1
The Union of Form and Content
Mission-shaped Church is a flawed document. Yet, at present, it determines the shape of ecclesiology in the Church of England. The flaws of the report are both theological and philosophical. We will highlight some of the theological concerns. Behind many of them lies a philosophical mistake that is too significant to pass over. Theology is the fulfilment of philosophy. All the same, theology needs philosophy if it is to expound the Christian revelation with clarity and consistency. The underlying philosophical mistake is that the forms of the Church are one thing and its inner reality is another. This is the mistake of attempting to disentangle ‘form’ from ‘content’.
As the report sees it, the Church can take an endless number of forms. In each case it is the same Church, but expressed in different ways. We can change the practices of the Church, her forms of life, as and when we like, to fit in with the surrounding culture. This treats the disciplines and practices of the Church as so much outward clothing.
The argument of Fresh Expressions would make no sense unless the ‘outward forms’ of the Church were one thing and the inner message or essence of the Church another. It allows for radical changes in the way the Church lives without – as they assure us – reinventing the Church of England in the process. We argue that this is a mistake. Form and content are much more closely bound up with one another. The theoretical basis for Fresh Expressions rests on a mistake about ‘expression’.
It is certainly possible to make a distinction between form and content. The distinction is a useful one. By ‘content’ we mean what the Church is about: its message, purpose and identity. By ‘form’ we mean the way this is lived and embodied. Form relates to what we call practices and disciplines of the Church. It is obvious that we can distinguish these two ideas; the mistake is to suppose that we can separate them. They are bound together: the content is in the form; the meaning is in the practices. Change the form and we change how we understand the content; change the practices and we at least risk changing the meaning. That is what we argue in this chapter.
For an excellent example of the interweaving of inward ‘meaning’ (or message) and outward ‘form’ (or practice), we have only to turn to Mission-shaped Church itself. The authors describe the pioneering work of Vincent Donovan among the Masai in East Africa:
Significant cultural challenges arose. A notable example was that Masai men and women do not eat meals together. Communion then raised very basic issues. But the converted Masai understood that the change of their beliefs included that Christ made different kinds of people one, because they were equally loved, and this pattern would have to change. So men and women of the Masai ‘brotherhood of God’ (their name for church) ate together for the first time – ever. (pp. 92–3)
The association of Christians across old divisions and differences is an important way in which the forms of the Church embody its Faith. This example is all the more striking since the report itself endorses segregated communities and the idea of the ‘homogeneous unit principle’, as we will discuss in Chapter 4.
The language of fashion and fusion
To see the extent to which form and content are dissociated in Fresh Expressions we need only notice how fond these authors are of metaphors of fabric, fashion and clothing. ‘The gospel’, they say, ‘may have many clothes, but there is only one gospel’ (p. 97). According to our analysis in terms of form and content, the gospel here is the content; its ‘clothes’ are the forms. In another passage the report describes the attitude of young people towards ‘denominations’[1] in terms of shopping for clothes. The various traditions of the Churches amount to no more than ‘different types of clothing, most of which are not thought “cool”’ (p. 25). Whether or not this is what young people think about the Church, the report does nothing to challenge it. The authors might wish that the denominations were held in higher esteem than they are, but they do not fault the terms of the analysis. For them, as for the putative ‘young people’, the forms of the Church really are so many fashion options. Our inherited ways of ‘being church’ are simply outward forms that clothe, this way or that, some inner essence of the Church.
The clothing metaphor comes into its own towards the end of the report, in a headline recommendation: ‘there is a fabric of the old way of being society and being church. We are not about patching the fabric of that old garment but seeking to set up a new loom to weave the new fabric for tomorrow’s society of the kingdom’ (p. 126). The authors leave us in no doubt. They want a radical upheaval, a disjunction between the old garment and the new, between old ways of ‘being church’ and new ones. This disjunction works only on the basis of the prior conceptual disjunction: between body and clothes, form and content.
Alongside fabric metaphors, the authors also write a great deal about ‘style’. On the one hand, there is the underlying essence of the Church and the simple message of the gospel. On the other hand, there is the outward ‘style’ taken by any particular ‘expression of church’. For Mission-shaped Church the practices and disciplines of the inherited church are just one of many potential ‘styles of doing and being church’ (p. 80). In this world of ‘style’, everything is up for change. The authors are quite clear that we must welcome any number of new styles into the Church of England. They are also quite clear that there is no reason why these new styles should bear any resemblance to what has gone before. Even more than that, it would be wrong to expect that sort of resemblance. The inner meaning of the church and its outward forms are so entirely separable that when a group ‘plants’ a new church it cannot possibly ‘begin with a clear understanding of what form of expression the resultant church may take’ (p. 30). The shape or form of the church floats free, this time from anything that has gone before.
The theory behind all of this comes to the surface in words that the authors borrow[2] from the Lausanne Haslev Consultation.[3] ‘There are many’, they lament, ‘who still fuse the meaning and forms of the gospel’ (p. 91).[4] We should note the tone of exasperation at this point: some people fuse meaning and forms; how foolish they are! The enlightened reader is supposed to recognize that the ‘meaning’ and ‘forms’ of the gospel are very different things. Upon this everything else rests.
The two authors of this book are among those who still ‘fuse the meaning and forms of the gospel’, and with them, the meaning and forms of the Church. We are supposed to be on the back foot here. With this book we wish to prove that we are not. The mistake is not associating the form and content of the Church, but rather to disassociate them. The message and purpose of the Church are to be found in the way she lives and worship. When it comes to the union of form and content, it is the Fresh Expressions writers who are out of date. It is difficult to imagine that a philosophically informed writer of any age would prise form and content apart so glibly. It is all the more remarkable for Mission-shaped Church to argue in these terms in 2004, coming after a century when Western thought became all the more aware how closely form and content are entwined. In this chapter we will establish this point from a number of philosophical sources. First, however, for an exercise in common sense.
The meaning is in the form
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