What is the shape of the Church?

One of the great fashions which the C of E is following is the idea of a Mission-Shaped church. This is a push to try and present the Christian Church to the unchurched via various initiatives such as "Fresh Expressions" - seeing the Christian Faith anew.

According to the Rev'd Mr. Paul Bayes in Mission-shaped Parish: Traditional Church in a changing world, a missionary church is

• focussed on the Trinity
  Worship lies at the heart of a missionary church, and to love and know God as Father, Son and Spirit is the chief inspiration and primary purpose;
  
• incarnational
  It seeks to shape itself in relation to the culture in which it is located or to whom it is called;
  
• transformational
  It exists for the transformation of the community that it serves through the power of the Gospel and the Holy Spirit;
  
• a maker of disciples
  It is active in calling people to faith in Jesus Christ.
  It encourages the gifting and vocation of all the people of God, and invests in the development of leaders. It is concerned for the transformation of individuals, as well as for the transformation of communities;
  
• relational
  It is characterised by welcome and hospitality. Its ethos and style are open to change when new members join.

(Bayes and Sledge Mission-shaped Parish: Traditional Church in a changing world p6)

How valid are the points made here?

Well, look at the idea of mission in the Scripture. Who in the Scripture can be described as being "sent"? Just looking for the conjugations of the verb mitto, mittere, missus in the Vulgate will surely help us consider the true meaning of "mission" and we will be able to weigh up these points using this idea.

Judging by the majority of the verses there seem to be two main senses in which people are "sent" in Holy Scripture. They are either sent by God to proclaim His Will, the Good News, or they are sent to prison by men (in the Acts of the Apostles) or by God (in the Apocalypse in the sense of the Abyss).

In the first sense, God sends out messengers, angels of His word,. We read that Christ sends out his apostles (the Greek word apostello is translated mitto in Latin) to make disciples of all nations. But notice, that St Paul says in I Cor xii.29 "Are all Apostles?" This shows that there is something very particular in how mission is to take place and, because of its connection with the Apostles here, mission should be something inherently episcopal. It is not a calling for everyone in the sense that everyone is to be a version of SS Peter and Paul.

But is the sense too narrow? As the Body of Christ must we not emulate the sense in which Christ Himself was sent? The Lord Himself tells us through Isaiah and from His own lips in St Luke iv. 18-21:

18 πνεῦμα κυρίου ἐπ' ἐμέ οὗ εἵνεκεν ἔχρισέν με εὐαγγελίσασθαι πτωχοῖς ἀπέσταλκέν με κηρύξαι αἰχμαλώτοις ἄφεσιν καὶ τυφλοῖς ἀνάβλεψιν ἀποστεῖλαι τεθραυσμένους ἐν ἀφέσει 19 κηρύξαι ἐνιαυτὸν κυρίου δεκτόν
20 καὶ πτύξας τὸ βιβλίον ἀποδοὺς τῷ ὑπηρέτῃ ἐκάθισεν καὶ πάντων οἱ ὀφθαλμοὶ ἐν τῇ συναγωγῇ ἦσαν ἀτενίζοντες αὐτῷ
21 ἤρξατο δὲ λέγειν πρὸς αὐτοὺς ὅτι σήμερον πεπλήρωται ἡ γραφὴ αὕτη ἐν τοῖς ὠσὶν ὑμῶν

18 Spiritus Domini super me propter quod unxit me evangelizare pauperibus misit me
19 praedicare captivis remissionem et caecis visum dimittere confractos in remissionem praedicare annum Domini acceptum et diem retributionis
20 et cum plicuisset librum reddidit ministro et sedit et omnium in synagoga oculi erant intendentes in eum
21 coepit autem dicere ad illos quia hodie impleta est haec scriptura in auribus vestris

18 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,
19 To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.
20 And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him.
21 And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.

So this is why the Lord was sent, and expresses the nature of the mission of the Church.

So how does the apostolic mission differ from the ecclesiastical mission?

Well, the nature of apostolic mission is that it travels widely. Look at SS Peter and Paul, the apostles par excellence, who go out to tell the world about the Kingdom of God. The communities they establish are not as wide ranging with respect to the distance they travel, but their endurance at keeping the message alive in their surrounds despite persecutions and temptations is certainly the crux of their ministry. The letters of St Paul to the Churches point to matters of living in the community according to the rule of life that following the teaching of Christ establishes.

In the letter to the Colossians, St Paul talks at length about the nature of apostleship, and therein lies an interesting direction. Apostles come from Christian communities, just as the first 12 Apostles formed the original nucleus of a community around the Christ, they were sent out to form new communities which, like the seminal picture of an atomic chain reaction, demonstrate, increase in size and number sending out holy apostles to the world.

So here then is the pattern for the mission-shaped church. It must be an apostle-making machine - each parish edifying its members in the true Christian way so that every so often, some of them will be best prepared to hear the call of God and go out into the world with the message.

However, times have indeed changed, and now parishes are diverse in membership with each person going where they feel the worship best suits them. There is no discernable boundary between the Christian and no Christian community. Christians gather for Mass, and then, at the Ite, missa est they are back out into the world again outside the community.

