Starting Again

[Danny Saunders]

I commend Bishop Hale's initiative to have Stuart Robinson as our guest at the recent Eastern Region Clergy Conference. Robinson's facilitation of discussion of 'Starting Mission-Shaped Churches' was excellent. We need to be a church 'on mission' if we're to survive.

Frankly the traditional church, including the Anglican Church of Melbourne, is in its death throws. Let's stop patting each other on the back, thinking we're all doing a great job, having talk/forum fests, thinking GAFCON's going to save the world as long as we preach Friday/Sunday sermons. The fact is, on conservative estimates, over 19 million Aussies are going to hell and unless one of them walks into our churches we're usually doing nothing about it.    

The answer is to plant new missional churches, either within existing Anglican congregations or if necessary, new churches 'affiliated' with the parent Anglican church. Anglican churches not on mission should be left to die in order to start again. We need new, fresh expressions of mission minded churches with mission minded people. It has been proven time and time again that these types of churches are the most effective in reaching the lost. Missionaries are not those sent overseas but every single person in our pews. This will involve sacrificial giving, serving and praying, praying for God's vision and opportunities for church planting and that He would have mercy on our nation.  

For more on this see:  

http://www.steveaddison.net/2006/09/26/the-trouble-with-melbourne-anglicans.html#comment-2632

and,

www.next1000.org

[Pete Young]

Whoa.. Lots of of the M-word in that post Danny.

I think just saying the church needs to be missional, and that we need to plant missional churches is incomprehensibly broad. Do you mind defining what this means exactly?

Is being missional something cultural or something structural?
Is being missional really a collective or an individual choice?
How do we be truly 'missional' while still caring for those in the flock?

I think it's all very well to use buzz words and predictions of gloom, and sure, the "missional church" sounds very exciting - but I think you need to get some more clarity around it.

[Danny Saunders]

Thanks Pete for your feedback. I was really only attempting to start a discussion so that's why I haven't provided definitions. I have assumed people are familiar with these terms. Can I have your email address & I can send you an essay on this topic that you might find useful? Otherwise, I suggest you read 'Starting Mission-Shaped Churches' by Stuart Robinson and maybe some books by Leslie Newbigin, Mark Driscoll and Tim Keller and go from there. To me the problem is less about ecclesiology and more about our lack of missiology. Our missiology should drive our ecclesiology rather than vice versa.  

[Matt Williams]

Danny wrote:
"Our missiology should drive our ecclesiology rather than vice versa."

Hey Danny, that sounds like a pretty big claim. Would you mind explaining what you mean by it?

Matt

[Andrew Bowles]

I agree about the importance of church planting and thinking of the mission. I think it would help if this sort of vision was tempered more by a focus on renewed love for God and for unsaved people, which is the driver of mission. Mission discussions that focus on the urgent need for action, our denominational failure and imminent death skate close to creating a climate of fear and guilt in the church, which won't help. I think Peter Corney's historical parallel with the Evangelical revivals in Britain helps with this, the sense that the 'dry bones' are not hopeless, but they can only live by the gracious word of God who revives them (Ez 37).

[jwhkuan]

Yes please, I'd like to hear more about that too.  Esp in response to John Hull's theological response to the CoE MSC report.

And I think you mean 'death throes' not 'death throws'.  

[Danny Saunders]

I would have thought it was a pretty obvious statement to decipher for scholars, forum-philes and word-smiths such as yourselves. Jesus' teaching in the Gospels is more about being on mission than maintaining structures and denominations. The rest of the NT has more to do with how we go about fulfilling our part of the mission of God than it does about maintaining a particular visible church structure or denomination or even doctrine of church. Therefore the basic idea follows - our concern should be missiology - how we go about doing mission and being on mission, rather than ecclesiology - what the church is and how to maintain it. I'm not saying ecclesiology isn't important, of course it is - but the primary question(s) should be about our misiology not our ecclesiology. Our missiology should drive our ecclesiology and not the other way around. How we do mission drives how we do church rather than how we do church driving how we do, or as a result of inward looking dead ecclesiology, how we don't do mission (think Anglo-Catholic ecclesiology). By mission of course I mean fulfilling the Great Commision and working in the harvest, doing evangelism and outreach and seeing lost people come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. We need a contextual, relevant missional ecclesiology. A missional ecclesiology is one where the church functions in a way that is most conducive to gospel mission work, to evangelism and outreach, rather than maintenance work. The harvest is plentiful but the churches are few.        

