I've been struck many times over the last decade or so how often the call for mission is raised as a response to the state of the Church. The attendance statistics etc. are trotted out in an attempt to challenge the Church on it's use of resources, on how it spends it's time or allocates it's cash etc. Mike Frost talked on Thursday about what do we organise Church around... do we organise it around worship - mission/evangelism focussed on invitation to our Worship meeting, creativity focussed on producing our Worship meeting, evaluation and discipleship based on attendance at/participation in our worship gathering etc. So when numbers begin to drop we ask ourselves what do we do to build up the numbers, the health of the church is measured by the worship gathering... so... as we face the apparent death of church as we know it we begin to ask "What are we going to do?" and what we decide to do is more often than not based on the simple question... what will get most people "in"?
The missional imperative cannot come from that understanding of church... why? Well, to begin with it has (at least) two linked problems... 1) Churches that do not have a problem filling their pews (for whatever reason - centralisation, the brain drain, transference, even growth etc.) have no need for urgency, so Mission becomes the task of the "failing" churches, and 2) we will fall into the trap of focussing on what we do "in" the church, we become production focussed - we believe that we must first make what we do in our worship gatherings as "good" as possible so that a) people will want to come and b) they will want to stay... to put it crudely we have to keep them entertained!
Frost says that we need to make a shift from having worship as the organisational hub of the church to seeing mission as the catalyst from which the life of the church flows... he says that mission does not necessarily flow from worship, worship however, naturally flows from being missional - as we engage we find that we need to come before God on bended knee and as we encounter God at work in the world we respond with real praise etc. - Discipleship, he says, does not happen from simple attendance/participation in Church (something even Willow Creek now recognise) but comes from faith at the coal face of culture... Much as we hate to admit it, Church is almost universally organised around the worship gathering, mission has become a tool of maintenance!
Leslie Newbigin wrote in 1987 (Evangelism in the City)
We have good new to tell... It is not communicated if the question uppermost in our minds is about the survival of the church in the inner city. Because our society is a pagan society, and because Christians have in general failed to realize how radical is the contradiction between the Christian vision and the assumptions that we breathe in from every part of our shared existence, we allow ourselves to be deceived into thinking of the church as one of the many 'good causes' which need our support and which will collapse if they are not adequately supported. If our 'evangelism' is at bottom an effort to shore up the tottering fabric of the church (an it sometimes looks like that) then it will not be heard as good news. The church is in God's keeping. We do not have the right to be anxious about it. We have our Lord's word that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. The nub if the matter is that we have been chosen to be the bearers of good news for the whole world, and the question is simply whether we are faithful in communicating it.
(edit) When Newbigin refers "the tottering fabric of the church" I don't think he is primarily talking about "fabric" in terms of our buildings, I think he means the institutions, traditions and the human structures that we hold on to.
Technorati Tags: Church: Mission: Missional: theology
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