The Minister As Missionary 5

3. The Missionary-Minister As Host.  Mission as Hospitality

In a rapidly changing, rootless society, mission is also about generating communities of hospitality, providing for strangers a nourishing and wholesome place to be while they decide if they would like to belong. 

This is not unrelated to my previous point.  One of the things that is essential for true hospitality is knowing who we are, being comfortable in our own corporate skin.  It really isn’t about being on our best behaviour, nervously minding our P’s and Q’s lest we offend.   Too many attempts at hospitality fail because they are uptight.  Good hospitality is about unashamedly being who we are while creating space for others to be with us, without them feeling that they have to be anything other than who they are.  It's about the standing invitation to all and sundry to enter into our domestic life, to be at home in our home.   It's not about offering a formal seat in the parlour, it's about keeping a place by the fire in the kitchen.

This, I fear, is where the seeker-centred approach to church and evangelism led us down a blind alley.  It really isn't helpful to gather up all that is peculiar about the Christian way of being and hide it behind the sofa for fear that guests might find it off-putting.   Let's face the facts, we are unquestionably odd.  But as society becomes more and more pluralistic so is everyone else.  It's normal to be odd.  Being embarrassed about our oddity just makes everyone nervous.

Becoming hospitable also requires us to embrace the invitational dimension of Christian mission.  Yes, we must attend to the rightfully insistent voices reminding us that mission is about going.  Yes, The Field of Dreams approach to mission (“If you build it they will come”) is indeed inadequate.  Inadequate, but not entirely misguided.  The debate between centripetal and centrifugal approaches to mission is ultimately sterile.  We need both.

Even as ministers work to grow churches that are eager to go, we must also be home-makers, nurturing communities to which it is worth returning.  Missionary-ministers will give themselves to fostering a community ethos that is generous towards those who lodge with us, at ease with visitors, appropriately, curious about newcomers and always ready with a patient explanation should anyone enquire about our peculiar ways.

And no, once again, I am not saying that fostering such an ethos is the sole responsibility of the minister.  Of course it isn't.  But ministers ought not to be blind to the influence they have for good or ill on the feel of the communities they lead.  Let's deploy that influence intentionally.  Let's seek to be home-makers and home-sharers.  Let's recover, practice and promote the lost art of hospitality.

Back in May I gave the Baptist Ministers' Fellowship annual lecture at the Baptist Assembly in Plymouth.  This month a version of the talk was published in the Baptist Minsters' Journal.  With the kind permission of the editorial board I will be reproducing a slightly modified version of the BMJ article here.  To keep things down to regular post length I'm going to stick it up in a series of bite size chunks.

Horror For Halloween

My friend Rob's been reviewing horror films as a run up to halloween.  The reviews are very good and this post is just in time so you might want to take your lap top behind the sofa and read 'em.

The Minister As Missionary 4

2. The Missionary-Minister as Theologian in Residence.  Mission as Faithful Witness

In the hands of unreflective activists mission is so easily hijacked by alien values and subordinated to unexamined cultural presuppositions.  Stories of how this happened in the massive Victorian colonial, missionary expansion abound.  But you don’t have to set foot beyond your own culture to fall prey to such a disease.  Our missionary methods at home have, for instance, become chronically instrumentalised.  Too often we get too close to ends justifying means.  We forget that the form of mission matters just as much as the fruit of mission. Having a mission-shaped church is fine as long as we also have a gospel-shaped mission.

When it comes to our fearful lusting after church growth we have not always been as vigilant as we might.  Measurable growth, numerical success, numbers coming through the door have, in line with our culture’s obsession with the countable, become almost unqualified measures of  ministerial success.  And while I would be the first to criticise a neglectful indifference toward to results, I am also convinced that our feverish concern with the response to our missionary endeavours often leads us astray from the way of Christ. 

Billy Sunday, the old time evangelist, once calculated the price of a soul by dividing the total cost of his missions by the number of converts.  I myself recall one preacher at the end of a disappointing week of mission making an appeal with an interesting twist:  “I’d like everyone here to raise a hand in the air.  Ok, now if you don’t want to become a Christian, put your hand down.”  This kind of thing is not effective evangelism, it’s false witness. 

Of course few take it quite so far.  But I do think we need to ask if we have been guilty of purveying “gospel light” because in our desire to see results we have emptied our “gospel message” of all substantial ethical content.  Too much evangelism sounds too little like a call to join a radical community committed to sacrificial living for the sake of peace and justice, and too much like just another manifestation of our culture’s obsession with the therapeutic quick fix.

The truest measure of Christian of witness is not effectiveness but faithfulness to the person and the way of Christ.  This is of course much harder to measure, but it is also much more important.  This means making sure that our churches embody our tradition, that we know our language, are familiar with our stories, and keep alive our distinctive, defining practices. 

