Principles and Process

Working Towards the Ideal Congregation

NYNO is very much an idea as much as it is anything else. It’s an idea inspired by Scripture, by the situation that the Church and society finds itself in at this point in time in the UK.

Briefly, the idea is that full expressions of church can exist that recognize the needs of its older members and therefore places them at the centre of their congregations. We believe doing this can be good for every generation that participates in such a congregation. We hope as well that any church that lives in this way will be better equipped to witness to the world, living in a way that speaks against the separation of old and young and that points to the wisdom of Christ centred community in the present and the hope of the redemption of all things in the future.

This idea can be both inspiring and intimidating. Again and again, we have seen people respond with enthusiasm when we describe what we hope to do and why we are doing it. Equally, we have encountered uncertainty as to how such a ‘perfect’ idea could ever become a practical reality. How, for instance, could a church survive without a dedicated minister; where will the youth come from; is there enough teaching?

There are one hundred and one practical questions that are unresolved by the simple idea and most of these issues will need to be resolved in the unique location and community in which you hope to see a church grow.

And yet, we’re not worried and we don’t think you should be either. Church planting with NYNO will be a process. The ideal, diverse aged, autonomous congregation, a spiritual home for all involved, will not spring into life immediately. It will require patient leadership, that holds onto the ideals of NYNO while making one change at a time, at each stage inviting the congregation to participate. That leadership (a team, I would expect) will have to be stubbornly singled minded when it comes to the ideas, the principles of NYNO. At the same time, it will have to be gracious and patient, recognizing that people will take time to understand the what we are aiming for. It will also have to have faith, realizing that there will be problems that won’t have an immediate solution that needs to communicated gently to the congregation. Together we will have to pray our way forward, always holding onto the end goal believing that God has given us this, even while the path that leads there remains bewilderingly winding.

Short Sermon: Serving and Being Served

The following sermon was given in February before the meal liturgy.

Reading: Philippians 2:1-11

The notion of service, of servant hood, is very important in Scripture and and also as a metaphor that directs the Christian life.

The Israelites were held as slaves – or servants, the terms are often interchangeable – in Egypt and redeemed by God to live as his free people. As Christians, as we have read, we find a model for our attitudes and actions in the life of Christ who did not strive after equality with God but rather took the form of a servant.

We are to be like servants. We are made free by God, from slavery to sin, that we might use our freedom the service of God and others.

On this basis, you might be forgiven for assuming that self-sacrificial service is in every case an unalloyed good. Curiously enough, I have come to the conclusion of late that it is not.

It is possible to serve, to be a servant of others, out of a sense of duty, and yet not love.

It is possible to serve for the sake of pride and ego, because in the context of a church service can be much admired.

The notion of servant-hood and service is not enough. There is something that must precede it.

Let me point you again to our celebration of communion. It is in this act, given to us by Christ, that so much of who we are and how we are to live is laid out for us to see. If we think about servant-hood in the context of communion it appears differently to us, as if in a new light. It does so in two ways.

Firstly, here we are taught that before we ever serve, Christ must serve us. The matter is made so clear by Christ’s words recorded in John 13, where Christ washes the feet of the disciples. Simon Peter exclaimed:

John 13:6-9 “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” 7 Jesus replied, “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” 8 “No,” said Peter, “you shall never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.” 9 “Then, Lord,” Simon Peter replied, “not just my feet but my hands and my head as well!”

Christians must receive from Christ before ever they serve him or serve others. Without this we will speak without love, like a clanging cymbal. We will act without love and we will be and gain nothing.

Before ever we serve, Christ must serve us.

Secondly, Christ also teaches us here in communion that as we receive from him so do others. To participate in Christ is to be made one with others. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians. (10:17) 17 Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf.

Before ever we strike out to serve others, we must recognise that others are called to the same task, called to serve others and called to serve us.

Our community in Christ lies underneath and behind our servant-hood. We are members of this community, we belong, we participate in Christ and one another before we ever strike out to offer our gifts to others.

All must give, but all must also receive.

There is a blessing, not often recognized, that we can offer to others. It is to allow other people to serve us. There is a sin, not often recognized. It is to be so proud of our service, that we refuse to allow others to give to us.

Let us remember, that in Christ we are made a community where all must give and all must receive. The Church is therefore more important than service.

