After The Bomb

This week the place where I live was violated.  Children from our city and our region, were cruelly killed and maimed.  As you are no doubt aware, Manchester is living through one of the most difficult weeks in its proud history.  And in the heart of this city my colleagues and I at Northern Baptist College have been getting on with the job that we believe God has given us, the same job that the college has been doing for over 150 years, preparing people for servant leadership in the Church of Jesus Christ.  It hasn’t been easy. 

On Tuesday, our staff team travelled out of our shaken city for an away day.  We spent most of our time naming, discussing and praying for each of our students.  Today, back at Luther King House, our home base on Manchester’s famous curry mile, we have been interviewing four people who believe that God is calling them into Christian ministry, calling them in other words to devote their lives to helping people to follow Jesus, helping people to love, to serve, to pursue peace and to work for justice. To be involved in such a process is always a profound privilege. This week it seems a particularly fitting way to be spending our time.

Why? 

Well, because the slaughter on our doorstep has reminded us just how much our city needs communities of people committed to living the Jesus way.  When some might be tempted to let anger turn into hatred, Manchester needs people who will remember that each of its citizens, whether red or blue, whether African, Asian or European, whether Sikh or Christian, Jewish or Muslim, whether northern-born or less fortunate, every last one of us is first and foremost a human being, created by God, bearing the image of God (however distorted) and precious in the sight of God.

As one of those charged by my denomination to form the next generation of church leaders I have to make sure that all our students remember what churches are for. No one can be allowed to leave our college in any doubt whatsoever that our churches must never become self-interested, seeking only their own wellbeing, neglecting the communities that God has called them to serve.  They must never be allowed to think that mission is only about growing bigger and bigger churches. They must never be allowed to devote themselves to growing disciples simply for the sake of growing disciples without asking what disciples are for, what difference disciples are supposed to make in the wider world.

We need leaders who will help churches become what they were always meant to be: communities of the prince peace, the healer, the lover of outcasts, the one who would eat with anyone whether he was supposed to or not, the one who wept for Jerusalem.  Any church that does not seek the welfare of its city is a contradiction in terms. Any church that forgets to build bridges of reconciliation forgets whose church it is.  Any church that is content to let outsiders stay out has lost its way and lost sight of its Lord.  Any church that thinks that this kind of stuff is none of its business is plain wrong.

That’s what I have to remember.  That’s what this difficult week has reminded me.  I pray to God that I will never forget.  I pray that you will never forget either, even if you are not fortunate enough live in Manchester. 

One of the things that people often say, when they are touched by tragedies such as the one that happened on our doorstep, is, “I wanted to do something but I felt helpless.”  If that’s you then thank God you’re are not helpless. If like me you name Jesus as your saviour, there’s lots you can do.  Here’s six suggestions for starters.

1.    You can resolve to remind yourself each morning that every person who lives in your village, town or city is a child of Adam and Eve and therefore your brother or sister in God.

2.    You can commit yourself to helping your church to become the kind of church that behaves a bit more like Jesus.

3.    You can identify someone in your community from another background, another race, another religion and simply get to know them. If that sounds scary, start by smiling and saying, “Hello.”

4.    You can find a group that is working to build bridges in your community and join them, whether they carry a Christian label or not.

5.    You can go on praying the prayer that Jesus taught us pray, “… your will be done in my part of your earth as it is in heaven” and then act like you mean it.

6.    And you can, if you would be so kind, pray for my colleagues and me in the heart of our hurting city, that we might be able to grow leaders who know how to grow churches who know how to grow the kind of communities that will gladden the heart of God.

This first appeared on Christian Today

Some Good News About Goodnewsing

Jesus seemed to think that evangelism was an important part of being a disciple.  He told Simon and Andrew that to follow him would mean fishing for people.  He told those of his friends who stuck with him in Jerusalem that when he sent the Holy Spirit they would end up being his witnesses.  According to Matthew, his parting words make it clear that to be a disciple is to make other disciples.  It all seems pretty straightforward.  If we call ourselves Christians we are meant to evangelise.

The same is true if we call ourselves Baptists.  The official basis of our union only has three principles, one of those is that every disciple is to bear personal witness to the good news and take part in the evangelisation of the world. 

So, how’s that going? 

Ah, thought as much, sorry to hear that. 

