A couple of weeks ago a student asked if he could interview me about mission in my church context. I said "sure," so over the next couple of days I'm going to post what I said in response to his questions. Are we on track? :
First Question
I. When did your church start a missionary program?
Several years ago, Murray Robertson (a pastor from Christchurch, New Zealand) gave an address at a national conference in which he said “New Zealand” is a mission field.” We (those at the conference) by and large hadn’t thought of it like that, or if we had we hadn’t really articulated it as succinctly as Murray had. Our focus had mostly been on “mission fields” elsewhere in the world. We hadn’t noticed that we were changing as a country. In 2001 (a census year) it was discovered that less that 10% of New Zealanders actually go to a Christian church. Running parallel with less people going to churches, more and more people were becoming interested in “spirituality.” Sadly however the institutional church (of which Bridges is very much a part) was bypassed. Church was experienced as having nothing meaningful or of value to contribute to this wider spiritual search.
Given the above (our context), intentional, practical mission is a tremendous challenge and opportunity for our church! From my perspective it’s less about “a missionary program” and more about embedding a missional identity at the core of who we are as a church. Mission needs to be core genetic material for us (along with our Godward and Communal / Pastoral dimensions, i.e. mission is one dimension of three which I believe need to be at the core of a balanced and healthy church). A very recent report, Mission-Shaped Church, produced by a working group of the Church of England’s Mission and Public Affairs Council, rightly noted that “the Church is called to be essentially, not incidentally, missionary in character…” Increasingly I’m coming to see that our identity and practice needs to derive from the missio dei – God’s mission in the midst of and on behalf of his creation. Does that make sense? If the church is not missionary it has significantly denied itself and it’s calling, for it has departed from the very nature of God (God who reaches out in and through Jesus Christ. God who is seeking to restore his original creation intent).
To help this renewed sense of identity and practice we might use programs (such as Ignition – a resource from Australian-based FORGE) but only to the degree that these are useful in helping us become a “missional church” (this expression needs to be further unpacked by us – What does it mean? What does it look like, feel like etc.? And what does a “missional church” do?). At this point I’d want to draw a subtle distinction between my sense of a “missional church” and a church that does mission. Of course we “do” mission (for me “mission” is both a noun and a verb), but mission needs to be at the heart of everything we are and everything we do. It needs to shape and influence every area of our church existence. From my perspective it can’t be an “add on” or about a small group within the church who have a heart for mission supporting mission (fund raising etc). It’s about who we all are. It needs to be very much a missional / ecclesiological question for us. Lesslie Newbigin has describes the church as the “hermeneutic of the gospel”. So, the question becomes, what forms and practices of church will best enable us to respond to what God by his Spirit is already doing in our local Cambridge context. American, Darrell Guder said it well when he wrote, “We have the responsibility and the capacity, through the Holy Spirit, to shape ourselves for faithful witness. Our purpose defines our organizational structures-which means that our mission challenges us to re-form our structures so that we can be faithful in our witness.”
This local focus doesn’t mean, I’m sure, that we’ll ignore overseas mission. It’s more a question of priority and holding the two foci in a helpful and creative tension.
Mission in our context – Aotearoa New Zealand – is about the Jesus-story being both embodied in and shared by our church community as it seeks to creatively inhabit the “ancient story” in the midst of our diverse and contemporary cultural contexts. This is something we need to learn to do. In many ways this is new ground particularly in Western nations such as New Zealand (the Church of England that has just published a paper entitled “Missional Shaped Church.” As we are in New Zealand, the Church of England is realising that England is, in its own right, a significant mission field). Helpful resources are being developed from within our Australasian context, and I’m benefiting from the research and writing of organisations such as the USA-based “Gospel and our Culture Network,” and recent visits by Canadian Alan Roxburgh to Australia are further addressing the challenges of mission that we face in our part of the world.
Mission, for me, includes evangelism but it is a whole lot more than just evangelism. “Evangelism” and “mission” are not similes, i.e. they do not mean the same thing.
New Zealand writer/theologian Mike Riddell has highlighted contextual issues that face the western church in particular, and also those we face here in New Zealand. His essays, Speaking the Lingo: Contextualisation as a Prerequisite of Mission to Pakeha Post-Christian New Zealand and Pine…or Pohutakawa wonderfully capture some of the missional challenges of our unique context, the tensions between imported expressions of the Christian faith and the need for indigenous (i.e. native to New Zealand) ways of expressing that same historic faith.
Other good resources which focus on a new Zealand Context are papers by Kevin Ward, here, here, here, and here
Work by Peter Lineham is also really useful.
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