This, perhaps, is where the truly mission-shape church resides - in the vocation of the laity. Christians go out into the secular world carrying within them the Christ. By living the Christian life visibly, they proclaim the message to the world and then they return to Mass bringing their life outside the church with them and present that world to God as part of the sacrifice of the Mass. It's interesting that the word parish comes from the Greek for that which is outside the church. This points again to the ministry of the laity.

Let's look at the marks of a mission shaped church again and see if we can make conclusions.

a missionary church is

• focussed on the Trinity
  Worship lies at the heart of a missionary church, and to love and know God as Father, Son and Spirit is the chief inspiration and primary purpose;

Well this makes sense, for the church to be building up the ministry of the laity, the laity need to to come to God bringing who they are to Him, but unified in their focus on Him so that they can present as one humanity the needs of humanity and receive from Him the Divine Assistance expressed primarily in the grace of the Sacraments and the blessings the engender.

• incarnational
  It seeks to shape itself in relation to the culture in which it is located or to whom it is called;

This is not a very clear statement. Certainly the local parish is made up of a certain demographic and there will be regional variations. However there must be some visible way in which the church in one parish is substantially the same as in another. Speaking in an aristotelian sense, we need to be sure what the accidents of the Church are. There needs to be a way in which a traveller can walk into any parish church and know that they are in the same place as the church back home.

This also goes for the traveller in time! Change for the sake of change (i.e. society is changing so the church must too) is not acceptable. If St Gregory of Nyssa were to walk into our church, it is clear that he wouldn't recognise the shape of the liturgy, but he should be able to understand the essence of it, where it has come from and that it is truly saying the same as when he was saying Mass in the 4th Century. If we are doing this then we can be sure that the children who come after us will be worshipping God in the same way and receive the same Sacraments fully as every other Christian in all of history.

Secondly, if the church finds itself in a particular culture which is not expressly Christian in its understanding - a gambling culture, a red-light district et c. then the church has to express the Christian values that do not change. This will mean coming up against the sin inherent in society, and visibly so. The Church must not be seen to capitulate to any behaviour or belief that contradicts the Eternal message, and will impede the journey of the sinful soul toward salvation. It will in this instant cease to be a proper church and embody the idea of ecclesial community with which the Holy See regards the Anglican Church.

• transformational
  It exists for the transformation of the community that it serves through the power of the Gospel and the Holy Spirit;
  
• a maker of disciples
  It is active in calling people to faith in Jesus Christ.
  It encourages the gifting and vocation of all the people of God, and invests in the development of leaders. It is concerned for the transformation of individuals, as well as for the transformation of communities;

These go together in the ministry of the laity. If church folk learn to worship and understand the orthodox doctrines of the church; if they know what sin is; if they know that they are the Temples of the Holy Ghost and understand this in themselves; if they trust in God's continued presence in their lives, his equipping with grace from the Sacraments; if they know their limitations and understand that they need to learn and to grow in prayer and worship and shape their lives around their prayer and worship, then, only then, will they transform their communities, and that transformation will be as unconscious as their own transformation, because they will be living a naturally Christian life.

• relational
  It is characterised by welcome and hospitality. Its ethos and style are open to change when new members join.

No. The church does not need to change ethos or style when new members join. It might need to change times of Masses or add new Offices during the week, but the whole point is that the new folk understand that they are to grow and become part of the Christian life and that means a deliberate act of submission to Him. This is why the presence of Christ is utterly necessary in every Christian community. The Benedictines do not change the Rule everytime a new novice signs up. To keep changing means being blown by the winds of fashion and that is why the C of E is in the trouble it's in. The process of welcome means insinuating people in, helping them to adapt to the Church and seeing its relevance in their lives. Like the Benedictine novice, new folk must see what they need to change in order to get closer to God, that way they can be assured of complete stability.

However the notion of welcome is vital. The Benedictines are always hospitable and kind and loving, it's part of the Rule! In fact it's necessarily part of every rule. We cannot be Christian if we are not prepared to be hospitable. We've just read the mission of the Church in St Luke iv.18-21, and it's precisely this mission of which the laity must play their part.

So what should the C of E be doing in order to promote the idea of mission?

Well, in my opinion, they should scrap the whole idea of doing things differently, of adding new and innovative services. They should stop pandering to what society wants from the church which too often is just a salve for the guilty conscience (such as Midnight Mass), or a nominal celebration (as most people see Holy Baptism).

Then they need to cement the Doctrine of the Anglican Church which at the moment is far too broad. (And you know where this little Anglo-Papalist would go for the cement!) The clergy need to be examined to ensure that they are compliant with the four marks of the Church and understand what they mean in the same way. Their interpretations need to be weighed against the Authority of the Church (Scripture, Tradition, Reason). Then, when the clergy are fully grounded in the faith. Then they should go back to making each Mass as excellent as it can be. That the people are catechised in an orthodox manner so that they emerge fully equipped to live Christin lives and fulful their vocation of the laity.

Impossible? Well, let's pray for it!