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The Missional Church
By Alan J. Roxburgh
Introduction and Background
Words insinuate
themselves into the vocabulary of a culture when a group uses new language to
articulate something that is felt and needs to find expression. This has
happened with the phrase missional church over the past half dozen
years. In 1998 Eerdmans published a book with the title Missional Church: A
Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America. It was written in
the most unlikely manner by a team of missiologists, theologians and
practitioners who met for three years to compose the book. The book's genesis
lay in the convergence of various people inside a new network called the
Gospel and Our Culture Network (GOCN). Comprised of people from a variety
of church backgrounds (Methodist, Lutheran, Reformed, Baptist and Anabaptist),
GOCN coalesced around the writings of Bishop Lesslie Newbigin, a missionary in
India for over thirty years. Newbigin, upon his retirement in the late 60's,
returned to his native England to discover that the Christian culture he had
left some thirty years earlier had all but disappeared. Having a keen missionary
sensibility, Newbigin recognized that by the latter part of the 20th century the
mission field for the Gospel had shifted dramatically. The greatest challenge
to Christian mission was now those very nations that had once sent missionaries
out around the world. It was the people of Europe, shaped by the Western
tradition, that were rapidly losing their identity as Christian. In one
memorable epithet Newbigin asked the question: Can the West be converted?
That question captured the imagination of many church leaders in the UK and
Europe. It represented one of the fundamental issues that had to be addressed
by the church but had not been articulated clearly until that point. The
challenge facing the Western churches was the re-conversion of its own people.
Newbigin wrote voluminously on this subject, addressing underlying issues and
outlining the missiological challenge such a situation presented to the church.
This European and
UK conversation found its way into North America. Newbigin came to America on
numerous occasions to lecture and teach on the themes of a missionary engagement
with Western society. His writing and conversations caught the attention of
academic missiologists and theologians on this side of the Atlantic where
numerous leaders were themselves struggling with similar questions about the
nature of Christian witness in Western societies at the close of the
millennium. It was out of these stirrings and conversations that a small group
of such leaders began to have more intentional conversations with one another
and, eventually, formed a network that became GOCN. Through its gatherings and
conversations, it became clear that there was a significant amount of work to be
done in addressing issues of Gospel faithfulness in North American culture. It
was against this background that the Pew Charitable Trust provided generous
funding to form the team that wrote Missional Church.
The Missional
Language
The missional
language found expression as the book took form over that three-year period
and thus, became its title. It has now become a part of the lingua franca
of the church in North America. Almost everywhere one goes today the word
missional or the phrase missional church is used to describe
everything from evangelism to re- organization plans for denominations, to how
we make coffee in church basements and denominational meeting rooms. In a very
brief period of time a new form of language entered the common conversation of
the church and diffused itself across all forms of church life. At the same
time, it is still not understood by the vast majority of people in either
leadership or the pew. This is a stunning accomplishment: from obscurity to
banality in eight short years and people still don't know what it means.
These facts
suggest something of the flux, stirrings and search for points of reference that
are now shaping the church in North America. The missional language would have
died and disappeared like so many other words and movements of the church if
there wasn't already present an underlying sense that something is amiss about
the Christian life and identity at this point in time. Anyone with a passing
familiarity with the movements that have shaped the church on this continent
over the past half- century is aware that this has been a period of massive
change and upheaval. It was into this context that the missional
language came and was received as a hopeful sign of how we could talk again
about the challenges facing Christian identity. But at the same time, it is a
testimony to the absorbing power of modernity that the missional language
could become so meaningless so quickly. Each of these sides-the readiness of
the church to receive missional language in the midst of
tremendous flux and change, as well as, the capacity of modernity to absorb and
neutralize it-must be part of our discussion. What is happening behind these
dynamics? What are the implications of the missional language today in
the life of the church?
Missional Church:
What Does it Mean?
In conferences,
teaching sessions or simply dialogue with other leaders, the question is still
continually asked: What do you mean by missional church? The non-clergy are the
most confused by and suspect of the word missional. They perceive it to
be another unnecessary piece of esoteric language invented by clergy and
seminary professors. Thus there is suspicion of the language and not a lot of
trust that it means more than a fancy idea about evangelism or mission. There
is a need for clarity and explanation. Where do we start in a description of
what it means? There are multiple levels to an adequate response which is what
makes the problem of meaning significant. If the language of missional
church is to become a helpful way of forming communities of God's people in
a radically changing culture then we have to spend the time and energy to
understand what is at stake in the language we are using. Simple sentence
definitions are not adequate.
What follows is a
brief overview of how we might approach the issue of describing what is meant by
missional church. Each of the points developed below should be unpacked,
understood, appreciated and engaged within the church in a context of dialogue.