Optimism and Realism

The following is a new section of orientation material from the NYNO booklet that is slowly taking shape.

The NYNO project was begun with an optimism that had sprung from a fresh – for us – reading of Scripture. We felt that we had seen, as though for the first time, something of what it meant to be the Church and that we had before us a place and a people in which that understanding of Church could be lived out as though we were a city on a hill. This meant that we went forward to start the project with a confidence that God could and would provide.

We knew that what we were proposing to do would not immediately appeal to many in the wider church. This was not because anyone would deny the importance of what we were trying – its basis in Scripture, its nature as a missionary action – but rather because we all find ourselves committed to our current congregations and it can be hard to embark on something new. There are lots of valid reasons for this. One the one hand, many Christians feel embattled and defensive in the face of increased secularism and gathering together in larger churches full of peers helps alleviate some of that stress, helps give confidence in mission. In contrast, NYNO appears to offer the prospect of commitment to a small congregation, full of older people: not immediately appealing. On the other hand, many existing congregations in the historic denominations are struggling to meet their financial commitments and require all the help they can draw on. Placing your attention on a new initiative may well be seen as a betrayal, leaving the burden of maintenance for the existing congregation on an ever fewer number.

Despite all of this, or perhaps even because of it, we want to insist that the Church can exist in ways that are faithful to God and so constantly surprising to us and to the world. If God is with us, who could be against us? We knew we were seeking to answer a question, the answer to which was not obvious. But we also knew that Christ was raised from the dead and therefore the Church must not simply live according to rules defined by the expectation of success. Christ would never have died for us had he followed those rules. What we are seeking is the fullness of life of the kingdom of God. The figure of Zacchaeus springs to mind. Here was a man who gave up his wealth and yet … rejoiced. We know that NYNO offers a challenge to many of us, particularly to the younger generations, but we do not believe the Gospel calls us to selfless misery. There is joy to be had in a NYNO congregation. It seems to us, as it must have done to Zacchaeus, that though this way offers challenge, it also offers something better.

Realism

An optimism founded in the new reality of the Spirit of Christ, who died and rose again, is a necessary characteristic of the Church. Such an attitude will always receive accusations of naivety. All such criticisms cannot simply be dismissed. A criticism of our optimism that stemmed from a cynicism and lack of faith would have to be resisted. This would be a criticism that failed to recognize the reality of the kingdom of God as the constitutive basis of our Church. This is not, however, the only criticism possible. A criticism based on a failure to observe the reality of the world is also possible and it is here where we are most at risk of rightly being called naïve.

Starting a NYNO congregation presents lots of challenges. There are personal challenges for the individuals who try to start it, there are challenges for the church community as it forms itself, changes and continues while its members grow frail and die. NYNO pioneers need to know what they are getting into. To use the Zacchaeus example, they need to know how much money they have before the full significance of giving it up can be experienced. We need to know that people may not flock to join us, they they may have many other claims on their time and energy. We need to know there is no set pattern of success that can easily be followed to achieve a ‘thriving’ congregation – that we ourselves will need to go into our situation in faith and with prayer, seeking answers for our own situation.

To return to the language of the kingdom, it is helpful to remember that the fullness of the kingdom will not be known until Christ returns. The challenge and task of the Church is to live in and according to the reality of the kingdom, to live in the Spirit, in a world that does not yet know the newness of the kingdom or the refreshing life of the Spirit. This is not achieved by closing our eyes and humming a hymn, but by knowing full well the challenges that are ahead and yet nonetheless believing that God looks with favour on the lowliness of his servant.

Praying in Silence, Participation in Public

The following is a first draft of a new section from the NYNO booklet, which is slowly taking shape, currently titled: Beginning a New Church …

Our practice of praying in public has changed over time. Originally, before NYNO started, we used the ‘chaplaincy’ model of conducting a service in which the minister figure led the prayers. We feel there are limitations to this form of worship. To recapitulate: when the minister leads all of the worship the congregation can begin to think of themselves as passive recipients of a spiritual good. When this happens, spiritual community can be assumed to be an additional and non-essential aspect of church. It is possible that this is exacerbated in our case, where the congregation consists of older people who have become accustomed to their role and contributions being peripheral to the life of their churches.

