Abstract
The language of ‘mission’ is everywhere in the Church of England’s current discourse. Yet many of us feel a profound sense of dis-ease about how it is used. Guder’s work on missional theology provides a rich, challenging exploration of how the Church should be exploring the term. It is a welcome, meaty addition to what too often feels like a diet of light snacks. Called to Witness is a collection of lectures and papers that Guder has given since the publication of Missional Church (1998) in which he and five other academics challenged the North American Church to read theology ‘through the lens of mission’. The book is a compilation of lectures, which means by nature it is in places repetitive. But my advice is to forgive this and read on, because there are real riches to be found; meat to chew on.
Guder provides a challenge to the Western Church shaped by Christendom, which, he argues, has a historical legacy of seeing mission as proclamation to the pagan elsewhere. This, combined with our modern focus on the individual, means that all too often mission is understood as saving individual souls rather than an apostolic call to bear witness to the saving work of God in Jesus Christ. His work is deeply grounded in theological scholarship, drawing particularly on Karl Barth. He calls on the Church to rediscover its ‘apostolicity’, its ‘sent-ness’. This has implications for how we understand the purpose of the Church as the community sent to ‘witness’ to the in-breaking of the kingdom for the world. He critiques the reductionism that focuses mission as a matter of individual salvation, that sees church growth as just adding more saved people to the club. So, the vision of witnessing that he sets out is more corporate. There is a fascinating insight into the way modern English does not have a distinctive plural (i.e. ‘you’), so we fail to pick up the corporate nature of many scriptural passages and so are less engaged with what it means to live in the world as those who reflect the collective salvific work of Jesus Christ.
Particularly interesting is his call to ‘walk worthily’, a challenge for Christians to live as communities of integrity and virtue. I also appreciated his insightful reading of the Nicene ascription of the Church as ‘holy, catholic and apostolic’ – backwards. So his understanding of mission impacts on not only how we read Scripture, but also how we orientate our ecclesial lives, and how we understand what it is to be and do Church in the world. This has implications for two key questions the Church of England is focusing on: mission and discipleship. I hope that those who are shaping these agendas will take the time to read and digest the insights and challenges Guder offers.
Tim Lomax in Creating Missional Worship is writing with a particular audience in mind. This is a book aimed at those who lead worship within the Church of England, particularly those who are looking at how you might combine a liturgical tradition with more experimental ideas. He makes a passionate case for ‘freedom within a framework’ working, within the structure of Common Worship, and utilizing ideas from the emerging church movement. The book begins with a discussion of context, drawing on Stephen Bevans’s work on theology. It is full of examples, questions and practical suggestions.
The worship that Lomax points to is claimed by the title to be missional – and here perhaps, as so often, is the weakness of the book, as there is no real exploration of what this might mean. Is this about making worship more accessible to those not versed in the Church’s traditional language? Is it about changing those within the Church to reflect more of Christ in the wider world? He touches on both of these aspects of worship. Yet, much as I value some of the examples, the book does not really deal with the complexity of worship being something that people participate in regularly for many years. It is easy for the innovative to become reified into its own tradition; and so often the Church then finds that its ‘up-to-date’ accessible worship can quickly date and fail to feed long-term worshippers or indeed feel accessible to the new.
That said, the book will help those looking for creative ways of putting together services for interesting occasions, and many of his questions could be useful for church groups to look at, as they think both imaginatively and critically about what shapes and sustains the worshipping life of their community.
Both these books remind us that we need to take seriously the challenges of a culture where the language of Christendom can no longer be assumed. Guder suggests that this involves a serious theological rethink of what it means to be the apostolic Church, sent to bear witness to God’s kingdom in the world. Lomax is correct in suggesting that in bearing witness, we will need to think creatively about how we root ourselves in our inherited faith, while listening to the world in which we live.