The Missional Church in Perspective (The Missional Network)

Mapping Trends and Shaping the Conversation

Craig Van Gelder, Dwight J Zscheile

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780801039133
• eBook ISBN: 9781441232069
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

In this book, two leading ministry experts place the missional church conversation in historical perspective and offer fresh insights for its further development. They begin by providing a helpful review of the genesis of the missional church and offering an insightful critique of the Gospel and Our Culture Network's seminal book Missional Church, which set the conversation in motion. They map the diverse paths this discussion has taken over the past decade, identifying four primary branches and ten sub-branches of the conversation and placing over one hundred published titles and websites into this framework. The authors then utilize recent developments in biblical and theological perspectives to strengthen and extend the conversation about missional theology, the church's interaction with culture and cultures, and church organization and leadership in relation to the formation of believers as disciples. Professors, students, and church leaders will value this comprehensive overview of the missional movement. It includes a foreword by Alan J. Roxburgh.

Part 1

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The History and Development of the Missional Conversation

Gaining perspective on the missional conversation requires us to examine in some detail when, how, and why this concept gained currency and became popularized in the last decade of the twentieth century. Chapter 1 provides a detailed account of the development of the important theological concepts underlying the missional church concept in the 1998 book Missional Church. The historical background of the formation of these ideas, unfortunately, was not adequately addressed in that volume, so in chapter 1 we discuss the origins of these ideas and offer an assessment of their strengths and weaknesses.

Chapter 2 provides two perspectives regarding the concept of missional. First, it offers a thorough archaeology of the introduction and early use of this word in the English language, with some discussion of the meanings associated with its various uses. Second, we revisit and critique the argument presented in Missional Church, paying particular attention to areas that did not sufficiently integrate or thoroughly develop key theological concepts. Additionally, several important themes missing from that book’s argument are identified.

Chapter 3 moves the discussion forward by mapping current literature, both conventionally published and available online, that employs the concept of missional. We identify four primary branches of the present usage of this term in relation to how the various authors and publications understand agency. Ten subbranches within these four primary branches are then examined in relation to specific examples from sources that illustrate each subbranch.

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Concepts Influencing the Missional Church Conversation

Even a cursory review of the literature now being published reveals that the word “missional” is being used in diverse ways. Some of these authors, to their credit, attempt to explain the various influences that helped to give birth to this concept.[15] Many others, however, seem to employ it with little apparent awareness of the complex historical developments underlying its popularized usage during the past decade.

This same problem, in some ways, should be noted regarding the writing team that produced Missional Church. They did briefly acknowledge some historical developments associated with the biblical and theological concepts they used to construct an understanding of missional. Unfortunately, however, they devoted little attention to mining this history for insights or examining the historically diverse theological imaginations that gave birth to these concepts. Thus they did not critique sufficiently some of the assumptions—both explicit and implicit—embedded in the use of these concepts. They also neglected to sort out adequately how these various concepts were shaped or reshaped by the diverse theological traditions represented on the writing team—the explicit and implicit assumptions embedded in their own theological imaginations.

When concepts are developed and introduced into any conversation, they will always eventually be adapted and modified within different interpretive frameworks. Usually people are not consciously trying to change the meaning of these concepts so much as they are trying to make them understandable within their own faith traditions. They nonetheless often end up either importing untested assumptions into their use or reframing aspects of the initial meaning of a particular concept.

Language is fluid and dynamic, so we are not arguing that such an approach is necessarily wrong when it comes to the use of the concept of missional church. We are asserting, however, that those seeking to utilize missional language would serve their own faith traditions best by paying close attention to the biblical and theological concepts informing the initial use of this term in Missional Church, as well as the biblical and theological developments that continue to take place around it. In doing so, those employing the word “missional” might enrich and deepen their understanding of God’s mission and their participation in it within their own faith traditions.

This chapter pursues this task in three ways. First, we consider the larger historical backdrop to the emergence of the missional church conversation. This backdrop is discussed in terms of the dichotomized categories of “church” and “mission” that developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how this framework influenced the development of the disciplines of ecclesiology and missiology. Second, we examine the development of the biblical and theological concepts that initially shaped the missional church conversation. In the third section we look at the formative work of Lesslie Newbigin, with special attention to how he incorporated these ideas into his own theological and missiological work. We also explore Newbigin’s influence on the development of several important gospel and culture networks that emerged in the 1980s, especially the one in England with which Newbigin was directly affiliated and the one in the United States that eventually contributed to the publication of Missional Church.

Background to the Missional Church Conversation: Dichotomy of Church and Missions/Mission

The Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century represented a significant shift in the development of Christianity in that it gave birth to a variety of institutional expressions of the church. This included primarily the establishment of state churches across northern Europe resulting from magisterial reform movements—for example, Lutheran churches in Germany and the Scandinavian countries, Reformed churches in the Netherlands and Scotland, and the Anglican Church in England. But this shift also included the emergence of a variety of groups that the state churches tended to persecute, groups usually referred to as sects—for example, Mennonites, Quakers, Amish, and independent Baptists.

All these newly forming churches, whether established or persecuted, were concerned with clarifying what they believed and justifying the legitimacy of their historical existence. Defining what they believed produced a variety of confessions, all of which included major articles explicating their understanding of church, that is, their explicit ecclesiologies—for example, the Augsburg Confession (Lutheran, 1530), the Belgic Confession (Continental Reformed, 1561) and the Heidelberg Catechism (Continental Reformed, 1563), the Dordrecht Confession (Anabaptist, 1632), and the Westminster Confession (English Reformed, 1646).

