Seeking Church

Emerging Witnesses to the Kingdom

Darren T. Duerksen, William A. Dyrness

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780830872428
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

New expressions of church that are proliferating among Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and other non-Christian religious communities, including so-called insider movements, have raised intense discussion in missiological circles. In Seeking Church, Darren Duerksen and William Dyrness address these issues by exploring how all Christian movements have been and are engaged in a "reverse hermeneutic, " where the gospel is read and interpreted through existing cultural and religious norms.Duerksen and Dyrness draw on the growing social-scientific work on emergent theory—the concept that social communities arise over time in ways that reflect specific historical and cultural dynamics. This is a missiological process, they argue, in which God has always worked through people and their culture to shape his witness in the world. They illustrate emergent theory through historical and contemporary case studies and consider the church's contextualized nature by exploring biblical models of the church, worship practices as emergent, and ecclesial markers that identify emerging churches and their distinctive witness.For missiologists, theologians, practitioners, and all who ponder the challenge and opportunities of mission among other religious communities, Seeking Church offers a multidisciplinary conceptual framework with which to understand the global diversity of the body of Christ. The Spirit is constantly drawing people toward God's community, causing new expressions of church to emerge and thus displaying new facets of his work and character.Missiological Engagements charts interdisciplinary and innovative trajectories in the history, theology, and practice of Christian mission, featuring contributions by leading thinkers from both the Euro-American West and the majority world whose missiological scholarship bridges church, academy, and society.

1

Is the Church in Crisis?

It is hard to know how to think about the Christian church today. Is the church as it exists today a cause for celebration or a reason to lament? One could make arguments either way. In some places it is clearly under attack—political, cultural, social, or even demonic. In North America, declining church membership is complicated by—and perhaps in part fueled by—the continuing polarization in the church over social and doctrinal issues. In Europe, despite the growing presence of African and Latin American immigrant Christians, the decline of the institutional churches appears unstoppable. In the majority world, despite a few bright spots in Africa and Latin America, Christians and their churches are often under severe pressure from newly militant Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism. In parts of Iraq and Syria, struggling with years of violence, there is even talk of the disappearance of Christian churches altogether, many with centuries-long histories in the region.

But this is not the whole story. Reports from many places in the world give evidence of an explosive growth of Christian churches, some powered by the global Pentecostal movement and others forming spontaneously under influences that are mostly invisible to outside observers.1 Even in places where Christianity faces serious challenges—like secularism in the West or newly awakened non-Christian religions in Asia—there are signs that God may be doing a new thing, something that calls for new wine skins for the new wine of the gospel.

These trends are interesting, and they are the staple of media reports. But the reality may be even more complex. Consider the different situations we have briefly described. When these various trends are examined closely, it becomes evident that the challenges faced by the church in North America are primarily about the institutional form (or forms) Christianity should take while the difficulties faced elsewhere are more often specific threats to the actual community of believers. The institutional form and the community of believers are both involved when we speak of church, of course, but they are looking at different aspects of “church,” and they call for very different reflection and response.

It is this complexity, and the multiple factors behind this, that is the stimulus for these two authors to write this book. Both of us have had long experience with the forms of church and with communities of believers: Bill as a missionary in the Philippines and subsequently as a professor of theology and culture and an ordained Presbyterian (PCUSA) minister; Darren as a Mennonite Brethren missionary in India, as a researcher in new forms of the church, and recently as a professor of intercultural and religious studies. Both of us have come to feel that many of the anxieties faced in missions today, to say nothing of the bewildering array of institutional challenges Christians face in the West, relate centrally to the current identity of the church—to both its theological nature and its social character. Further, it is our conviction that too many treatments of church use the term uncritically as though it were something everyone understood when in actual practice church is used in a variety of ways that reflect widely different contexts. This diversity reflects not simply the fundamental divide we have already noted but the multiple cultural and historical situations where followers of Christ seek to faithfully live out the gospel. In this chapter we want to linger on some of the factors that contribute to this confusion about the church and then briefly lay out the argument of the succeeding chapters.