[Tim Patrick]

There's a kitsch statement in 'Mission-Shaped Church' (although I think they've actually nicked it from somewhere else) that goes: 'It's not the church of God that has a mission in the world, but the God of mission who has a church in the world.'

Cheesiness aside, what do people think of that? Unlike much of the traditional-church bashing Emerging Church literature, this seems to want to prioritise mission while upholding the importance of the church as one of God's primary means. It pushes a missional ecclesiology rather than a missiology that's negative about church.

[Matt Williams]

Sorry, brother, I really don't agree. Your vision for the church sounds like a kind of gospel pyramid scheme.

The church must not be reduced to merely a vehicle for further mission. It needs to be a lot more than that. It is called to be missional, but it is also called to be holy, and righteous, and united, and orderly - many-faceted exemplars of a community redeemed into Christ Jesus. In other words, it is called to be something (Christ-like) and that includes doing many things (including undertaking the mission that Christ began), not just grabbing onto a mission goal and deriving its shape from whatever seems most conducive to multiplication in the present age.

If we want to identify drivers, I would have thought the shape of the church (ecclesiology) should be primarily driven by Christology. Since Christ not only was holy but sought to draw people in to share his holiness, a part of Christology is a missional heart. We too are called both to be holy and to draw people in to share in God's holiness with us in imitation of Christ; including his missional heart. Thus missiology can be seen as a sub-unit of ecclesiology, not the controlling driver of ecclesiological shape, because there is more to Jesus than mission, and the church is called to imitate Christ in all respects, not only his missional heart.

Danny wrote: "Jesus' teaching in the Gospels is more about being on mission than maintaining structures and denominations. The rest of the NT has more to do with how we go about fulfilling our part of the mission of God than it does about maintaining a particular visible church structure or denomination or even doctrine of church."

In fact I thnk Jesus said a surprising amount about church order and protocol considering there wasn't one yet. And the rest of the NT is mostly apostolic attempts to rescue good order, doctrinal, moral and gospel fidelity in the visible church. There is hardly anything at all in the NT telling the churches to get out there and evangelise: but there is a lot about how to live faithfully as the people of God. I agree that getting churches sorted in terms of authority, doctrinal and moral fidelity consistutes a significant part of "how we go about fulfilling our part in the mission of God", but it nonetheless rather undermines your point, because it is also about "what the church is and how to maintain it."

Blessings
Matt

[Danny Saunders]

Thank you Matt for setting out the appropriate goals of our ecclesiology - Christlikeness, not institutional,  structural or denominational survival. Hence I stated previously that ecclesiology is important for the many reasons you have articulated and certainly many more.

However, my reading of the Great Commission is that the priority is on 'go and make disciples' - thus a missional thrust, a missional driver. Baptising and teaching are secondary, not in the sense that they're not important but simply the reality that you can't baptise and teach someone to obey with any transforming effect if they haven't already become a believer. Therefore 'go and make disciples' is the driver, once we have a disciple(s) we can administer sacraments and teach Christlikeness and form church.

My discussion starter wasn't meant to be purely academic but a more practical concern with the current state of our society. In our current context, where there are so many people outside of church facing God's wrath, our focus should be on mission not ecclesiology. Of course they're related but without mission there is no church - which is why churches that abandon the mission of God soon die or at least become irrelevant or simply become purveyors of medieval culture. Thus for a healthy ecclesiology the driver and priority must be on mission as seen in the Great Commission.    

I would have thought in the context of bringing the gospel to our culture '...whatever seems most conducive to multiplication in the present age.' is exactly what we should be thinking about and doing if we share the heart of God, which is a heart for the lost, a heart for redemption, a heart for mission. Doesn't 'making disciples' necessitate multiplication? Of course the mission never changes, we don't change the gospel, but our methods and our ecclesiology must and can change. Therefore missiology is and must be the driver (go and make disciples) with sanctification/Christlikeness (teaching them to obey) always the goal. But again ecclesiology is secondary, ecclesiology must be adaptable to be culturally relevant in order to seek and save the lost in the present age. Or are we just playing at mission because we're majoring on church?

 

[Matt Williams]

Hey Danny,

"However, my reading of the Great Commission is that the priority is on 'go and make disciples' - thus a missional thrust, a missional driver. Baptising and teaching are secondary, not in the sense that they're not important but simply the reality that you can't baptise and teach someone to obey with any transforming effect if they haven't already become a believer. Therefore 'go and make disciples' is the driver, once we have a disciple(s) we can administer sacraments and teach Christlikeness and form church."

