Category Archives: Mission

Living with Metaphor

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For over 5 years now I have been using the metaphor that church is both the city on the hill and the journey to the city on the hill, which connects the action and attitude aspects of the allegorical descriptions of church in the bible. I play around with the edges of this; like the city is lit by the ethic of christ, or we loose sight of the city from time to time but just see a distant glow. For me the metaphor is also rooted in the connecting of mission, worship and church into a more fluid whole entity.

The sense of openness that using a metaphor brings is liberating and disconcerting. However in the last couple of years i have heard more tweets, status updates and conversations connecting the action and attitude parts of worship, or church or mission. The most recent from Ben that “Worship is about telling the story and living it out”.

I think this type of approach is a step in the right direction but I wonder if there is something in thinking about the trinity as a metaphor for a reconnecting of worship, mission and church. That being caught up in God and embraced by the dynamic relationship is to be caught up in mission, worship and church. not sure yet…..

Missional Imagination 4 – Finding the question

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When we started with church on the edge there were a number of questions we had around mission and church that were important. They included things like, what does Donovans new place look like for young people, By name is G-d known in this context, what is church?

For me they broke down into two main categories, – There were Star Trek questions, that perhaps will never be answered but keep fueling the missionary imagination, questions about the new place. These questions keep you on the journey and keep you on a missional trajectory – to boldly go. Then there were the Star Wars questions which were more practical and about the steps towards breaking out the old way of doing things and moving beyond the empire of the instution towards a practical outworking of the force. Although hard to answer, these were more attainable, eg what is equivalent of Engai to the young people

When it comes to mission a lot of what we do is instinctive or stems from the feeling that something needs to change. However unless you identify your questions it is hard to begin to re imagine any answers.

What are your missional questions?

You say syncretism, I say inculturation or What’s wrong with a bit of syncretism?

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I have been thinking a lot about holding the tension between culture, bible and tradition which has moved into thinking about what it is to be swept up with missio dei, and what this may look like for our structures and approaches/ theology.

I still think and still feel we are a long way off the mark in emerging church circles as we are worried about slipping into syncretism, and the gravitational pull of orthodoxy. Perhaps our orthodoxy is as much a myth as the myth that we can know the unknowable G-d.
I think the separation of sacred and secular is rooted in our need to box God in, to define what is God and what is not.

So there is something buzzing away in the back of head about the need to collapse much of our approach as it feels dualist. We have made great progress in missional thinking and understanding recognizing the missio dei etc – if God is working, sovereign, we ask what is God already doing, so we can get in on this (rather than the older approach which was thinking it is our mission or we are the carriers of God or God is not present/at work) but this question, what is god doing is still rooted in identifying a particular thing God is doing (which in itself supposes there are things that God is not in control of or doing) and thus enables us to focus on this known/discerned aspect of God rather than simply being cast adrift with the missio dei with G-d in G-d’s world.

This raises the question of ‘other’ what is it, does it exist, or is there other but that is a whole other kettle of fish which i cant get my head around.

If syncretism is about the attempt to reconcile contrary beliefs, often while melding practices of various schools of thought wasn’t this what happened with introduction of christ and the emerging christology. So since Christ split the curtain shouldn’t we be a bit more about what Robert Schreiter sees as inculturation “the dynamic relation between the Christian message and culture or cultures; an insertion of the Christian life into a culture; an ongoing process of reciprocal and critical insertion and assimilation between them” which seems to differ little for me from syncretism. Perhaps i am being naive about the semantics.

Misisonal Imagination 3

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It took me while to reflect on why I had a disquiet about yesterdays post on Mike Frosts, Gaby Ngaboca and TSK’s conversation around missional church. I think the root is that whilst Mikes examples in his talk seemed to be in an Outside Out approach (and were truly inspiring), the way he phrased the question “what would our worship/community/disciple making look like if they were shaped by mission?” FEELS like an inside out approach to mission.

The “our” word is problematic as whilst the way he discusses mission is more missio-dei this question is more inside out, and attractional (which I assume was not his intention based on other stuff he has written). TSK comments that the culture then helps shape the way you then become missional church, but I wonder if by then due to the feel of the question and the insider start to the question ifgravitational pull would have already kicked in for most churches.

So when it comes to missional imagination perhaps we are back to the bare bones of the question that simply asks “what is G-D doing (or where is G-d) in this context?” and allow that to start the journey to missional church.

Missional church

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Listening to Mike Frost and TSK HERE and Frost defines he defines mission as All that we do outside of ourselves to alert people to reign of God in Christ (a Bosch quote). He sees church having four equal elements – Mission, Worship, Community, Discipleship. He defines missional church is one where the community is attempting to discover, what does it look like if mission shapes or catalyzes the conduct of the other three functions.

