The Missional Church in Practice – An Overview and Assessment

It is not the Church of God that has a mission, it is the God of mission that has a Church

Introduction

My location with regard to ‘the missional church in practice’ is as a church planter for the past 13years, on the south-west edge of London. I am part of a church-planting movement

that on the onehand predates the ‘missional church’ movement discussion, but on the other sits within thepenumbra of this ecclesial phenomena.

I have, personally and consciously, been situated in boththeory and practice as a church planter within the ‘missional’ church matrix.The ‘missional church’, often subsumed within ‘emerging church’, is the subject of an ongoing 10-to 12-year-old public discussion.

In 2008 the emerging/missional church movement wasannounced by some to have already passed its expiry date.

Yet some 12 years since the publicationof one of the earliest ‘missional church’ works,

the missional church movement is today able togarner interest and energy for this conference and the publication of new ‘missional church’ works,including the latest eponymous work,

Introducing the Missional Church

Then we have just seenthe third Lausanne Congress on Global Evangelization take place, with 4,000 leaders from 198countries, at which the topic of missional church was high on the agenda.

At an Anglican eventcoterminous to Lausanne, Christopher Wright, author of

The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible'sGrand Narrative

, suggested that the word missional for Church was redundant. He recounted afriend who told him that saying "missional church" is like saying "female woman".

The title of this paper, and the concern of this missional movement, begs the question: what is andwas the missional church? Indeed, this question is one with which the emerging/missionalmovement has been almost self-obsessed, as can be seen in its production of multifarioustaxonomies and critiques.

Regarding mappings, which I fear often reveal more about the peoplemaking them than of the movement itself, I will highlight in this paper some of the more helpfulones.I also offer my own mapping, created from within the movement as a church planter and throughmy experience of travelling and viewing something of the emerging/missional environment. I offer a typology of its key forms and models, and therein run the risk of adding my obsessions to theemerging/missional church preoccupation of self-classification and ethnographic eisegesis.

Attributed to Rowan Williams, General Synod, 2004

The Association of Vineyard Churches, http://www.vineyardchurches.org.uk/.

Vineyard Churches began as a movement in 1982; http://www.vineyardusa.org/site/about/vineyard-history (accessed23 August 2010).

A claim to the age of the use of this term is made at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/march/16.56.html(accessed 23 August 2010).

http://www.outofur.com/archives/2008/09/rip_emerging_ch.html (accessed 23 August 2010).

Darrell L. Guder, ed.,

Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America

(The Gospel andOur Culture Series) (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998).

Alan J. Roxburgh and M. Scott Boren,

Introducing the Missional Church: What it is, why it matters, and how tobecome one

(Baker Books, 2009).

http://conversation.lausanne.org/en (accessed 5th November 2010).

http://tinyurl.com/38g3lek (accessed 5th November 2010)

A simple Google search of ‘what is the emerging/missional church?’ immediately surfaces some of the almostcanonical mappings and overviews of this movement.Jason Clark www.jasonclark.ws

I then suggest an alternative way to understand these models, from my research, situated within themethodological hopes for this conference. I hope that this will stimulate the move from practice totheory, the integration of academic research with on-the-ground experience, for concrete andprophetically inspired missional action (even if that is through the rejection of my diagnosis). Iconclude with some staging and signposting of where missional church may need to head in light of my diagnosis.

Mapping Missional Church: Whose Typology? Which Archaeology?

For my starting point, I have decided not to seek to explicate what a missional church is, or what thenature of the missional church movement may be. Many examples of this are already available, andI have chosen instead to provide a short survey of missional ecclesiologies. I hope this will orientreaders to the concrete world of the missional church, whilst also drawing attention to the theoriesand influences that underlie those manifestations.Some of the taxonomies and typologies of emerging/missional church have become canonizedthrough a Darwinian process of Google Ranking and blog repostings. In the self-referencing onlineworld in which many of these surveys have made their mark, blog time is different from academictime. Referencing an article dated 2007 runs the risk of appearing to draw attention to a book from1907. However, several articles from inside and outside the missional/emerging community aregenerally accepted as providing helpful descriptions.

A quick google will bring you the moreapocalyptic and sensational conspiracy-theory critiques. In the present paper I have also run the risk of conflating the terms ‘missional’ and ‘emerging’. These terms are often used synonymously, or rather, missional church is often observed as a subset within the larger emerging-churchphenomenon.

Within the various analyses of emerging/missional church, most seem irreconcilable, and variousdiagnoses abound.