With respect to prayers, there are different ways of addressing this problem. An obvious solution is to invite members of the congregation to contribute to different parts of the service and, in this case, to lead the prayers. This is a sensible way forward in that it encourages a wider public participation and yet acknowledges the diverse giftings of the congregation: for whatever reason not all have the confidence or aptitude to take a public role.

In our own situation we felt that increasing the number of public contributors while keeping the same model of service was not the best way forward. We thought this for a number of reasons. Firstly, even if we encouraged some people to lead prayers and succeeded in getting them to do this, the majority of people would still not be doing so. We would still have in place a model of worship in which community could be seen as peripheral to church. We would still have a congregation who through their age and living situation have become less than central to the life of a church centred on a parish building. What we hoped for instead was to find ways to emphasize the importance of each member and the value of his or her contributions, whatever they were. Inevitably, when a service is led or conducted this leading role will be especially esteemed, to the detriment of valuation of the contributions of everyone else.

Secondly, in our particular situation we felt that it was particularly difficult to be seen to be ‘raising’ people into church leadership. The problem lies in part in the way Church of Scotland ministers, and no-doubt those of other denominations, are viewed in society generally and perhaps especially amongst the older generations. It would be difficult for any individual to be seen to taking on that role in such a small church that largely existed within a relatively small housing complex. All manner of attractive and unpleasant power dynamics would be possible if a resident were to take a role as a church leader for a church that largely consisted of residents. Of course, leading prayers or even taking a public role in worship does not entail church leadership, but it does imply it to some degree with a led service model and where few people are willing to contribute publicly.

Lastly, we recognized that we might be unsuccessful in finding people who would want to contribute to the service. We simply might not have such people. Our congregation might be too frail or too intimidated, for reasons discussed above. It had to be possible to find a form of worship that could be embraced and enjoyed even when the giftings of public speaking were not available.

For these reasons, we turned to a form of silent prayer in which the prayers of all the saints are recognized to be significant and there is no necessity for anyone to be understood to be praying on behalf of the whole congregation. Everyone can and must pray, is called to do so, and this is reflected in how prayer is conducted in the liturgy.

Our current liturgies are largely composed of prayers and statements of faith and the congregation says these prayers and statements together, to God and to each other. When we come to intercession, we recognize that we are responding directly to the differing situations of our lives and so there is the need for words that respond to this. Simply put, this section of the service begins and closes with set prayers (when we are not celebrating communion, we close with the Lord’s Prayer) that remind us of the reason why we can and should pray. In between these prayers pieces of paper are distributed and people are asked to write down topics for which we can all pray. These are collected in and then one person has the task of collating these topics and simply saying ‘Let us pray for …’ before a period of silence and concluding the silence of prayer with the responsive prayer, ‘Lord in your mercy,’ to which the congregation responds ‘Hear our prayer’.

There are undoubtedly limitations to this approach. It’s advantage is that it is simple and requires relatively little preparation and so can be used by anyone. At the same time, this simplicity and silence means that we are not teaching people to pray in any particular way. Well structured and thoughtfully composed prayers, teach us to pray according to what God has revealed of himself. Such prayers teach us to pray with faith, hope and love. It is possible that a selection of collects could be used to accompany these prayers, but there will always remain a balancing act: the richer and more varied we make our liturgy, the more demanding it is to prepare the service. Perhaps the way forward is to keep a simple basic form of liturgy, but to allow individuals to enrich it as they have the time, energy and inclination to do so.

Bosch on Missio Dei

Bosch, Witness to the World (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1980)

Missio Dei is an oft used phrase in popular missiology. It can be hard, though, to pin down its significance. The ‘mission of God’ is definitely repeatedly as an introductory justification that missiology should be an essential topic of conversation for the Church and that the practice of mission should be an essential action of the Church. Used in this manner, it is treated as a form of theological shorthand. The actual workings that lay out why these things are so are left unexplained. Such has been my experience, anyway.