CHURCH AND KINGDOM

One important reason for many false assumptions about the church rests on the simplistic assumption that Christ’s primary goal in his teaching and work was to inaugurate what we understand today as the Christian church. It is in the light of such priorities that mission in many people’s minds is equated with church planting. While church planting is an important mandate of missions, there are two problems with this assumption regarding Christ’s work. First, there is no doubt among scholars of the New Testament that Christ’s primary message was the arrival of the kingdom or reign of God, not of the institutional church. At the very beginning of his ministry, Mark’s Gospel tells us that Jesus came to Galilee announcing the “good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news” (Mk 1:14-15). Further, from a careful examination of Jesus’ teaching, especially his parables, it becomes clear that Jesus understood this reign to be present in his person and work. It was the arrival of this reign that was both a fulfillment of First Testament2 prophecies about the coming of the Messiah and a realization of the reconciling and renewing work of God. This cosmic intervention of God in human form is what Paul would later call the new creation and what the New Testament claims will culminate in Christ’s second coming. So, what Christ inaugurated, while it would later include the church, involved a renewing and reconciling work that had implications for the whole of creation and for all people.

“Church” (Gk. ekklēsia) meanwhile barely makes an appearance in Christ’s teachings. The word appears on only two occasions in the Gospels, both in the Gospel of Matthew. The first is the famous account of Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Messiah, whereupon Jesus promises that “on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it” (Mt 16:18). Catholics and Protestants differ on the interpretation of this passage, but scholars from both confessions would agree that it is a stretch to read back into it all that we understand now by “the Christian church.” Rather, it is best seen as one way of thinking about the kingdom that Jesus preached and the concrete form that this would take. Whatever church meant, it would centrally involve the confession that Peter had made about Jesus’ messianic mission, and nothing would be allowed to frustrate that mission. In the only other reference to church, also in Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples that divisions that disrupt the community of those gathered in his name are to be handled first privately before bringing in other witnesses: “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone” (Mt 18:15). Clearly this indicates that the kingdom would take shape in the form of particular communities, but neither Jesus (nor Matthew) gives other details about what this means to him and his audience. It most probably would not have included many of the things we mean by church today, and it does not follow that this is simply to be equated with the Christian church as it developed in its long history.

This is not to say that the teaching of these verses is unimportant. In fact, one might argue that the two central theological components of the church that emerge in the book of Acts and in Paul’s teaching are already present in these two appearances in Matthew. First, however one understands Peter’s confession, it cannot be doubted that the church involves people’s response to Christ, resulting in an intimate connection with God that Christ makes possible. As this develops later in the New Testament, the church centrally involves people whom God joins to Christ by the Holy Spirit, what Paul calls the body of Christ (e.g., Rom 7:4; 1 Cor 10:16). This is a central theological meaning of church, as we will argue in a later chapter. But, as the second appearance of the word indicates, this new reality involves people, joined to Christ, who are joined to each other by the Spirit to live together in a new community of mutual forgiveness. This latter aspect of “church” (Gk. ekklēsia, lit., “assembly”) is seen consistently in the way God’s work came to focus on communities, starting first with Jewish people and extending eventually to all ethnic and people groups.

Despite these important hints, Jesus gives no indication that he intended to found a separate religion with a distinct institution called “the church.” It is clear from the Gospels that response to Jesus took many different forms that reflected the multiple situations of the hearer—from the Samaritan woman at the well who became a missionary to her community (John 4) to Nicodemus, the Jewish leader who came secretly to interview Jesus (John 3), to the Syrophoenician women whose faith resulted in the deliverance of her child from an unclean spirit (Mark 7). The kingdom work taking shape in Christ’s life and ministry would elicit multiple responses and take many different forms, even if initially its focus was on the Jewish people and more particularly Jesus’ disciples. But one must recognize that Jesus’ primary work was to establish this divine kingdom, not only by his teaching and miracles but also and especially by his death and resurrection as manifested by the pouring out of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2. Notions of the church as a distinct and voluntary community came into existence gradually, as we will note in more detail in chapter two, but the church was always called to witness to the kingdom and become an embodiment of that new reality.3