I think you need to reconsider the grammatical structure of Mt 28:28. 'Make Disciples' is the imperative on which which two participial clauses hang: 'baptizing' and 'teaching'. Those participial clauses could be instrumental - make disciples by baptizing and teaching; or epexegetical - make disciples meaning baptizing and teaching; but they cannot represent consecutive actions - make disciples then baptize and teach them to obey everything Jesus commanded.

In other words, there is no content to 'making disciples' in Mt 28:28 other than baptizing them in the name of the trinity and teaching them to obey everything Jesus commanded. We can't really make disciples first and then do the rest as a secondary imperative.

Anyway, the problem I'm driving at, brother, is that if we perpetually take it upon ourselves to splinter out of established ecclesiastical structures because of missional pragmatism, in that very mission-motivated act we contradict the mission of Christ. We set ourselves up as lithe little unfettered missional missiles precisely by failing to be the church Christ sought to establish!

As PA pointed out the other night, Paul was speaking to a very mixed up Corinthian church when he said "if anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy that person. For God's temple is holy, and you are that temple." (1 Cor 3:17) And again in 2 Corinthians, rather than urging the orthodox to leave the super-apostles to die and organise breakaway groups, he says "Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you." (2 Co 13:11) Our conduct within a missional church, no matter how pumping we are with prophetic words, is to be informed by the nature of God, "For God is a God not of disorder but of peace." (1 Cor 14:33)

Part of the problem, as I see it, is that we often start with the assumption of reality - the splintered denominational Christianity around us and then move straight from there to expressing mission in that context. But I think we are called firstly to see how far our present splintered reality falls short of Jesus' strongest desire for his church - that they may be one, as he and the Father are one - and then work out what it means to express mission as a whole church in this ideal construct; and only then consider how that might play out in the limitations of our present circumstances. The fractured fabric of the church today is not God's seal of approval on any new fractures we might wish to open up for missional expediency, it is a tragic outcome of Satan's work among the flock of God. For the new generation of shepherds in God's church to recommend we leave the frail flock already entrusted to us "to die" while we seek more exciting flocks elsewhere seems to me to correspond neatly with Satan's agenda. If we cannot be faithful with a little, will God entrust more to us?

Blessings
Matt

[Jereth]

Interesting interchange.

I basically agree with Danny and Tim that the key reason for the church's existence is mission, as gathered from the NT's teaching. The church is not an end in itself -- the end is the gathered resurrected multitude in the new heavens and new earth giving glory to God in Christ. I do not see in Scripture any prescription for a particular type of church order or structure. Church structures are something that develop under the pressures and needs of the times. Church structures are not a "given". We do not start with a particular church structure and then say "right, now how can we work with this to do mission?"

Having said that Matt is also accurate in saying that the church should be holy, righteous and orderly.

We should avoid too narrow an idea of "mission". I don't think mission is just evangelism, although evangelism is (as I understand from scripture) the primary activity of the church. I think "mission" encompasses all the activities involved in ushering in God's kingdom -- which is broader than just evangelism.

I think Danny is right in suggesting that the old denominational structures are failing. The Australian churches are ample evidence of that. If they don't facilitate mission, or indeed impair it, they should be revised. But this is not the same as saying let's all join the emerging church.

Jereth

[Matt Williams]

Hey Tim,

Regarding:  'It's not the church of God that has a mission in the world, but the God of mission who has a church in the world.'

As so often with theological dichotomies, I think it is a false one.

I'd rather say,
Because the God of mission has a church in the world, the church of God has a mission in the world.

Or something like that.

But obviously from my replies to Danny I would say the church of God has more than a mission in the world: it has a calling to be something, not only to do something. And part of what we are called to be is "one".

Blessings
Matt

[Matt Williams]

Hey Jereth,

"The key reason for the church's existence is mission"? What happened to glorifying God and enjoying him forever? And surely the true church (which we have to treat the visible church as for the time being) is the resurrected multitude giving glory to God? So the key reason for the churches existence is to be the people God has redeemed. We are not instruments of mission in God's toolkit first; human beings redeemed to enjoy fellowship with a loving God second. Surely it has to be the other way aroud?!

Interesting that you have tried to broaden the idea of 'mission'; that was why I asked Danny to clarify in the first place - in case he was working with a definition of missiology that was so broad I could find more conceptual agreement, if we expressed it differently. But it turned out he wasn't!

Nonetheless I agree that we should revise our church structures if they fail to express the mission of Christ.  But not by abandoning what already is or flouting church authorities already in place, but rather by working with them. Nor should we look at the question of 'what will maximise our multiplication' in isolation. We should ask that question in proper theological context with all the other things the church is called to be - so that in our passion for mission we don't otherwise lose our fidelity to the call of Christ.