Bosch offers a fairly compact ten pages, the conclusion to the book, on this topic. The context of his thoughts is a two pronged correction to both evangelical and ecumenical missiology. He argues first (Ch. 19) that evangelical missiology has risked using an unhelpful dualism where salvation history is divorced from world history. This has led to a passivity in the face of injustice meted out to others. In contrast, the Church must realize that Christ is the head of the Church and the cosmos, and following the example of her saviour must take up her cross in identification with the outcast. Against ‘ecumenical’ theology, he insists on the distinctiveness of the Church from the world (Ch. 20). The Church can only be apostolic if she is different in her being from the world. She must maintain that God’s judgement is not ours, that the cross remains at the heart of our life together and our proclamation, that our political actions will be fallible and that the kingdom will be made present to the world in signs and not in fullness until Christ returns. Mission is therefore an eschatological event (Ch. 21), seeking to see the kingdom come on earth now, aware that our actions can only provide signs of that kingdom. Communal church life in the present is a life filled by God’s presence (Ch. 22), waiting and witnessing, identifying with the hopeless while yet never losing hope.

Bosch’s explanation of missio dei is set out as an alternative to these two limited approaches. It is worth reflecting on this. Although Bosch’s presentation of missio dei ostensibly comes from first principles, so to speak, he is still offering his alternative to two failed approaches to missio dei. Given this, simply importing missio dei as presented here should be done with caution, until we’re convinced that we are not, in doing so, responding to a problem (evangelicals and ecumenical missiologies at loggerheads thirty-five years ago) that is not our pressing concern.

In outline then, Bosch offers missio Dei (God’s mission) because mission begins with God. The Word and Spirit are ‘missionaries’ of God in creation and redemption, being sent to the world.

Although Aquinas (?) may have used missio with respect to the sending of the Son by the Father and the Holy Spirit by the Father and the Son, this is not obviously the basis for the modern use of the term. Only in the early to mid- twentieth century did mission become explicitly linked to trinitarian theology. Having said this, I should add, the precise link is rarely explicated.

Barth’s connection to all of this is important. He is frequently argued to be an advocate for this form of theology but, again, rarely with a description of what he said. Bosch here is not guilty of that. There is to be no ‘speculative interpretation of a foundation of mission on the Trinity’. Instead, Incarnation, Cross and Resurrection are events of particular historical involvement. It is in these events that we learn of the nature of the Trinity, and indeed that God is ‘a missionary God’. [A curious phrase, monotheistically speaking.]

In Christ’s actions we discover a new dimension to God’s concern for the world, and his actions are therefore to be definitive for ours. Here our saviour is revealed, and we are not to look elsewhere for alternative revelations of God’s will. The role of the Spirit does not diversify our missiology, providing an alternative mode of God’s concern for the world, but rather further specifies that the Church’s life, in the Spirit of Christ, is to be shaped by Christ: “As the Father sent me…” (Jn 20:21). The Spirit’s role is two-fold, inward and outward, setting us apart that we might then be witnesses to the world.

Bosch complains of a diluting of missio Dei. Mission does not now become a human responsibility to the degree that it ceases to be God’s work. The kingdom remains God’s work, wrought by him. Missionary ‘success’ is therefore never to be the criterion by which we judge mission. To the extent that we view the world as perfectible through our actions, we lose sight of the missio Dei. But equally, we cannot be passive. Because God’s kingdom has dawned, we cannot be resigned to the way things are. We are to pray, ‘thy kingdom come’, and therefore we are to act, believing we can make difference, knowing we must wait for the final day.

Bosch concludes by claiming that the Church owes the world faith, hope and love. She is to be herself, faithful to her head, and so she will worship, live and serve as Christ did for her.

As a brief postscript, I can see nothing dramatically wrong with Bosch’s presentation. At the same time, the basing of missiology in the Trinity and therefore in the revealed acts of God in Christ leads us directly to considering ecclesiology in direct connection with missiology. We are not at liberty to speculate about the life of the Trinity and to see analogy in political action, nor are we justified by this bare statement to claim to see God in the world and to pursue these things with scant regard to the Church. Instead we are directed to the ascending Christ, and the sending of the Spirit upon the Church. Missiology and ecclesiology can not, responsibly, be considered apart from one another. Both are to be derived from Christology and Pneumatology and therefore (and only therefore) from the Trinity. This is not presuppose a particular ecclesiology.  It is not to advocate for a reactionary attitude towards our institutions. What it is is many things, not the least of which is that the life of the kingdom in the Spirit of Christ is communal.