More and more of us seem to have a problem with evangelism.  On the one hand we know we are supposed to, but quite frankly much of the evangelism we have seen puts us off. “If that’s what evangelism looks like I wouldn’t do it to my worst enemies.” Evangelism can so easily become intrusive, arrogant, pushy, manipulative, forced, artificial, dishonest - anything but good news.  However, it doesn’t have to be that way. 

If you are not a fan of some of the evangelism that you’ve seen, here’s some good news - not the good news, but some good news about the good news.

·      You don’t have to stand on street corners shouting at people.

·      You don’t have to pretend that you want people to be your friends, just so you can evangelise them.

·      You don’t have to devise a cunning strategy to get your friends to come to church even though you are pretty sure they don’t want to.

·      You don’t have to invite them to hear some minor celebrity who’s pretending to talk about being a celebrity when really that’s just an excuse to preach the gospel.

·      You don’t have to wear a wrist band and explain what the heart, the X, the cross and the question mark stand for, or be able to draw The Bridge to Life, or memorise The Four Spiritual Laws, or any other formula for that matter.

Those things aren’t what evangelism is.  They are just some of the ways that people have gone about evangelism.

OK, then, so what is evangelism?

To put it simply, evangelism is the communication of the gospel.  It’s all about helping people to find out about and understand the good news of Jesus in the hope that they too will want to follow him.  Evangelism is goodnewsing, getting on with life in such a way that people have a chance to discover Jesus for themselves.

If I’m right, and this is what evangelism is, another bit of good news is that it’s best not to limit evangelism to verbal proclamation.

We can communicate the good news as individuals or as churches by the way we are, and the stuff we do as well as the things we say.  Being, doing and speaking are all important modes of evangelism.  When we are the kind of church that is welcoming, friendly, outward-looking, generous and forgiving, we communicate the good news by embodying it.  When we work to shelter the homeless, feed the hungry and campaign for the oppressed, we communicate the good news by enacting it.  When we explain to our friends why we pray, how we came to follow Jesus or what God means to us, we communicate the good news by articulating it.

Of course these three modes of communication work best when they work together.  That way they make for a richer expression of the gospel.  Being on its own is too passive.  Doing on its own is too ambiguous.  Speaking on its own is too facile. Get it all together though and our message is more likely to ring true.

The next piece of good news is evangelism doesn’t always have to be the thing at the front of our mind, the thing we are consciously aiming at.  In fact it often happens best when it happens obliquely.  Ironically, if evangelism is always the primary motivator for everything we are, do and say we will end up actually undermining our evangelism because we will make it inauthentic, twisted, less than genuine.

So, for example, when the way we are bespeaks Christ, when our churches are hospitable, honouring the least and including the outsider, this is indeed evangelistic, it communicates the good news, but our primary intent here is not to communicate but rather, together as a church, to live a Christ-like life. Evangelism in this mode is more often than not a blessed by product of trying to be faithful, Jesus-type communities.

Similarly, if we only ever care for the needy or work for peace and reconciliation so that we can let everyone see what the way of Christ looks like, there’s something about our motivation that is not true to the Jesus we hope to communicate.  Again, gospel communication in this mode happens best when we are focussed something else, such as loving people, irrespective of whether or not they are interested in our message.

This also applies when we speak of our faith. When we explain to friends why we pray, when we offer a Christ-informed perspective to colleagues at work chatting about an event in the news, even on occasions such as these it is not that we think, “OK, now I am going to evangelise.” No, we just do it because part of what it means to live as a Christian is to speak as a Christian and therefor to speak of Christ.

Now don’t get me wrong here.  I’m not against intentional proclamation of the gospel as one means of communicating good news. There will, of course, always be those times when our primary purpose is indeed to get the good news across. But these are evangelism’s special occasions not its everyday way of being. This is evangelism in its Sunday best not the kind of come as you are and take us as you find us evangelism which is the staple of ordinary goodnewsing. This matters, because when we allow disciples to believe that the exceptional is what defines evangelism we run the risk of putting them off.

Nor am I suggesting that we don’t have to speak about our faith.  I don’t think St. Francis ever actually said, “Preach the good news and if you must, use words” but I wish it hadn’t got round that he did.  Piping up about Jesus is a crucial part of evangelism.  But it’s a part not the whole. And it’s at its best when it’s not contrived but rather when we just tell our friends about Jesus, when we say what we say because that’s who we are, not because we are targeting someone, seeking to assuage our guilt or trying the get the pastor off our back.

