  Equally for the old to call the new an “experiment” is patronising.  To call it a project is to deny it the honourable name of church.  OF is a two way street between old and new – for both are part of the body. 

I confess I do not know how best to handle this.  Our time is so critical that waiting for consensus seems ludicrous and dangerous, yet division cannot commend Christ to others.  I found myself thinking of a CD called Officium that came out in the 1990's.  Let me comment on its approach that somehow models a way.  What you listen to is the Hilliard ensemble. Four male singers are rendering the ordered musical style of ancient plainchant. Alongside is Jan Garbarek on saxophone, jamming modern jazz.  They might fight but they don't.  It becomes extraordinarily creative.  Two different musical traditions - composition and improvisation - create between them more than one alone could offer.  Order and Freedom are heard co-existing in eerie harmony.

We need the new to re-energise the old.  We need the old to inform the instincts of the new.  The new is actually redefining what we think Church is; the old gives us skills by which to evaluate and convey what we discover.  Walk the OF road with gentleness, for both old and new should proceed in humility, knowing scripture tells us that we know in part and prophesy in part.

Dare to live at the boundaries

Where might a counter cultural, apostolic community find an address? I guess it will be on the circumference of what is. Those who pioneer new ways of being church live on the edge of what may have been thought as acceptable. They are called to live on the boundary of what is approved of by the church, and must cross the frontiers between the church and the world. They are to live as wanderers with God as he develops new patterns and ways in mission.  In the same spirit, Stuart Murray Williams and Anne Wilkinson Hayes wrote their Grove Booklet no 49 - Hope from the Margins.  That is the place of learning and discovery.  The Mission writer Wilbert Shenk in Changing Frontiers in Mission is interested in the very term “frontiers” and believes they have changed, from the geographical ones of white Christendom and darkest Africa to the internal frontier of personal inner space.

I share instincts with both authors and what I write is intentionally called Encounters on the Edge. This is a very likely place to rediscover what God intends the church to be. In the vulnerability of the new frontier of a fresh mission context, working with those on the margins, and at the edge of our existing understanding, is the likely place of creativity.  Working in response to the God of Mission will be like this, as he continues to transform all things.  Yet such a future of the church will take us beyond our comfort zones. 

Thinking of these very things I was electrified to find, blue tacked to the wall of the little inner city local church I belong to, these words. 
"Come to the edge" he said 
"We are afraid" they said 
"Come to the edge" he said
They came. 
He pushed and they flew. 
Guillaime Appolinaire