Bosch on Dimension and Intention

Bosch, Witness to the World (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1980), pp. 199-201.

Bosch offers here a thought-provoking, if not immediately obvious discussion on the relation between mission and church and in particular on whether mission is an essential aspect of the church. He uses a pair of concepts from H.-W. Gensichen: ‘dimension’ and ‘intention’.

‘Intention’ refers to an explicitly missionary act, something that is primarily intended to be an expression of the love of God, and of the Church, to the outsider.

‘Dimension’, somewhat opaquely, refers to manner in which every aspect of the Church’s life must have a missionary element or, perhaps better, must have a character derived from that of God, who in Christ has shown himself to be ‘missionary’. The Church’s nature is missionary, taken as it is from Christ, the Son of God who who created and redeemed the world as an expression of the love of God.

Therefore, everything the church does must have a missionary dimension, not everything must have a missionary intention.

The church is missionary when she is welcoming to outsiders, open to change for the sake of others, when she upholds the and defends the truth the Gospel, even though there may be no explicitly missionary intention in any of these acts. She has to be this in order to perform mission at all. Intention can only exist on the basis of dimension.

Useful texts listed are:

Phil. 2:14-16. ‘Do everything … as you hold our the word of life.’

Col. 4:5. ‘Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders; make the most of every opportunity.’

1 The. 4:9-12. ‘Now concerning love of the brothers and sisters … so that you may behave properly toward outsiders and be dependent on no one.’

1 Pet. 2:12. ‘Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.’

1 Cor. 5:12-15. ‘What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked man from among you.”’

2 Cor. 3:2-3. ‘You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everybody. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.’

More generally, I’m reminded of Barth’s discussion of Salt and Light in CD IV.3.2 par.72 and, unsurprisingly for us, the manner in which the Church’s nature is to be shaped by her source in 1 Corinthians: we are the body of Christ. If Christ is the Son of God, and we are the body of Christ, how can our nature be anything but self-giving for the world? Even when we prophesy to one another, our words will point to the one who sets the world free (1 Cor. 14:24-25).

Experimental Church (Part 1)

An ‘Experimental’ Church

Here at NYNO, we suggest that it can be really helpful to think of the life of a church (a new church plant or an existing church) as an ‘experimental’ work. By using this term we are making an analogy to science … but it is only an analogy and all analogies have limits. So, please don’t be put off by something that might sound intimidating. What we actually mean by this is relatively simple and also, we believe, quite important.

So, what do we mean by ‘experimental’? In very brief and broad outline, the term is useful in at least two ways: firstly, in the educational relationship between our church plant and the wider church; and, secondly, in the manner in which our church communities handle the adaptation that is necessarily at the heart of a missional life. This post will address the first of these and hopefully a second post will follow to take up the matter of experimentation in a local congregation.

‘Experimental’ Church Work in the Context of the Wider Church

The Goal of ‘Experimental’ Church Life

What everyone wants to see in the Church is faithful communities growing through mission. We would all like to see this, but few of us do. This just seems an empirical fact given the ongoing shrinkage of the Church in the Western world in the twenty-first century. We use the term ‘faithful’ because numerical growth is not everything. Filling an arena is not an end in itself. Christ must be at the centre of our lives as individuals and as a community. We use the term ‘mission’ because we want to insist that out new communities come from an engagement with the world outside of our existing church communities. It doesn’t really prove much, at least with regard to the questions NYNO is interested in, if a church grows through attracting people who are already Christians. All this being said, this is what we hope for our churches: faithful communities, growing, engaged in mission. The problem would seem to be, though, that none of us really know how to do this.

No-one Has the Answer

When we say, ‘we don’t know how to do this’, this is no exaggeration! If there was an answer, we would all be using it. Part of the issue is that the Church as a whole has not come to terms with its new position in society after the end of Christendom. Whether we are dealing with the Church’s relationship to other faiths, what we have to say with regard to society’s attitudes towards money, sexuality or celebrity, as a Church we struggle to convince one another and arrive at a common mind, let alone speak with a provocative and faithful clarity to the world. Now it may be that my search for a common mind that would speak powerfully to the world is all a bit of a power trip on my part, but that’s not really my point. The issue is rather that the Church feels as though her anchors have been lost and she has been cast adrift. We feel as though our faith necessitates that we should have some answers – even if that answer is a practice of prayerful silence in the face of the world! – but we don’t. There is lots we could say. Many doctrines we could rehearse but too often, to our consternation and the test of faith, they seem empty and powerless, dry, dusty, dead.