The missional church conversation is far more than finding new words for old
ideas. It is not about putting new paint over the cracked and chipped frames of
an established 'Nay of thinking. The missional church conversation challenges
some of the most basic assumptions we have about the nature and purpose of the
church. Implicit in this conversation is the need to challenge and change some
of our assumptions concerning the practice of church life in North America.
What then are some of the characteristics of this missional conversation?
Missional Church:
Characteristics and Meaning
1. Western
society as mission field:
As indicated in
the introduction, the language of missional church has to do with the
recognition that somehow the Western societies are now themselves a mission
field. This is saying something more than simply needing new evangelism
tactics. To a large extent modern evangelism was practiced from within a
context in which people generally took it for granted that the Christian story
was a normative, regulative part of the cultural backdrop within which they
lived. Put simply, most folks knew the basic story in one form or another.
Evangelism was about understanding why they no longer accepted or lived in the
story, developing a form of presentation or apologetic which addressed those
issues and pressing for commitment. Evangelism assumed an environment of prior
Christian understanding or background.
The use of
missional language is to suggest that this memory of the Christian story as the
essential background to evangelism is, in most Western societies, essentially
lost and can no longer be taken for granted. In this sense, most Western
societies are post-Christian and are mission fields. We can no longer assume
that the Gospel story is part of the cultural narrative of people. Now this is
more- or-less the situation. Certainly, in Europe and England it is the case
that the Christian story is all but a faint and vague memory that has no shaping
power in people's lives except among increasingly small minorities. In 2002 a
major British tabloid published a front-page interview with a Catholic bishop in
that country. The headline quote was: Christianity has almost expired in
the UK! Stark language but not inaccurate. The same comment could be made
for most of Western Europe.
The majority of
the emerging generation in Canada is growing into adulthood with no memory of
the Christian narrative. What must be emphasized here is that twenty- five
years ago this was not the case in Canada. The corrosive forces of change that
had been building up for decades under the surface of popular culture suddenly
reached the tipping point and rapidly transformed the culture. The dislodging
of Christian life in Canada from the mainstream to the margins has been
astoundingly rapid. Canada is not unlike America where the same kind of thing
can and will happen. Thus, the missional language was created in order to
emphasize that we are confronted with a radically new challenge in the West. We
are not in a situation that requires minor adjustments and course corrections.
We're not in a place where simply planting thousands more churches or changing
existing congregations to seeker-driven outlets or developing
methodologies for natural church growth, is going to address the massive
changes now transforming the landscape of the West. We need to fundamentally
rethink the frameworks and paradigms that have shaped the church over the last
half-century. The basic stance of denominations and congregations must be
transformed to that of missionaries in their own culture. This requires far
more than adjustment. It calls for a radically new kind of church.
2. Mission is
about the missio dei: Latin phrases may not be the most appropriate form of
communication in the 21st century, but this one does capture a theme central to
the missional conversation. If the West, including North America, is once again
a mission field within which the central narratives of the Gospel have been
either lost or profoundly compromised by other values and stories, then the
focus of this mission is the God who has encountered us in Jesus
Christ-the One whom we confess in the Trinitarian confession of Father, Son and
Spirit. This may seem like such an obvious statement that it needs no comment;
however, this is not the case. The missional conversation is convinced that
throughout Western societies, and most especially in North America, there has
occurred a fundamental shift in the locus of the understanding and practice of
the Christian story. It is no longer about God and what God is about in the
world; it is about how God serves and meets human need. More specifically, the
God who encounters us in Jesus Christ has become the spiritual food court for
the personal, private, inner needs of expressive individuals. The result is a
debased, compromised, Gnostic form of Christianity which is not the Gospel at
all.
The biblical
narratives are about God's mission in, through and for the sake of the
world. The focus of attention is toward God not the other way around. The
missio dei is about a theocentric rather than anthropocentric
understanding of Jesus' life, death and resurrection which itself, as the
apocalyptic engagement of God with the world, breaks into creation in order to
call forth that which was promised from the beginning-that in this Jesus all
things will be brought back together and made new. The focus of this movement
is doxological. It is not about, in the modem, Western, expressive
individualist sense, meeting my needs. The personal pronoun is not the subject
of the narrative; God is the subject. This is a
fundamental element in the missional conversation. Enough has been
written about this issue of the locus and intention of the Gospel and its
debasement to an individualistic, needs-centered story in North America that it
doesn't require further expansion in this brief essay. But whenever this part
of the conversation takes place, it creates consternation and confusion among
both clergy and laity alike. If, they ask, the Gospel isn't about the
individualistic, personal-need-focus of expressive individuals in North America,
then what is the nature of the Gospel? The question reveals the level at which
our framework must be radically changed in order for the people in North America
to hear and practice the Christian narrative once again. There can be no
minimizing the level of the change required for the Gospel to be heard again in
the West. The language of missional was coined in order to capture and
express a) the locus of the Gospel on God and God's actions, b) the depth of the
compromise that has overtaken Christian life and c) the extent of the challenge
we face in addressing this situation.