I don’t know if these thoughts will help.  Some might think I’m watering down evangelism.  In which case I’ve not made myself clear.  I think I’m trying to beef it up.  I’m also trying to help people see that it can be a commonplace part of ordinary Christian living; something everyday for everyday disciples; something that everyday disciples just get one with; something for which the Baptist flavour of disciple becomes known – in life and not just on paper.  If that were to happen, that would be good news.

This was originally published in the Summer 2016 edition of Baptists Together

Urban Embrace

Look!  A conversational, reflective, creative and friendly bit of getting stuck into urban mission and ministry, Manchester style.  I'm going.  Go on, join us.

Co-Principals Sought for Northern Baptist Learning Community

The theological college where I work is looking to appoint new leadership.  Here are the details of the position(s).

Want an exciting job in theological education in Manchester? The post(s) of Co-Principal of the Northern Baptist Learning Community in the stimulating Luther King House is about to be advertised.

Two Co-Principals
Northern Baptist Learning Community

Location: Manchester

Reward package: circa £30,000 per post (negotiable) + housing allowance

Missional Ecclesiology Article and Sermons on Luke

 I've just uploaded some new stuff to Scribd. I do this form time when people ask me for copies of notes from lectures, sermons etc.  The first piece is an article on Missional Ecclesiology raising some questions about the theology and practice of missional church practitioners.  This first saw light as a lecture to a group of European Baptist theology teachers in the Ukraine back in July 2012.  It had a reincarnation as part of our 1st Tuesday series of public lectures at Luther King House in November 2012. The version here was published in the Journal of European Baptist Studies (Volume 13, Number 2).  I am grateful to the editorial board for permission to publish it in this format.

There are also notes from three sermons on Luke 4 originally preached at the Baptist Assembly in Scotland in October 21012.  The first is entitled What's He Up To? and looks at Jesus' own sense of mission; the second is entitled Which Side Is He On? and deals with Luke's presentation of Jesus' boundary busting approach to mission; number three, Who's The Daddy?, is a reminder that our participation in the ongoing mission of Jesus must include pointing to him as Son of God.  If you want you can also get an audio file of each sermon over at the Baptist Assembly in Scotland web site.

Finally there are notes for a sermon on the preaching of John the Baptist in Luke chapter three.  The sermon was preached at Luther King House chapel on December 11th, 2012.

I know this looks like nothing more than shameless self promotion which is not the case.  It is of course at least in part a bit of brass-necked-look-at-me-ism (which blog isn't?) but it is more than that, honest.  I only stick up here stuff that people seem to have appreciated.  Generally it's also stuff for which I've received requests for notes.  So really it's better to think of what I'm doing as selfless public service.

There's more than a small chance that the sermon notes won't be of much use to those who didn't hear the original.  They tend to be a bit on the sparse side, fleshed out for publication somewhat from what I actually take into the pulpit with me but nonetheless well short of a full script (apart that is for the third of the Luke 4 sermon notes which for some mysterious reason ended as the fullest notes I think I've ever used.)

Anyhow if you think they might of help click the links above or head to Scribd via the box in the side bar to the right and down a bit. If you dont' think they'll be any help you've probably stopped reading by now.

Missional Church Lecture

Here's what I'm doing on Tuesday November 6th.  You can come if you want to.  You can also tell others who might want to come.

Mission Implausible - Book Review

I've decided to stick a few book reviews up on the blog.  Some of them were written a while ago.  This one relates to a book that is now sadly out of print.  Shame.  It's a good 'un.  Still might be possible to pick one up second hand.  Anyhow, here's the review.

Duncan MacLaren, Mission Implausible: Restoring Credibility to the Church (Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press, 2004)

The latest edition of Religious Trends from Peter Brierley’s organisation, Christian Research, catalogues the ongoing, dismal decline of the UK church.  Brierley predicts that if current trends continue 1.3 million (net) members will leave between the years 2000 and 2020, a loss of 23%.  This is the context for Duncan MacLaren’s very helpful contribution to the growing literature on mission in western societies.   Specifically he offers insights from The Sociology of Knowledge a field pioneered in the 60’s and 70’s by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman.  His hope is to discover strategies that the church might adopt to recover credibility for itself and its message.

