Julie Gittoes,Brutus Green and James Heard,Generous Ecclesiology: Church,World and the Kingdom of God;Harald Hegstad,The Real Church: An Ecclesiology of the Visible

Harald Hegstad, The Real Church: An Ecclesiology of the Visible , James Clarke: Cambridge, 2013; 258 pp.: 9780227174098, £20.00 (pbk)

Recently I addressed a group of Anglican curates from dioceses in Yorkshire and Humberside. They were participating in a course about leadership and change in the contemporary church as part of Initial Ministerial Education. The discussion soon turned to the linked issues of church growth, church planting, parish churches and Fresh Expressions. The course is not easy to teach since some are taking it as part of an MA, which demands academic depth and rigour, while others want insights and practical wisdom that can be applied more immediately to their specific context. One of the non-MA students made an impassioned intervention. Why were we wasting time on analysis and theorizing? Our focus should be on growth. There were growing churches but they were held back because they had to ‘drag behind them the corpse of the traditional church’.

That is a fair, if brutal, summary of how an increasing number of Anglicans see the challenge facing Christians today. Are we For the Parish (FTP), to use the title of the book by Andrew Davison and Alison Milbank; or do we see the future lying in the creation of ‘a sustainable network of Christ-like, lively and diverse Christian communities in every place’ (a diocesan mission statement) – a Mission-Shaped Church (MSC) – that may or may not want to be part of the parish system or act like a traditional parish church. Should we seek to sustain traditional models of the Church or find fresh expressions?

This is the explicit background to the collection of essays in Generous Ecclesiology, written principally from an Anglican perspective and mainly by male clergy. There is a recognition that the Fresh Expressions movement and the idea of network churches (MSC) has caused disquiet and some attempt needs to be made to find a way of holding both the traditional and the new together, otherwise a divided church will fall. The authors collectively call this a deeper vision of Church and mission, rooted in worship and responsive to the world. This deeper vision is summed up as a ‘generous ecclesiology’ that flows from an understanding of the generosity of God in giving himself for the life of the world.

The essays range widely over many topics: what ‘generous’ episcopacy looks like; what we can learn from the history of Anglo-catholic incarnational theology and practice; the open nature of traditional Anglican ecclesiology; the missional potential in engaging with aspects of modern culture; the relationship between Church and kingdom; what we mean by assurance; the Church as both necessary and in constant need of reform; the need for an inclusive catholicity.

The authors are right in seeing the renewal of ecclesiology as one of the most urgent tasks facing the Church and one made necessary by the loss of the Book of Common Prayer and its implicit and explicit ecclesiology that once united Anglicans. Between them they highlight some of the strengths and weaknesses on each side of the FTP and MSC debate. So, for example, traditionalists have not always understood that spirituality is not absent in contemporary society but has migrated: it flows through numerous non-traditional channels that our traditional practices fail to recognize. In contrast, those who ignore the centrality of sacramental worship may be seriously impoverishing the Christian mission.

For me, the pivotal essay is by Robert Thompson, an NHS chaplain. Standing every day at the interface between the churches (ecumenical) and a secular institution, he is forced to think about the implications of living in a highly plural culture in which no one faith can assume a privileged position. As a result, he recognizes that ‘both MSC and FTP need to be augmented by fuller accounts of how their respective visions of mission relate to the faith diversity found in contemporary Britain’ (p. 143); otherwise we finish with ‘supersessionist’ ecclesiologies that cannot serve us in the present age. The book is worth reading for this chapter alone.

A focus on the Church as we experience it is also the theme of Harald Hegstad’s book, The Real Church. Hegstad is a Norwegian scholar who began his academic career as – in his own words – ‘a rather traditional systematic theologian who was mainly concerned with analysing the works of other theologians’ (p. ix). When he went to work for the Center for Church Research (KIFO) in Oslo, however, he discovered the methodologies and perspectives of the social sciences ‘as a way to investigate the church’ (p. ix). The result, set out in this book, is something that is often lacking in contemporary studies of the Church: a union of systematic theology and empirical research. This would be a very good book, therefore, to put into the hands of those curates I met who are about to undertake a study of their local church as part of their training.

Hegstad’s starting and end point is the question: what does it mean to believe in the Church? His argument is that it has to mean that we take seriously the Church as we actually encounter it and not some idealized notion of it. This is why the book is sub-titled An Ecclesiology of the Visible. He then examines chapter by chapter aspects of the visible Church, drawing out what distinguishes this particular human fellowship, flawed though it is, from others. As I read Hegstad’s account I was reminded of Robert Thompson’s description of the Church: it is Christ's holy/sick body.