3. Missional
church is about the nature and purpose of the church:
The church is an
essential part of the missional conversation. The question which the authors of
the book Missional Church set out to address was the nature of the
church in North America as the agency of God's mission in the world. That part
of the discussion focused attention on two critical areas of dialogue a) the
nature of the culture in which we currently are located as North Americans and
b) the purposes of God in the world as revealed by Jesus Christ and his Gospel.
In terms of the former, the church is no longer at the center of the culture.
This raises fundamental questions about the relationship between Christian life
and the pluralistic culture in which we now live. In terms of the latter, the
message of Jesus was about the in-breaking of the reign of God into the
world. Therefore, on the basis of both these motifs, the church is the called
out community of God in the midst of the specificity of a culture. The
genitive in that phrase (the of God) is not an objective but a subjective
genitive. In other words, the church is called out for the sake of God;
this is what God has done in Jesus Christ in order to call into being a new
society whose life and focus is God.
The church is,
therefore, an ecclesia, a called out assembly whose public life is a
sign, witness, foretaste and instrument to which God is inviting all
creation in Jesus Christ. The church, in its life together and witness in the
world, proclaims the destiny and future of all creation. In this sense, local
congregations are embodiments of where God is calling all creation. The church
anticipates the eschatological future of all created things through the power of
the Spirit. This is why Lesslie Newbigin gave so much energy in his early
writing to understanding the nature of election in the biblical
narratives of the reign of God. Election is not the rescue of human
beings from some future damnation. It is the call of men and women (in the
mystery of God's purposes) to submit their lives to the God who encounters us in
Jesus Christ for the sake of the world. Again, to put that into the
context of the church in North America (which is largely middle class and
suburban) the call of God is to a vocation for the sake of the world, not
one's own personal needs. In this context (and not any other in this
conversation) the church is not a gathering of those who are finding their needs
met in Jesus. This is a terrible debasement of the announcement of the reign of
God. The God we meet in Jesus calls men and women in exactly the opposite
direction-to participate in a community that no longer lives for itself and its
own needs but as a contrast society whose very life together manifests
God's reign. How the North American church could take this story, especially
one focused around the One who, according to Philippians 2 emptied himself
by giving up all his rights in obedience to the Father, into a story about
God wanting to meet my needs, is a question that makes abundantly clear
the church's own need for radical conversion to the Gospel of God in Jesus
Christ.
4. As a
contrast society the church is formed around a set of beliefs and practices
which continually school and form it in a way of life which cannot be derived
from the particular culture in which it is found, but must be embodied in
translatable forms within a particular culture. Our North American culture is
commonly designated as a modern or a postmodern one in which individual rights
are paramount. We live in a context where it is simply assumed that in this
tolerant and open society personal rights, feelings and desires are to be
affirmed. As a contrast society the church is formed around a set of beliefs
and practices that continually shape it in a way of life which cannot be derived
from the particular culture in which it is found but must be embodied in
translatable forms within a culture. Therefore, missional church is about what
Catholic missiologists call ressourcement meaning a return to the
sources. Missional church is not about the modern mantra that we must reject
the insular, conforming demands of the past with their so-called cultural
captivities, for some new future that is all about meeting the needs of
middle-class expressive individuals. Missional church, like the biblical texts
of Jeremiah and Isaiah, is convinced that God has brought the Western church
into an experience of liminality within its own cultural world, a place of
marginalization, in order that through its loss, anxiety and chaos, it might
hear again the Word of God. This was the experience of the exile in Babylon.
The missional
church conversation does not claim a parallel between our situation and that of
Judah after 587 BC. The language of exile is alien to the North American
imagination. People look at churches full of people and it seems to them that
these are signs that all is well in the land. Indeed, the assumption is that if
there is a problem with a specific congregation or denomination, in terms of
dwindling membership or finances, it is because that particular group has wedded
itself to outdated methodologies. All that needs to be done is to figure out
the correct methodology for the moment and recalibrate the system for success
just like those other church groups that seem to be thriving. This is precisely
the lie that the religious leaders of Jerusalem used against Jeremiah prior to
the exile. It was all a matter of finding the right tactics; God was, after all
on their side and nothing could change that reality. Therefore, a little change
here, a little tweaking there and all would be well. This is the situation
today.