That is why a missionary-minister has to be a theologian, a local theologian, a theologian in residence.   The missionary re-orientation for which I’m calling , the turning out to the world rather than in on our selves, must not become a mere pragmatism, an unthinking rush to adopt whatever method promises to “work”.  It is the missionary-minister’s job, to help ensure that mission is rooted in our identity as a gospel people.

Now of course it’s not all down to the minister.  Baptist congregations of all congregations should be congregations of all the talents.  But there is a particular expertise that we as ministers must bring – an expertise in the scriptures and their significance for shaping congregational life.  We have a deposit that we are charged to keep, guard, renew and make available to our people, in the hope that they will never, ever trade in the blessing of authentic Christian identity for a mess of institutional success.

This is especially important  in our pluralistic society with its tournament of narratives, its bewildering white noise of competing ideologies and identities. Perhaps the greatest danger for an enthusiastically missionary church in our glorious, fascinating, diverse culture is that we forget who we are.  We must not allow that to happen.  It is the missionary-minster’s job to make sure that the church doesn’t go native.  We do this by learning to see ourselves as theologians - an unapologetic, insistent theological presence and resource rooted in our communities, not ivory tower fancifiers, but theologians in residence.

Back in May I gave the Baptist Ministers' Fellowship annual lecture at the Baptist Assembly in Plymouth.  This month a version of the talk was published in the Baptist Minsters' Journal.  With the kind permission of the editorial board I will be reproducing a slightly modified version of the BMJ article here.  To keep things down to regular post length I'm going to stick it up in a series of bite size chunks.

The Minister As Missionary 3

In the previous post I suggested that If we are to nurture genuinely missionary disciples, and genuinely missionary congregations we have to have genuinely missionary ministers, ministers who are oriented towards the beyond church, who see their calling as helping God’s church prayerfully to pursue God’s purpose for God’s world.

This will mean reimagining what it means to be a minister. I want to suggest that this will require the development of new images of ministry to sit alongside, or in some cases to supersede, the traditional images such as the pastor-teacher.

I would like to share with you three such images in the hope that they might help to fund such a reimagining.  Each image is fashioned in relation to a particular missional challenge facing the church in  twenty-first century Britain.

1. The Missionary-Minister as Conversationalist.  Mission as Dialogue
Cross-cultural missionaries discovered long ago the vital place of dialogue when working beyond the bounds of Christendom.  We too in this country are now ministering beyond Christendom.   The Church is an eccentric minority.  Our society is religiously plural.   Sadly the response of Christians to this situation has often been either hostility or indifference.  What is called for instead is ministerial initiatives in friendly engagement with those with whom we share our post-christian country. 

One of my regrets about my last pastorate is that I did not give nearly enough attention to discussion with the Muslim community on my doorstep.  In the current climate of brittle co-existence between different faith communities in the midst of a functionally atheist culture, it has to be a priority that we ministers work to show that diversity of religion in our society needn’t be a problem, and still less an excuse for violence.  If mission isn’t about reaching out in friendly embrace to those who are different, if it isn't about intentional peace-making then I don’t know that it is about.

In our relationships with those of other faiths neither crass conversionism nor timid opposition to conversionism will do.  What we need is mature, open, generous, humble, committed dialogue.  If our churches are to be oriented toward the beyond church, not turning our backs on our neighbours but turning toward them that we might first listen and then speak of our faith in Christ, we need missionary-ministers who will reach out in friendship and strike up as many conversations as possible.  Yes of course this is a calling for the whole church but ministers represent the church in particular way, ministers set the tone and give a lead.  It is our responsibility to initiate conversations, sustain conversations and draw church members into such conversations.

Back in May I gave the Baptist Ministers' Fellowship annual lecture at the Baptist Assembly in Plymouth.  This month a version of the talk was published in the Baptist Minsters' Journal.  With the kind permission of the editorial board I will be reproducing a slightly modified version of the BMJ article here.  To keep things down to regular post length I'm going to stick it up in a series of bite size chunks.

God At The Movies?

More shameless self publicity.  This is one of our Luther King House Church Saturdays.  I think the flyer's self explanatory.  If you're in the Manchester area, why not come and join us?  Click on the image below to mail us with your booking.

The Minister As Missionary 2

Introduction - Missionary by Orientation 
Talk of mission is fast becoming the twenty-first century ecclesiastical equivalent of bind weed.  It gets everywhere.  Nor is it just  talk about mission that is expanding, our understanding of what qualifies as mission has grown and grown and grown.  So much so that we run the risk of sticking the label “missionary” on everything that moves and, this being church, quite few things that have long since lost the power of movement. 

