SCM Study Guide

Stephen Spencer

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780334041085
• eBook ISBN: 9780334048046
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Explores the nature of Christian mission in contemporary post-modern society. This book examines the main historic types of mission in the Christian tradition, seeing how they were forged in the cross currents of history and how they continue to be expressed by different Christian communities.

Part 1. Orientation

There is in God – some say –

A deep, but dazzling darkness; as men here

Say it is late and dusky, because they

See not all clear.

(Henry Vaughan, ‘The Night’)

1. Mission in Crisis

It is fifty years since Mrs Rosa Parks, a black tailor’s assistant in a city centre department store in Montgomery, Alabama, in the deep south of the United States, boarded a bus and took a seat. When the bus filled up the driver ordered Mrs Parks to stand so that a white man could sit down. She refused to move: ‘She’d gone shopping after work, and her feet hurt. She couldn’t bear the thought of having to stand all the way home. The driver, of course, threatened to call the police. Go ahead and call them, Mrs Parks sighed. And she thought how you spend your whole life making things comfortable for white people. You just live for their well-being, and they don’t even treat you like a human being. Well, let the cops come. She wasn’t moving’ (Oats 1982, pp. 64–5).

Mrs Parks was arrested and charged. She found support, though, from the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), and especially from one of its leaders in Montgomery, a young Baptist minister called Martin Luther King Jnr. He and other members of the association decided to call for a boycott of the bus company by the black community. Over forty church ministers and community leaders met in one of the city churches and gave their support to the idea. The boycott was launched a couple of days later and the response from the black community was unanimous – the buses were empty the following morning.

This was the start of a protracted campaign, involving legal battles in court and rallying calls to the community to maintain the boycott. The campaign reached far into 1956, stirring up intense opposition in sections of the white community and periods of worry in the NAACP that the campaign would fail. King himself was arrested and fined at one point. But he was quite clear from the start that the protests were to be peaceful and to ‘be guided by the deepest principles of the Christian faith. Love must be our regulating ideal . . .’ The response from the black community was emphatic and the campaign became the defining moment of King’s life. He became a national celebrity, travelling across the United States to speak about the protest and drum up support. But the authorities in Montgomery were as defiant as ever and in early November succeeded in getting a judge to rule that the car pool, which black people had been using instead of the buses, was ‘a public nuisance’ and therefore illegal. After almost twelve months it seemed as if the protest had failed. But, at that very same moment, the Supreme Court in Washington ruled that the local laws in Alabama requiring segregation of races were unconstitutional. It was victory at last, a turning point in the way black people were regarded in the south and, indeed, across the country. The implementation of the ruling would take further struggle, especially when some black churches were blown up by white supremacists, but a threshold had been crossed.

Mission as social action

Why remember these events on their fiftieth anniversary? One reason is that at a time when many in the churches are looking for new ways to give mission expression (in response to ongoing decline in church attendance), these events vividly embody one form of missionary engagement. When many churches are drawing up mission strategies and action plans it is possible that Rosa Parks, the NAACP and Martin Luther King suggest an inspiring (and challenging) way forward.

According to this view mission is about the coming of the kingdom of God, with its peace and justice and healing, to the dark places of the world. The work of the Church is to assist this wider mission in whatever ways it can, such as through supporting the civil rights movement in 1950s America. It is about Christians coming out of their bunkers and marching alongside others for an end to poverty and oppression. Whether or not the Church grows or declines is secondary to this. In words often attributed to Archbishop William Temple, the Church of God is the only institution that exists to serve the needs of those who are not its members, so Christian mission is about assisting with what God is doing in the world: mission is human development.

But is this the right approach? How can God’s mission be assisted if there does not already exist a vibrant Church to do the assisting? How can his mission even be identified if his people are not gathering in church week by week to hear that mission described in the reading of Scripture? If significant energies are not devoted to building up the internal life of the Church how will it avoid losing itself in the struggles of the world? (See Chapter 9 for further discussion of this approach.)

Mission as church growth

A different outlook is found in the recent Church of England report Mission-Shaped Church. In its longest and most detailed chapter it provides a description of different kinds of congregational church life, which it describes as ‘fresh expressions of church’. It lists among others the following: alternative worship communities, café and cell churches, churches arising out of community initiatives, mid-week congregations, network churches, school-based congregations, church plants and traditional forms inspiring new interest. The report suggests that these are ‘a sign of the creativity of the Spirit in our age . . . a sign of the work of God and of the kingdom’ (Cray et al. 2004, p. 80).

The assumption in all this is that the mission of God is primarily concerned with forming these various kinds of church meeting: mission is growing the Church. This is actually stated at different points in the report, such as in the introduction: ‘the church is the fruit of God’s mission . . . creating new communities of Christian faith is part of the mission of God to express God’s kingdom in every geographic and cultural context’ (ibid. p. xii).