MacLaren is sympathetic to Grace Davie’s contention that the dramatic decline of the fortunes of Christianity in Europe is something of an oddity when compared to the remarkable resilience of religion elsewhere.  In accounting for this decline  he allows for influences arising from the history of ideas since the enlightenment.  However, more weight is given to sociological factors.  Here MacLaren lines up with classic secularisation theorists such as Bryan Wilson and Steve Bruce, attributing the decline of the church to the inhospitality of modernity (at least in its European form) towards institutional Christianity.  His analysis of the impact of such issues as urbanisation, industrialisation, and privatisation covers familiar ground with commendable clarity and lightness of touch.  Similarly we are offered a very useful introduction to Berger’s notion of plausibility structures – those aspects of any given society that bolster the credibility of  certain beliefs. 

Next, Maclaren identifies various forms of religion that seem to buck the secularisation trend.  For instance sectarian forms of religion such as Pentecostalism or the latent religion associated with high profile tragedies such as the death Diana.  He then goes on to suggest various reasons for such resilience.  This thinking is cashed out in terms of five “imperatives for practical action for restoring credibility to the church”.  Very stimulating stuff this.

With echoes of Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture we then get MacLaren’s consideration of the positioning of the church viz a viz the rest of society.  He identifies three promising strategies: tension (the sectarian option which maximises internal coherence and maintains distinctives); momentum (making the most of favourable societal trends by going with the flow) and the middle way of significance (engaging in public issues in ways that maximise the visibility of the church).  The suggestion is that a missionary-minded church needs to find ways of simultaneously becoming distinctive, inculturated and engaged.  Interesting, but I wasn’t entirely convinced by the suggestion that the Columban mission of the Celtic church is an example of how this might be achieved.

All in all I found Mission Implausible a very helpful and worthwhile read; so much so that I now use it as one of the core text-books for my course on Mission In Contemporary Britain.  Its value lies in the combination of sociology and missiology.  While there is little here that is brand new, MacLaren is a well-informed and reliable guide to both fields and his handling of the conversation between the two is very stimulating.

Evangelistic Fragment Two: On The Relationship Between Evangelism And Mission

(The second of an as yet undetermined number of thoughtlets on evangelism that have dribbled out of my brain, down my arm and through the keyboard.   Mainly because I'm preparing to teach an MA module on evangelism.)

Evangelism  is that aspect of mission that is concerned with communication of the gospel, getting the message across.  Other vital dimensions of mission include making a difference for good in God's world irrespective of whether or not we get our message across. 

It is my conviction that mission in its fullest sense is about praying and working for the fulfillment of the purposes of God, seeking the establishment of the reign of God and therefore cooperating with the Spirit of God in every dimension of God's creative and recreative work. 

Missiology Podcasts From Fuller

I've just posted a number of links to podcasts from Fuller Theological Seminary on my Links To Other Stuff page.  (See the tab in the green bar at the top of this page.)  There's all sorts of good stuff to be had including Graham Cray on Fresh Expressions, Darrell Guder on Missional Leadership After Christendom and Allan Roxburgh on contemporary mission.  Go take a look.

I will stick up a few more links when I get round to it - I've particularly enjoyed listening to John Goldingay's Old Testament lectures - and I'll keep on adding stuff as I come across it.  Keep on checking back from time to time just to make sure you don't miss out.

Mission in Britain Today - What Would You Teach?

I've decided that time has come for a significant revision of my introductory degree module on mission in Britain today.  I've been teaching this course for the past six years now with only minor tweaks and that word "today" in the title is a rather insistent demand to keep things freshish. I've got a number of ideas in mind but it would be awfully decent of you if you would offer up some suggestions of your own.

Here's what we cover at the moment:

Pentecost and Mission

Had an enjoyable couple of hours preparing to preach two sermons on Acts 2 this weekend.  Came across this from Justo Gonzales in his Acts: The Gospel of the Spirit.  Liked it.  Thought you might like it as well.