On the one hand, this is clearly a good thing. I wouldn’t want to go back to the idea that unless it involves giving out tracts or making an appeal it doesn’t count as mission.  On the other hand though, there is a problem.  What exactly does count as mission and what ought not to count?  Where do we draw the line?  Which activities qualify?

I do an exercise with our students called Is it mission?  They conduct a questionnaire with their congregation.  The questionnaire lists a range of activities – everything from church planting through political campaigning to discussing religion with a Hindu neighbour.  The interviewees have to decide which activities qualify as mission.  We soon discover that if you try hard enough you can make a case for virtually anything to count as mission. 

The problem of course lies in our attempt to define mission in terms of what we do.  Becoming missional is not about doing a different thing, a new thing, an additional thing, it’s about doing all that we do with a different view in mind.  Mission is not one thing in particular it is everything seen from a particular perspective.  In the end I don’t think it’s helpful to think about which activities count and which don’t.  Our focus should be on our orientation.  Not “What are we doing?” but, “What is our motivation?”  Not, “What is occupying us?” but, “What are we intending?”  Is our concern, the furthering of God’s purposes for the world?  Then in my book it’s mission.

To get theological for a moment, it’s a matter of learning to see our place in the grand flow of the divine purpose, the Genesis to Revelation movement of God.  Creation itself is an act of mission, an act of divine outreach, bringing into being that which is both other than God and beloved by God.  Similarly, God’s determined commitment to the world despite its sin and brokenness is the missionary ground of the reality in which we live.  And of course the vision of the consummation of all things when the kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah is our missiological lodestar.

The people of God have their being and find their identity as part of this reality.  We exist for God and for God’s ultimate purpose, the restoration of all things.  To the extent that Christians live contrary to this reality, pursuing self-interest and neglecting the divine project, we live against the grain of reality and in denial of our identity.  We also live in contradiction of the very heart of the gospel.  Whether you look to the incarnation, ministry or crucifixion of Christ what you see is the most profound orientation to the other, a living and a dying for the sake of the world, a radical refusal of self-absorption.

If you want an illustration of my point consider the second of this year’s televised prime-ministerial debates.  Supposedly this focused on foreign policy.  The questions however were all about national self-interest. Nothing on international justice, nothing on the global poor, nothing on international development.  Little-Englandism at its worst.  And the kind of attitude that is sadly too often found, transposed into a religious key, within our churches.

If all the talking, writing, conferencing, posturing and assembling on the theme of mission is to amount to anything, then we need a radical reorientation of the life of our  churches.  And if our churches are to experience this reorientation then our concept of ministry also needs a shake up.  If we are to nurture genuinely missionary disciples, and genuinely missionary congregations we have to have genuinely missionary ministers, ministers who are oriented towards the beyond church, who see their calling as helping God’s church prayerfully to pursue God’s purpose for God’s world.

Back in May I gave the Baptist Ministers' Fellowship annual lecture at the Baptist Assembly in Plymouth.  This month a version of the talk was published in the Baptist Minsters' Journal.  With the kind permission of the editorial board I will be reproducing a slightly modified version of the BMJ article here.  To keep things down to regular post length I'm going to stick it up in a series of bite size chunks.

The Minister As Missionary 1

Back in May I gave the Baptist Ministers' Fellowship annual lecture at the Baptist Assembly in Plymouth.  This month a version of the talk was published in the Baptist Minsters' Journal.  With the kind permission of the editorial board I will be reproducing the BMJ article here.  To keep things down to regular post length I'm going to stick it up in a series of bite size chunks.  I may add further posts to the series so that I can expand on some of the ideas beyond the word limit that was possible in the article.  We'll see if I run out of energy.  

I'd love to hear what you think of the proposals.

Preamble
The talk and the article explored what it means to think of the minister as a missionary.  My concern was to address the majority of (Baptist) ministers who will devote their lives to serving regular congregations rather than those whose calling takes them into more pioneering ministries such as church planting.  Much has been written about the need for such cutting edge ministries in Britain today.  I agree wholeheartedly.  However, if the church as a whole is to evolve into new missional forms and mentalities it is important that we consider what this might mean for those caring for and reaching out from mainstream congregations, those who for the foreseeable future will continue to comprise the majority of ministers.

The approach that I take is to offer a number of models for how we might envisage the role of the missionary minister.  I relate these models to some of the challenges of mission in post-Christian Britain.  More of that later though.  The first post proper (which will follow soon) is an extended introduction where I explore the idea that mission is best understood not as an activity or a set of activities but as a particular orientation.

Africa United

A friend of mine was producer on this new film.  This is me doing my bit to promote it. 

The film has been well received on the festival circuit.  The Guardian/Observer seemed to like it.  All that's needed now is for people to go see it.  It's  on general release on October 22nd.  Here's a trailer.