The second problem with the assumption that Jesus came to found the church is that it ties Jesus’ work—indeed God’s purposes for creation—too closely to what eventually took shape as the Christian church. As missiologist David Bosch reminded us a generation ago, and as we mentioned above, the Gospels give no indication that Jesus intended to begin a new religion called Christianity. As Bosch put it:

Jesus had no intention of founding a new religion. Those who followed him were given no name to distinguish them from other groups, no creed of their own, no rite which revealed their distinctive group character, no geographical center from which they would operate.4

Jesus came rather to bring about a radical renewal of the First Testament covenant people that was to bless the world. Bosch writes: “The community around Jesus was to function as a pars pro toto, a community for the sake of others. Never, however, was this community to separate itself from the others.”5 Jesus lived his life as a faithful Jewish believer, as did most of his earliest disciples. They saw no conflict between their Jewish faith and their call to follow Christ. It is true that already in the book of Acts the framework for what was to become “Christianity” was taking shape, and, despite Bosch’s claim, there is reason to believe that much of what became known as “Christianity” was a part of God’s purposes. However, what later became the institutional church does not constitute the center of Jesus’ life and ministry. The kingdom, with its multiple forms, filled that spot. Moreover, it was the kingdom that would create the church, not the other way around. As Alfred Loisy famously commented in his 1902 book, whether with irony or regret, “Jesus foretold the kingdom, and it was the Church that came.”6 Though the church plays a crucial role as witness and embodiment of that kingdom, and might even be thought to be central in some ways, its reality does not constitute either the limit nor the extent and reach of the kingdom.

Throughout history the ambiguity associated with teaching on the church has been widely recognized by theologians. As the famous German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg argues, “It is not self-evident that the concept of the church should be a separate dogmatic theme.”7 And in fact, Anthony Thiselton points out, the church was not really a separate area of doctrine before the Reformers. He concludes his survey by saying: “Whereas the kingdom of God is determinative, the church is characterized by provisionality.”8 This is a theme we will return to in the concluding chapter.

The implication of this for our argument will become clearer as we move forward. But here we signal that since God’s work initiated in Christ extends beyond the church, there surely will be implications for the multiple forms of assembly that God intended to promote as kingdom work. And though the Christian church has a critical role to play in promoting this larger kingdom work, it will not be surprising if, as the history of the kingdom unfolds, the evidence of God’s work will introduce social forms and structures that expand existing notions of “church” as they reflect what we might call God’s larger kingdom—and even ecclesial—purposes. In preparation for exploring these possibilities, in the remainder of this chapter we want to reflect briefly on the contemporary situation of missions today in the light of recent history, and highlight the significance of this for thinking about the church.

CHURCH AND MISSIONS

A further complication in reflection on the church results from the fraught history of relations between mission and church that we have inherited. On the one hand, missions, carried out frequently by activist Christians sent out by supporting societies, from the start had an ambiguous—and frequently contentious—relationship with sending churches in the West. As Anne-Marie Kool points out, missions in the West were mostly born outside the church, and as a result, missions have often been considered an appendage.9 Churches thought of mission—if they thought of it at all—as one of their many functions rather than as something essential to the nature of church. Missionaries, meanwhile, when they finally realized their goal was church planting rather than simply evangelization, had difficulty understanding what these “younger churches” should look like.

Stephen Neill in his classic history of missions recounts these difficulties in a lengthy chapter entitled interestingly enough “From Mission to Church.”10 He notes that the problems often stemmed from the fact that missionaries saw themselves as primarily activists seeking individual converts; thus, the church appeared mostly as an afterthought. Or else the founding of churches was carried out independently of the work of missions, with little mutual support and understanding between these efforts. Neill concludes that healthy national churches were rare because developments were driven by personal or nationalistic motives rather than by “any clear theological understanding of the nature of the church.”11

These long-standing problems were on full display in the famous Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910, which is worth considering here as a case study of the struggle to understand and build healthy mission churches.12 After more than one hundred years of missionary activity, planners of the conference felt there was much to celebrate. Two factors stand out as background to the conversations about the church. First, as Brian Stanley notes, the vast mobilization of resources reflected in the participation of multiple mission agencies from Europe and America lent a feeling of ...