The Difference ‘Experimental’ Churches Could Make to the Wider Church

In this context, in our context, we think ‘experimental’ church is important. Here is why.

An experiment is a step into the unknown. We create a hypothesis and then we test it. The hypothesis might be, ‘Could a Church prosper, meeting in the context of a library’, or ‘Is it possible to create an diversely aged church that is particularly accessible to older people’ (that one might sound familiar to you), or ‘Is it possible to make our musical worship feel fresh and joyful without feeling as though our attention is constantly drawn to performers on a stage?’. The point about the hypothesis is that it sounds like a plausible and attractive solution to a problem, but we don’t know whether it would work. Hopefully our ideas will be informed by the needs of the people in front of us, the state of the wider church, the priorities of Scripture and doctrine and the wise counsel of those who went before us in Church history. Hopefully they will be great ideas, inspirational and exciting. Testing these ideas might involve a new direction for an existing church, or might involve the creation of a whole new church shaped in an important sense to address this pressing issue. The grand hope would be, whatever our hypothesis that we wish to test, that we will learn from from our experiment and be able to pass that information on to others.

We said above that we wanted our churches to be ‘faithful communities growing through mission’. In this world, where the church feels cast adrift we need to learn from each other’s successes and failures. This is particularly true for church planting which is an especially challenging task, often working without the established structures and support of an institution. The principle applies, though, to all churches that want to try something new. Lessons can be learned from success and failure, if we’re humble and honest enough to listen to others and to tell our story.

The Problem of Success

As was discussed above, we all need and want success. This is true when you face up to the general situation of the Church in the western word: what is the answer that might turn our situation around, fill our buildings and our coffers? This is also true on a local level: what might bring our church to life, fill our services and encourage the world outside of the church to look on us with respect. On the one hand, we need more people. Without them, the future looks grim as our churches will be unable to sustain their existing infrastructure. On the other hand, we want to be the people with the answer, the people with the thriving church, the people others look to for the answer. This second issue is made all the more tempting because of the seriousness of the first.

The problem is, that this need and desire for success actually gets in the way of our achieving it. What we need in order to achieve success is freedom to experiment, freedom to follow the priorities of the Gospel, even if that leads us into apparently unpopular places. We can only have that freedom, if we give each other permission to ‘fail’, if we value and support each other as we learn together, irrespective of whether things do or do not lead to the conversion of towns and cities en masse.

While we value success, we will be tempted into pragmatism, doing ‘what works’ or trying to follow the models of apparently large and ‘successful’ churches. Let me give an awkward example. A successful church might have a number of talented musicians who produce a rock concert like experience for a large number of people. This looks like success. Smaller churches will try to emulate their performances, perhaps without the same slick professionalism. Other churches with no musicians will feel hopeless, unable even to begin to emulate such success. A better way forward for the small church is to experiment, to try something completely different, to question these established norms that seem to doom our meetings to ‘unattractive failure’; believing that God is with us and that must count for more than the presence of a skilled guitarist and large amplifier. To do this, we would seek to base our existence as a community afresh in the life of the Holy Spirit. We would pick up inspired Scripture and try to read it afresh as it points us to Christ. We would start a conversation amongst God’s people, trusting that God has given us the people we need for this place and that these people are endowed by the Spirit with gifts for the equipping of his church (and that these gifts might not be the conventional tools of ‘success’ that we hope for). We would try to be students of the Church’s history, listening patiently to those who went before us, trusting that they were no more fallen and no less indwelt by God’s Spirit than ourselves. And finally, we would seek to do this in supportive conversation with other churches doing the same thing. We don’t know what might result for all of this, but I suspect that at the least it might be a community that knows it has a purpose and that values its own members and that those would be an improvement on feeling hopelessly small, uncool and under-skilled.

All of this is to say that we need churches – and projects that are not yet churches but want to be – that are willing to try something different. But it is hard for these new churches and new initiatives because they may not be able to offer the prospect of immediate ‘success’. They will feel self-conscious, under pressure to produce results, and possibly under-valued if they perceive themselves to be evaluated according to ‘success’. What might an alternative be?