The understanding of what we refer to today as “God’s mission” was developed in these confessional documents within a worldview of Christendom in which the church was established by the state. It was thus assumed that the church was responsible for the world, with the church’s direct involvement defined primarily in terms of the magistrate’s obligation to carry out Christian duties on behalf of the church in the world. Within a Christendom worldview, the church and the world occupied the same location: the social reality of the church represented the same social reality of the world within that particular context. The Christian groups referred to as sects by default had to function within the same worldview of Christendom, although on the underside of it. Their emphasis on free-church ecclesiology, however, planted seeds that later came to fruition in the development of a more explicit mission theology.

The Modern Missions Movement

The story of the rise of modern missions out of these Protestant beginnings has been told many times, so we provide here only a cursory overview of its details.[16] It is important to note, however, that what became known as the modern missions movement emerged largely from outside, and to some extent alongside, the established churches. An organizational structure, able to function beyond the Christian duties assigned to the magistrate, was required for missions to come into their own. Such a structure emerged with the formation of the mission society as a specialized organization to engage in missions.

Early examples of mission societies were those formed within the Anglican Church, including the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge in 1698 and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in 1701. These proved to be quite strategic for the spread of Anglicanism within the numerous British colonies then coming into existence around the world (including the North American colonies). More explicit independent societies followed by century’s end, patterned after the work of William Carey and the mission society that he proposed in 1792 in An Enquiry into the Obligation of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen. Scores of such independent societies soon existed in Europe alongside the state churches—for example, the London Mission Society (1795), the Scottish Missionary Society (1796), the Church Mission Society (1799), and the Berlin Mission Society (1824).

The first immigrants to the American colonies from Europe brought with them their existing churches as well as their ecclesiastical definitions of the church. These immigrant churches included variations of both the established state churches and persecuted Christian sects. This diversity of Christian faith traditions in the colonies eventually led, in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, to a decision to formally separate the church and the state. This decision had the historical consequence of introducing the denomination as the primary organizational form of the church, which represented a remarkable change in the organizational life of the institutional church, the first in over 1,400 years.[17] The denominational church readily became the norm for church life in the newly formed United States, a norm that soon spread around the world through the modern missions movement. This development also signaled that aspects of the free-church ecclesiology of the previously persecuted sects were being incorporated into the polities of all the churches in the United States.

Numerous interdenominational mission societies, following the lead of the European state churches, were also organized in the early nineteenth century in the newly formed United States, including the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (1810), the American Bible Society (1816), the American Education Society (1816), the American Colonization Society (1816), and the American Sunday School Union (1824). Such mission societies during the early 1800s served as vehicles for cooperative mission activities among the more than thirty national denominations that had emerged. Internal church politics, however, soon led increasing numbers of denominations to withdraw from these cooperative agreements in order to form their own internal denominational boards and agencies, including the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society (1814), the Methodist Missionary Society (1819), and the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Mission (1837). Now mission societies existed in two forms, one version independent of the denominational churches (later taking on names such as “faith missions” and “parachurch organizations”) and the other an organizational structure within these denominations (later known as “denominational agencies” with internal governing boards).

Church and Missions/Mission

It is critical to note that the foreign mission societies (societies were formed for many specific purposes) focused primarily on one goal: taking the gospel to other parts of the world. The tasks of evangelizing and church planting, along with numerous benevolent causes such as schools, hospitals, and orphanages, became the order of the day for thousands of missionaries sent out by scores of these independent mission societies and related denominational mission agencies. The peak of this movement, now clear in retrospect, came at the world mission conference convened in Edinburgh in 1910. Over 1,200 delegates from Western churches and mission societies gathered at that time to plan the final advance to complete the challenge of the Student Volunteer Movement’s watchword: “the evangelization of the world in our generation.” World War I dramatically disrupted the optimistic plans proposed there.

At least two significant developments took place within the modern missions movement following World War I. First, what became known as “younger churches” began to emerge within the Western colonial system. This emergence brought to the surface a critical question: what should be the relationship between the older churches and the younger churches? Embedded in this question were the unresolved issues associated with ecclesiology, both the multiple confessional ecclesiologies of the numerous denominational mission agencies and the lack of less explicit ecclesiologies among many of the independent mission societies.

Second, there was a move in the West toward defining more clearly the relationship of the church to mission. This conversation began to take place within three new organizations, all of which grew out of the work of the Edinburgh conference: the International Missionary Council (IMC), formed in 1921; the Life and Work Movement, formed in 1925; and the Faith and Order Movement, formed in 1927. The same question soon surfaced in all three organizations: how should church and mission be related? Embedded in this question was the growing recognition that the theologies of mission then operative in the modern missions movement were insufficient for answering it.

These two questions—about the relationship of younger and older churches and the relationship of church and mission—especially dominated the discussion within the IMC during the next several decades. It emerged initially at the Jerusalem conference in 1928, became more prominent at the Madras, India, conference (also referred to as Tambaram) in 1938, and wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: The History and Development of the Missional Conversation
• Part 2: Perspectives That Extend the Missional Conversation
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index
• Notes