Blessings
Matt

[Jereth]

On the slow death of the traditional churches (and the rise of non-traditional ones):

http://blogs.theage.com.au/thereligiouswrite/archives/2007/06/

[Andrew Bowles]

Jereth wrote:

On the slow death of the traditional churches (and the rise of non-traditional ones):

http://blogs.theage.com.au/thereligiouswrite/archives/2007/06/

I don't know if the article quite shows that. Yes, Pentecostal churches are growing, but the next after them apparently are Eastern Orthodox, and they don't get much more traditional than that.

My analysis would be that secularisation over the last few decades has had a deeper impact on denominations that had large numbers of nominal Christians than on marginal groups such as Pentecostals, where you would only join if you were genuinely committed to the movement. That has translated into a stronger culture of discipleship and evangelism, and consequently they've been better positioned for growth in recent times. I don't think the level of 'traditionality' has much to do with it. The emerging church movement shows that a lot of younger people are very attracted to traditional Christian practices.

[Jereth]

Andrew Bowles wrote:

I don't know if the article quite shows that. Yes, Pentecostal churches are growing, but the next after them apparently are Eastern Orthodox, and they don't get much more traditional than that.

I read an analysis of this last year; if I remember correctly the growth of Eastern Orthodoxy is due to immigration of people from Orthodox countries, moreso than evangelism/mission.

cheers
Jereth

[Tim Patrick]

Matt Williams wrote:

I'd rather say,
Because the God of mission has a church in the world, the church of God has a mission in the world.

Thanks for this - it's a helpful corrective for us.

While I love the fact that the original catchphrase promotes the church as God's means of reaching the world (something we too often overlook when we assume that 'doing church' and 'doing mission' are wholy different activities), it falls short for me in it's failure to recognise that, this side of the return of Jesus, the church is also the goal of mission.

I've seen too much evangelism that offers people something true to believe in, without necessarily offering them something healthy and exciting to belong to. I suspect this goes back to our lack of practical understanding about the meaning of being 'raised with Christ' even now. Perhaps this is another call for more thinking about integrated theologies of cross and resurrection.

Tim

[Danny Saunders]

Thanks for that Matt.
I think you're assuming many things that I haven't said, perhaps in order not to take a discussion about missiology seriouly?

Some of what you say borders on the rediculous, you say:
'For the new generation of shepherds in God's church to recommend we leave the frail flock already entrusted to us "to die" while we seek more exciting flocks elsewhere seems to me to correspond neatly with Satan's agenda.'

If you read over what I've said and Peter Corney's article that I provided a link to (that no one seems to have bothered to read) - I've never suggested leaving the "frail flock already entrusted to us 'to die'" nor have I suggested ecclesiology is not important nor unnecessary nor have I ever said, as you have assumed, that the churches work is only about mission or that it won't be ordered or informed by Christology, the nature of God, etc, etc.

Most of what you have said just goes off on tangents. I have attempted to confine our discussion to 'mission' and 'missiology'. I think what I've said quite clearly is we need to think harder at what it means to fulfill the Great Commission, be missional, start new expressions of church (even Anglican fresh expressions which is what I initially suggested), in a way that may require missiology to drive our ecclesiology in order to see more people come to a saving knowledge of Christ. The grim reality of our current situation requires this discussion.

Of course, this will involve good teaching, great commitment, discipleship and maturity from those of our flock that do this work with us. I doubt very much that these things that I'm talking about are part of "Satan's agenda" and it's a disservice to this discussion to bring it to that level. Anyway, how is it you're so aware of "Satan's agenda"?

Perhaps you need to think carefully about what Jesus means in John 15:1-17? Perhaps as Jesus says in verse 2, letting go of parts of the church that are unfruitful is a work of God to enable the fruitful parts to be even more fruitful? What Jesus says in John 15 suggests that schism may be a cleansing work of God. Wasn't this the case in the 16th century? Jesus appoints us to 'go and bear fruit' again the priority is on mission and when the church bears fruit (which of course is more than mission, we also need to love one another!) this is to the Father's glory. Let's live and work for that.

[Tim Patrick]

Guys,

Thanks for the vigorous discussions. I think these are all good topics for us to be engaging with.

I am, however, going to put in a word as moderator and ask that we all take a breath before posting our messages to ensure they are full of grace towards our interlocutors. I really don't ever want have to use my power of censorship but there are some things that I am going to find hard to let through.

Let's argue the points with passion, but let's also show love towards each other in a way that honours and represents Christ.

Many thanks,

Tim