The purpose of viewing our churches and initiatives as ‘experimental’ is that everyone might recognise the need to try new things and the challenge and risk involved in that. To view a new church plant as ‘experimental’ would be to expect that church plant to try new things and that this is a worthwhile thing in and of itself. Such a project should not be evaluated according to success, but rather promise and progress. The question might must simply be ‘are they successful?’ but rather, ‘are they learning something that can be shared with the rest of us?’. Those lessons might be small things, questions of pastoral wisdom, advice on organising events, or bigger notions to do with society’s response to a certain presentation of the Gospel. The lessons might come from apparent success or failure. Both should be valued. Individuals and teams embarking on experimental projects need to feel valued by the wider church not because they have all the answers, but because they learning. If we were all involved in this task, learning and listening to one another, is it possible that our Church would be better equipped to witness faithfully to the world in our new and disconcerting age?

More Bosch, this time on Missio Dei

Bosch, Witness to the World (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1980), pp. 179-80. My underlining.

The mooring of mission to the doctrine of the Trinity led to the introduction of the expression missio Dei (God’s mission) at Willingen. The term was in all probability coined by Hartenstein. He intended it to give expression to the conviction that God, and God alone was the subject of mission. The initiative for our mission lay with him alone (missio ecclesiae, the Church’s mission). Only in God’s hands our mission could be truly [sic] called mission. In the period after Willingen the concept missio Dei gradually changed its meaning. It came to signify God’s hidden activities in the world, independent of the Church, and our responsibility to discover and participate in these activities.

It’s interesting how the final idea is, at least in part, the basis of Roxburgh’s advice. Again, strange to see ideas from 1952, reported on in 1980, offered as the latest and greatest solution to the Church’s problems.

Just to repeat what was in the previous post, and speaking more generally of the use of missio Dei: the missionary focus on the world as we follow God’s initiative is right. The side-lining of the Church is a grave mistake.

The Church Inside Out

I discovered the following in Bosch, Witness to the World (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1980), pp. 176-78.

The theology of the apostolate soon underwent a certain radicalisation due to Hoekendijk’s contribution. He polemicised against the church-centric mission that had been especially in vogue since Tambaran 1939. The Church was an illegitimate centre. Not the Church but the world, the oikoumene, stood in the centre of God’s concern. Van Ruler’s thesis that mission was a function of the Church, was inverted by Hoekendijk: the Church was a function of mission. There was no room for a ‘doctrine of the Church’. We should refer to the Church only in passing and without any emphasis. Ecclesiology should not be more than a single paragraph in Christology (the messianic involvement with the world) and a few sentences in eschatology (the messianic involvement with the world) … 

From the outset Hoekendijk could not accept a ‘theology of mission’. If he did so it would imply that mission would once again be an extra. There would then also conceivably be other ‘theologies of …’. He therefore pleaded not for ‘theology of mission’, but for ‘missionary theology’ as expression of all authentic theology. …

In this way Hoekendijk’s theology of the apostolate became a theology of the world. Theology is God inviting us to share the world with him. For precisely this reason it was a theology of the Kingdom. Mission was not the road from church to church: mission or Church was the interaction between Kingdom and world, involved in both … The form which this involvement took he called shalom, Hebrew for ‘peace’, which he described as a ‘social happening’, and which was an ethical rather than a soteriological concept. Reconciliation became a universal humanisation process. In his earlier writings he did characterise the task of the Church as kerygma, koinonia and diakonia – proclamation, community, and service. In the course of time, however, he increasingly moved towards the last of the three.

I find it curious that the following theology derives from the 1960. Theological language along these lines is, I find, being used with plenty of enthusiasm today. Not having read Hoekendijk’s theology at first hand I should be cautious speaking directly about him. An English translation of some of his shorter works was published in 1966 with the title ‘The Church Inside Out’ (SCM). It’s another one to add to the list …

I am all the more interested having just read Barth on the Church as witness (CD IV.3), and also John Flett’s head spinning The Witness of God. When I hear this language used today, it is in my experience without reflection on Bosch’s concluding analysis (from 1980!): you get rid of the Church  and something essential is lost.