In order to have the multitude understand what the disciples of Jesus were saying the Holy Spirit had two options: one was to make all understand the Aramaic the disciples spoke; the other was to make each understand in their own tongue.  Significantly the Spirit chooses the latter route.  This has important consequences for the way we understand the place of culture and language in the Church.  Had the Spirit made all the listeners understand the language of the apostles, we would be justified in a centripetal understanding of mission, one in which all who come in are expected to be like those who invite them.  However, because what the Spirit did was exactly the opposite, this leads us to a centrifugal understanding of mission, one in which as the gospel moves toward new languages and new cultures, it is ready to take forms that are understandable within those languages and cultures.  In other words, had there been an “Aramaic only” movement in first-century Palestine, Pentecost was a resounding no! to that movement.  And it is still a resounding no! to any movement within the Church that seeks to make all Christians think alike, speak alike, and behave alike.  The first translator of the gospel is the Holy Spirit, and a church that claims to have the Holy Spirit must be willing to follow that lead,  That is why it has correctly been stated that whereas Babel was a monument to human pride, the Church is called to be a monument to the humiliation of any who seek to make their language or culture dominant.

Incarnate Church Planting Talks

Last month I had the privilege of taking part in the annual incarnate gathering of church planters.  I was invited to be the missiologist in residence.  My job was to kick off the gathering, join in the conversations and then share some reflections to wrap the whole thing up.  Enjoyed it a lot.

Any how on the off chance that someone might be interested there are audio files of my talks and downloads of my handouts to be had over at the incarnate website.  Pay the site a visit.  Have a mooch around.  Keep your ears open for the whisper of the Spirit.

Review of Morna Hooker and Frances Young's "Holiness and Mission"

A renowned New Testament scholar and an eminent theologian deliver a series of lectures on Mission and Holiness, looking for lessons for today’s church from the remarkable growth of Christianity in the urban centres of the Roman empire.   Intriguing.

Morna Hooker, offers an account of mission in the scriptures from Israel through Jesus to the New Testament church.  She detects a common thread originating in the call to God’s people to be Holy as God is holy.   This Holiness is social holiness, a particular people living an ethically distinct life in the midst of other peoples, thus pointing to the reality of God and offering an embodied invitation to come, know and worship.  Words alone, whether proclamation or personal testimony, aren’t enough.  Witness is dependent on corporate godliness, ecclesial bodying forth of Christ the God-revealer.

According to Hooker, living the holy life in a city offers particular challenges.  The Bible is ambivalent about urban living.  From Babel through Babylon to Rome the city is a place of alienation, corruption and hubristic rejection of God.  Both Jesus and his followers meet the challenge of urban godlessness and in so doing offer a challenge to the cities that sought their death.  Yet in the vision of Zion restored and Babylon/Rome become the heavenly Jerusalem, scripture offers us assurance that God isn’t done with the metropolis.  So, the church today is called to meet the challenge of the city and to offer a challenge to the city by living otherwise, thus pointing to the promise of the city, God’s promise.

In her treatment of early church growth Frances Young also emphasises the significance of holiness, the quiet, distinctive, engaged presence of the first Christian communities.  She recognises that early Christian mission took many forms including demonstrations of power through exorcism and healing, remarkable confidence in the face of death and verbal announcement of gospel.  But it is the presence of Christian networks both like and unlike Roman institutions, quietly overlapping the structures of society and offering a place to belong, a sense of identity, practical care and a distinctive philosophy that gets most of the credit.  The church grew because it was an articulate, attractive anomaly.

Young then ventures beyond Constantine when the booster rocket of state of approval carried church growth into stratospheric dimensions.  She offers us a welcome, nuanced rendition of an oft told story – church moving from household to basilica, from lifestyle to religion, from radical alternative to the mainstream, from simplicity to flamboyant dazzle.  Mission becomes enculturation and growth through conquest; organic, grass-roots life becomes top-down establishment and as society is Christianised, the church is de-Christianised.

And the implications for today?  What is called for is an integration of verbal witness and embodied witness, rooted in social holiness.  We could do worse than allow Marshall McLuhan to provide commentary on Leviticus:  be holy as I am holy – the medium is the message.