But the formation
of a missional church is going to be a very costly matter. It calls for a
people who are willing to conform their lives to practices and habits of
Christian life which, at their root, are about the willingness to give up one's
personal needs and rights. This is a terrifying, archaic, almost anti-human
thing for most contemporary people to imagine. Human life is not about my needs
and me! The humanity that God calls into being in Jesus Christ is one shaped by
obedience and conformity to habits and practices learned by God's people in the
Old Testament through the Torah and in the early church through the
development of catechesis, offices and practices. Therefore, the missional
church is about a way of life that cuts across the grain not only of the culture
but the pastoral models of therapeutics or management and control. Missional
church is about the formation of a people in the particularity and materiality
of real contexts in neighborhoods and communities. Therefore, missional
leadership is more about the rediscovery of the ancient work of the abbot
among a people. This is terrifyingly hard work for contemporary pastors because
nothing in their training or habit of life has prepared them for such a
vocation. The missional church conversation calls for leaders themselves to
become novices; but novices who return to ancient practices and novices who
choose to live under the authority of Scripture among a community of people
where the I is replaced by the We.
The Work of a
Missional Ecclesiology
A major critique
of the missional church conversation is that it's primarily an academic
discussion among intellectuals and academics which, while interesting and
important, does not lend itself to practical application in congregations and
denominations. It is fair to say that has been true. From its beginnings the
conversation, shaped to a large degree by the Gospel and Our Culture
movement, has been the academic and intellectual work of missiologists,
theologians and biblical scholars seeking to bring theological and sociological
resources to the question of the church's missional engagement with our own
culture. The numerous books written by members of the Gospel and Our Culture
Network (GOCN) reflect that engagement. This has been an appropriate focus of
work and energy. There was a need to frame the issues the church must address
in our context first, from a missiological, theological and biblical
perspective. The importance of this focus was that it made clear that the
missional church conversation was not just one more tactic for church growth or
other pragmatic means of success. The work of these academics underlined the
extent and depth of the issues that face the churches of the West. Therefore,
the critique of the movement is accurate and yet fails to be cognizant of the
monumental shift in biblical and theological imagination required of the
church. The church must return to its sources not by copying some past time but
by discerning the shape of a faithful Christian witness today. A second element
of the "too theological, too academic" critique from pastors and denominational
leaders is the reality that in North America the churches and schools in the
20th century often failed to cultivate leaders with the intellectual capacities
to understand or teach theology. Theology is sometimes considered an abstract
discipline with little real relevance for the practical work of pastoral
ministry. There is a critical need for theologically informed leaders capable
of engaging their people in a very different kind of reflection on what is
happening in their lives and in the church at this moment in time. It is only a
church that re-enters the power of its rich theological and biblical traditions
that will have any chance of missionally engaging the culture.
Having said all
that is not to deny that the missional church conversation has, to a very large
extent, failed to address the issues of translation. It has remained a
relatively theoretic and abstract academic conversation about the church. Its
books and ideas have been shaped more by internal conversations within the
missiological academy than attentiveness to the needs of the churches. Unless
this critical issue is addressed, the missional movement will die because it has
failed to create an environment, which can nourish its life in the churches.
The answer here is not the creation of more missional books. Commentaries and
hermeneutics on missional issues relative to scriptural interpretation is an
important work for academics which will, over the long term, bear fruit for the
church. But the pressing need of the moment is for three things. First,
translation of materials and resources that make available to pastors and
leaders the rich resources have already been developed within the missional
conversation. This work has yet to be done with any seriousness.
Second, there is a critical need to understand how people
learn, how they enter into dialogue as communities of learners that results in
change. Paulo Friere in Latin America understood that change is not simply a
matter of transmitting information but requires a whole new way of thinking
about how people learn for themselves. The missional church movement must
address this issue of pedagogy and change if this critical conversation is to
diffuse into the churches in ways that bring about a deep shift in understanding
and action.
Third, there is a
need to develop tools and resources that congregational and denominational
leaders can use in the work of missional transformation. Within certain
elements of the missional church conversation there has existed a resistance,
perhaps disdain, for this kind of practical work. But the nature of the case is
that most of us learn by doing, by involving ourselves in processes of missional
action that enable us to see an alternative way of being the church. The
majority of us do not first learn a set of abstract ideas and then put them into
practice. Without well-developed tools, processes and resources for innovating
and cultivating missional church, the movement is dead at birth. To this point
a few of those within the missional conversation have focused their attention on
addressing this issue. People like Craig Van Gelder, Pat Keifert and myself
from within the missional church movement have made available such tools for the
practical application of missional church in congregations and denominational
systems.
In conclusion, the
missional church conversation is one of the most hopeful movements to emerge in
the last decade. This is partly why the term quickly became popular throughout
the church. It is an indication of the church's searching for ways to
understand its current malaise and discover a faithful and fruitful future under
the reign of Christ.
This article first
appeared in
Theology Matters
(A Publication of Presbyterians for Faith, Family and Ministry) Vol 10 No 4
(Sept/Oct 2004). It is reprinted with permission.
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