It’s not as though I don’t have sympathy for Hoekendijk’s frustration with the Church. It is only because of faith that I stay loyal to the church structures and institutions. Yes, I have enough self-knowledge to know that I am no less fallen than the next church member, but that doesn’t make identifying with and living with and in the Church any more comfortable.

As an attempt to flesh out something more positive, here follows a brief summary of something I was going to provide more detail of later … some Barth inspired thoughts.

The move from missio dei to church-less service (identified by Bosch above) seems to stem from an absence of Christology. The language of mission and kingdom seems to have been abstracted from Christ himself. One often hears today this language used in connection with discipleship. On the face of it, this sounds quite Christocentric! With it, though is a closely connected assumption that the discipleship of the gospels has no direct relationship with the Church. As Barth points out, this is a case of not seeing the wood for the trees. The ‘absence’ of Church from the gospels is because it is everywhere assumed! Of course it is, the gospels themselves were written from within ecclesial community, often addressing the concerns of that community (the assumptions of form and canonical criticism spring to mind).

This being so, the Church’s existence is determined (skirting over a discussion of actualistic ontology) by her saviour, by whom the covenant between God and humanity is concluded. Christ is about his Father’s work. Humanity is called to witness to that, to echo Christ’s words and actions as the covenant partner and so point others to him. The Church follows the attitude of Christ, who is about his Father’s business. God’s concern firstly is for the world and in Christ the world is justified. We come to faith and join the Church as members of the world. The Church is composed of those brought to the knowledge of this salvation found in Christ and so are called to participate in their own proper way in the loving work of God. The Church therefore cannot be and must not be firstly concerned with its own life, or see itself as an end in itself. To do so would be to be radically incoherent. The Church is called, and therefore the Church must follow Christ and do the Father’s work. But because it is called it is the Church and it is as a community that the Church can witness in a manner no individual can (Stringfellow springs to mind for the ability of the Church to witness politically today). Think of the roles of forgiveness and accountability. The Church here is not somehow establishing a perfect society on earth, it is pointing in a faltering manner to the one who has already forgiven them. Of course, I can forgive people outside of the Church and this can be a witness, but in the Church I don’t just forgive. In the Church I can be forgiven too.

The future of popular missionary theology is not the removal of ecclesiology. It is rather having a good ecclesiology by which the Church can understand her very nature is to be outward focussed, in which even her most private worship in word and form, can be a witness to the world of the coming kingdom.

The State of Play, Autumn 2014

I thought I’d provide an update as to what NYNO has been up to and what we hope to be doing in the near future.

We continue to run our two groups in a sheltered accommodation complex. The first group meets monthly and has moved from being a familiar minister led service to one based around a communal meal structured by set prayers and actions in which all participate together. The second group is smaller and meets most weeks, and would have been recognisable to most as a Bible study. That two has moved to so as to have a worshipful meal format in which young children and be kept at the heart of the meeting, rather than kept quiet during the adult talking time.

Over the summer Julie and I have really begin to give our attention to the practical questions of an every age meeting, particularly accessible to older people. The change in our worship to a format based around a meal was done with the idea in the back of our minds of finding a format in which young and old and can worship together. But it was, if you like, only a first step. There remains the question of how to invite the younger people to worship with us!

As with everything we’ve done, we’re not rushing to answer this question. One step at a time! That has, so to speak, been our mantra: take one step, reflect, listen, take the next step. You have to have some plans, but you need to hold them lightly, letting everyone be involved as you take the next one step.

Perhaps strangely, taking your time such a big change and allowing people to contribute can mean you have time on your hands, so in the meantime, I’m planning to put together a small booklet. This would together our reflections to date, and more easily allow people to follow what we’ve been doing date and amongst other things, get to grips with our notion of ‘first class church’, put into practice a reflective and participative cycle of leadership, pick up and use our liturgies and – if you like! – follow our bread recipes …

In addition we’ve been compiling some notes on Barth’s Church Dogmatics, IV.3.2 par.72 on ‘The Holy Spirit and the Sending of the Christian Community’: very helpful for clarifying the relationship between Church and mission. Hopefully they will be posted before too long.

Of course, once again, if you’d like to know more about NYNO, or have a conversation about starting your own church in Sheltered Accommodation (or indeed in a care or nursing home) we’d be more than happy to talk to you.

Matthew