Questions have been raised, such as whether the movement is Christian at all,whether it is antithetical to truth and Gospel, a revolution in ecclesiology, a replaying of liberalecclesial sentiments, a break with the church completely, a turn back to the Great Tradition, the solehope and future of the church, or the genetic dead-end and logical telos of a bourgeois middle-classEvangelicalism. Many of these critiques marshal arguments that are framed theologically,philosophically, historically, and sociologically. Some are made with care and others with completeabandon for any of those methods, preferring simple polemic. The academic world has produced asurfeit of postgraduate theses with regard to the missional/emerging phenomenon

and aconcomitant flood of related popular books.

These various mappings require a mapping of their own. In an attempt at this, I suggest that there isa ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ emerging/missional church. There are those who consciously layclaim to be the progenitors of this movement and thereby exclude others and the larger church bytheir claims. On the other hand, many church groups are clearly concerned with the questions andissues within the missional/emerging milieu. These latter groups are perhaps more ‘unconscious’ in

For instance, Scott McKnight, “Five Streams of the Emerging Church”,http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/february/11.35.html, 2007; John S. Hammett, “An EcclesiologicalAssessment of the Emergent Church”, http://criswell.wordpress.com/2006/03/27/hello-world/; Andy Crouch, “TheEmergent Mystique”, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/november/12.36.html.

See “What Makes a Missional Church?”, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/march/16.56.html.

As is most likely common to all changes in ecclesiology throughout history.

Perhaps started by Pete Ward of Kings College with his thesis in Pete Ward,

Liquid Church

(Hendrickson Publishers,2002).

One of the most well-known being Ryan Bolger and Eddie Gibbs,

Emerging Churches: Creating ChristianCommunities in Postmodern Cultures

(SPCK, 2006).

their claim to and use of the term ‘mission’, but they are nonetheless deeply engaged in theepiphenomenon of emerging/missional church.The issues of concern to which these groups attend would include, but by no means be limited to,missional contexts of post-modernity, globalization, secularism, late-capitalist markets, post-colonialism, pluralism, social justice, political engagement, the nature of atonement and the Gospel,and various challenges of post-Christian contexts to discipleship. I propose that it is these elementsof concern that cluster together to give the emerging/missional movement its direction, impetus, andtexture and are the modus operandi for all things missional.I remember when in 1999, some two years after planting a church, I came into contact with many of these ingredients and challenges and realized that I was no longer a church planter in a countryhospitable to Christianity. Instead, I had become a missionary to a post-Christian society. I did notneed to travel abroad for mission, because where I was, ‘mission’ had become the context for ministry and church planting.

The Missional Church Texture: Streams and Manifestations

As various groups have explored this missional context and surrounding issues, many concreteforms have taken shape in response. I highlight a few here as key current ‘streams’ and trajectoriesof the missional church movement. Many of these streams are interrelated and are not clear delineations between groups, some of which will undoubtedly and understandably take issue withmy crude categorizations.

Social Justice:

There has been an emphasis and rediscovery of the mission of the church as‘social justice’. We perhaps see this within Jim Wallace and the Sojourners Community in the US,

New Wine/Soul Survivor in Shepton Mallet with fair trade and Tearfund stands, Steve Chalke andOasis pioneering housing, healthcare, education and youth activities for over 20 years,

and newfoodbank schemes run by local churches throughout the UK.

David Bebbington described in 1989how a premillennial Evangelicalism in the UK led to an inability to engage in social justice but ashift in the 1970s from Keswick and others to an amillennial view allowed a pent-up desire for social justice to be released (unlike in the US with its ongoing focus on sin as the target of socialaction and despite Jim Wallace’s influence at the time). I suggest that there has been a retrieval of social justice within a rethinking of the Gospel for many Evangelicals.

Missional:

Then perhaps more eponymously, we have the ‘missional’ missional church. Here wefind often find practitioners of missional church who lay claim to this term as their

raison d’être

. Inmissional groups the work of David Bosch in

Transforming Mission

is often cited with the claimthat all of Christianity

to be understood as missiology. Closer to home, the ‘missional’ churchtakes its impetus from Leslie Newbigin, who on his return from missions, discerned how far the UK had moved away from Christianity, and saw the need for the church to understand itself asmissional in response to this change.

David Bebbington highlights the work of Jim Wallace in the 1970s and its future influence in David Bebbington,

Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s

(Routledge, 1989), 264.

http://www.oasisuk.org/ (accessed 22 October 2010).

http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=87190 (accessed 22 October 2010).

David Bosch,

Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission

(Orbis Books, 1991).

For a history of that impetus and ongoing resources, see The Gospel and Culture Network, www.gocn.org (accessed22 October 2010).Jason Clark www.jasonclark.ws