He then asks the questions what would our worship/community/disciple making look like if they were shaped by mission. I think this is a really helpful way of looking at things, and good question.

I am interested that in two of the four elements he identifies for church we see the nature of God (Mission – missio-dei and Community – trinity) but not sure why but I think it maybe a key to some of the questions I have about some of the other things he says.

Imperialistic thinking masquerading as missional engagement

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Pete Ward has an essay here on the nature of celebrity in culture and missiological implications. There are some interesting points raised and I value several of the observations and critic of celebrity as an entity. However when it comes to exploring the missional nature it is again theologically/missionally conservative, and IMHO falls far short of genuine missional application. His section on Beyond Functional Equivalence is well written but is rooted in a quasi imperialistic approach to missional engagement masquerading as a radical movement. Pete suggests we must “take this capital into account” and whilst he recognises the “contested meanings” around celebrity provide a fruitful area for engagement it is very much on re-interpretative terms rather than from any position of powerlessness or that our doctrines could be wrong and need re-interpreting through genuine dialogue with the people shaped by the culture.
I am not arguing all culture is good, but equally neither is all doctrine. I simply want to hold the culture with the reverence it is due and as an equal partner with the bible and tradition in the “contested” space that non imperialistic mission should inhabit.

I hope the book that is due to follow the article will address some of these issues, but I wonder if there is an inherent imperialism or notion that we have our doctrines right, rooted in the theological or publishing culture that would never let a book like this get written. As underlying any text would be the need for an heretical imperative as that is part of what enables real dialogue in the contested space of missional engagement.

Missionary Imagination 2 – The place of awareness

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NB This may not make much sense as words are problematic.

Often people talk about awareness in mission, the need to be open to what God is doing, and this is critical. However this a part of the process, and we need to discover a place of awareness. Without sounding too much like an old duffer, when I was younger, practicing the spiritual disciplines of silence, different prayer forms and awareness exercises was a key in helping me tune into what G-D what doing on the streets. Like any muscle it needed training and exercise. However the process became too important and I found my self looking for acts of kindness, giving or love etc and it was spotting these that tuned me into the recognition that we were in a thin place, where heaven and earth seemed closer. More recently I have found I needed to practice inhabiting the thin place in the whole of life, slowly I have begun to learn to tune into seeing Jesus in both the act and the person. It is like the difference from being aware you are walking on thin ice and so watching for every step, to simply being in tune with the ice that you walk on so you spend less time watching your step but feel the environment with all your senses.
Last week on visiting some of the great projects around, we went walkabout. On encountering a group one guy the workers knew was homeless, so they checked to see how he was doing. As they chatted over the income support forms another in the group reached across and gave the guy a chocolate bar. He wasn’t sharing a piece because he was eating a bar himself, but simply a response, a seemingly random act. The guy was homeless simply said thanks stuck it in his pocket for later and continued to work on the forms.
I felt christ in the workers, both young people, the sacred space and the well know chocolate bar but I knew we were in a thin place the moment I parked the car and hour or so before the encounter.

Developing missional imagination 1

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So if we have thought about some of the blocks how do we develop the missional imagination. Most people realise the need to do something different as they recognise that what they have been doing doesn’t cut it anymore or their faith is maturing towards or beyond owned faith. Often there is a deconstruction process – where the ambiguity of faith is presented and the gray areas expanded, this then enables us, when we start to deconstruct enables the move from certainty towards mystery. As we recognise and encounter the mystery at the heart of faith we find a freedom to re-imagine our faith, encounter G-D rather than the God we have created in our own image, and this gives us space and inner permission to experiment.

Start the journey:
– Trust your questions
– Leave church as you know it
– Find silence
– Read Scripture from below
– Find fellow travelers
– Reject the God you know as that can’t be G-D
– Be Still but Still moving
– Spend more time at the beach or in woods
– Experiment with your own creativity, eg painting, sculpture

Blocks to the missional imagination

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The local is where it is at, getting on with the job at hand, finding out what God is doing is in the community and going with that. However is there truly the freedom to do this with the creative imaginative responses that faith demands or are we just kidding ourselves that we are free.
Faith is not faith in the seen otherwise it is not faith but a known, there is no need for a leap in imagination, or the risk of a step of faith. Yet as Christianity has been bombarded by the enlightenment culture we have been socialised, institutionalised into seeing faith as an arrival towards a certainty rather the first of many risky steps. This leads to a pre-disposition towards the need for models, towards a lack of risk and ultimately a lack of missional imagination.