But is it? Some of the initiatives, such as alternative worship services and network churches, have been described as maintenance rather than mission, a kind of chaplaincy to those who cannot bring themselves to attend traditional churches any more. It is questioned whether such initiatives have drawn new people into the life of the Church. Some of the other initiatives have been described as serving the wishes of the world rather than God, serving coffee and cake rather than Christ. Other initiatives, like the school-based congregations, have often been supported by parents who wish to win a place for their child in a church school, but when the child starts at the new school the parents, more often than not, stop coming to the church. They seem to lack commitment, which questions whether real mission has taken place. Overall, there appear to be a number of uncomfortable features of ‘fresh expressions of church’ when these initiatives are viewed as mission. (See further Hull 2006. For discussion of a church-centred view of mission see Chapter 5.)

Mission as public witness

A third point of view seeks to have the best of both worlds. It agrees that mission is not primarily about bringing people into church, which is putting the cart before the horse. But nor is mission about the Church losing itself in wider struggles for a better world: if Christ is not named and not known in missionary work then Christian mission does not take place. He is the way, the truth and the life and only through him can true salvation be achieved. Mission is about proclaiming Christ in the world and churches need to follow his example and be bold and adventurous in this. They are to gear their activities to spreading the news about Jesus along the highways and hedgerows of society: mission is proclamation. A recent advocate of this view was Lesslie Newbigin, who in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society called for the churches in the West to engage in the mission task of proclaiming the gospel as ‘Public Truth’: ‘in Christ we have been shown the road. We cannot treat that knowledge as a private matter for ourselves. It concerns the whole human family’ (Newbigin 1989, p. 183). An example of this kind of proclamation would be recent attempts to increase the provision of state-funded church schools across Britain with their explicit commitment to teaching the Christian faith. (For discussion of church/state mission see Chapter 7.)

Who is right? The differences between these three influential views are profound. There are other significant points of view as well, not least the traditional evangelical view which sees evangelism as the defining feature of mission (see Stott 1986; see also Kirk 2006; for discussion see Chapter 8). Other distinct views from Christian history also demand attention. One thing is certain, that there is a general lack of agreement about the nature of mission. David Bosch, in his encyclopedic survey of thinking about mission, Transforming Mission, published 25 years ago and still definitive for the subject as a whole, stated that the loose use of the word ‘mission’ in the last half-century masked a crisis (Bosch 1991, p. 1): he believed there had been a terrible failure of nerve over mission (ibid., p. 7) and that the churches were not sure any more what it was really all about. Twenty-five years later, with mission understood in an ever increasing number of ways in the churches, reflecting an increasingly pluralist society, it seems the crisis is far from over. Furthermore, the word itself has been adopted by industry and commerce to describe its own variegated attempts to make money, with ‘mission statements’ appearing in every corporate reception area. It has become an overused and undervalued word.

What, then, are the churches to do within this ‘deep, but dazzling darkness’? In one place Bosch recalled that in Chinese the word ‘crisis’ is spelt with two characters, one standing for ‘danger’ and the other for ‘opportunity’. This suggests that when events take a dangerous turn a moment of opportunity has arrived: new initiatives can be taken, new directions found, hope restored. In this new century the crisis of mission is still upon us, but so is a moment of opportunity.

It seems increasingly clear that local churches need to explore and reflect on the right way to reach out to their surrounding communities. This means they need to ask a basic theological question about the nature of mission, a question which needs to be answered before secondary questions about practice and strategy can be faced. Is mission primarily concerned with engineering church growth, or is the joining of wider struggles for a better world the right way forward, or is the proclamation of the gospel in the public arena the overriding calling?

This Studyguide presents a range of answers to this question. It begins by laying out some of the theological groundwork that is needed before looking for an answer, beginning with an explora...

Table of contents

• SCM STUDYGUIDE TO CHRISTIAN MISSION
• Contents
• Preface
• Part 1. Orientation
• 1. Mission in Crisis
• 2. Origins of a Word Mission as Missio Dei
• 3. Digging Deeper Mission as Participation in the Trinity
• 4. In Human Terms The Prophetic Mission of Christ
• Part 2. Types and Expressions
• Introduction
• 5. Filling the Ark Apostolic Mission
• 6. Radiating Eternal Truth Hellenistic Orthodox Mission
• 7. Establishing Christendom Medieval Catholic Mission
• 8. The Conversion of Souls Protestant Reformation Mission
• 9. Building the Kingdom on Earth Enlightenment Modern Mission
• 10. Finding Hope in Local Communities Mission within Postmodernity
• Conclusion. Which Type of Mission?
• Epilogue. The Coming of the Rains