All in all then not a bad little book.  Not bad, but not great.  I can find nothing with which to take exception in Hooker and Young’s exposition and I approve their central message but I’d hoped for more.  A book by these two commended heartily by James Dunne and David Ford is one that I was eager to read but one that taught me very little.  All too familiar.  I was much more impressed by the Kreiders’ Worship and Mission after Christendom which tells a similar story and offers a similar vision.  Still, I’ll probably use Hooker and Young as a set text for my first year course on mission.  It’s short, clearly written, reliable and makes some important points; ideal for those beginning to study missiology.  If that’s how you see yourself, go ahead but if you want more than an introduction I’d look elsewhere.

This review was originally written for Regent's Reviews and is reproduced here with permission of the editor.  Check out the web site to get a free pdf of a whole bunch of reviews.

BMS and Urban Expression Announce New Partnership

News just released of an exciting new partnership for cross cultural mission in British cities.

Persuasion

The opening session of a first year mission course that I teach here in Manchester always stirs up a vigorous debate.  I ask the students to fill in a questionnaire entitled, “Is It Mission?”  They are given a list of activities ranging from the overtly evangelistic (planting a church) through the clearly political (joining a march to campaign against a war) to the distinctly ecclesial (playing piano in church).  I then ask them to decide if the activity counts as mission or not.  Without fail a major part of the ensuing discussion focuses on one activity in particular, the one that speaks about persuading a friend to become a Christian.

It seems that many people, or at least many of my students, are not persuaded about the validity of persuasion.  Some seem to have a gut-level reaction against the very notion. In their minds the word “persuasion” hangs out with words like “pressurise”, “manipulate”, “brow-beat”.  This worries me.  Especially when they try to persuade me that I should join them in their rejection of persuasion!  It worries me not just because of the inherent contradiction.  No, it worries me far more because it is yet another sign of the way in which the church’s confidence in evangelism is evaporating. 

When I was a teenager my best friend worked hard to persuade me that my objections to Christianity weren’t as well founded as I thought they were.  If he hadn’t I would never have come to faith.  I am really glad that he persuaded me.  If antipathy towards persuasion takes root then many of today’s Christians will never even attempt to persuade their friends to join them in following Christ.

What makes it difficult for me though is that as well as worrying about the reactions of my students I also sympathise with them.  They do have a point you know.  Too many of our attempts to persuade have indeed bordered on the hectoring, the underhand, the dishonest.  I still wince at the memory of the closing night of one fortnight-long town-wide mission in which I was involved.  It had not gone well.  At least when measured by the number of “decisions”.  The evangelist who was heading up the mission and preaching at the nightly rallies in the town’s theatre was also disappointed.  He didn’t say so, but you could tell.  You could tell because on the last night of the mission when it came to the appeal he tried a novel tactic: “OK I’d like everyone here to raise their hand in the air.  Now, if you don’t want to become a Christian please put your hand down.”  I ask you!

As those committed to the way of Christ, committed to truth, committed to the dignity of all people we ought to run a million miles from any attempt  to persuade by bullying, by trickery, by dishonesty.  An underhand presentation of the gospel is a contradiction in terms.  More than that, it’s a monstrosity.  But that does not mean that we should give up seeking to persuade.

Yes, persuasion alone is inadequate.  Yes, conversion nearly always comes about through far more than logical argument alone.  Yes, being good news and acting good-newsily is just as important as debating the issues.  But we have to recognise that in this world of many stories, this time of multiple worldviews, seeking gently, confidently and respectfully to persuade our friends to repent and believe the good news is not only legitimate, it’s crucial.  If we don’t, we fail in our calling.  We fail our Lord.  We fail the world for which he died.

Persuaded?

My turn to do a month's worth of opinion pieces for the Baptist Times' "Outside Edge" column has come round again. With the agreement of the editor I'm posting my BT article here. To check out the Baptist Times as a whole click here.

The Minister As Missionary 6

Conclusion - ministerial by calling

This reorientation, this reimagining of what it means to be a minister is both important and urgent.  However, it is not without dangers.  One such danger is that of missionally-motivated ministerial sheep-beating.   I detect an emerging and distressing phenomenon, angry missionary-ministers, ministers whose anger is kindled by their congregation’s failure to get with the missionary programme.  These are ministers who feel held back by their congregations.  It is as if their people are getting in the way of their own missionary-ministry.  And it makes them mad.  I sympathise.  I think I understand.  But I am also alarmed.

God did not call us to into ministry that we might become our congregation’s accuser. That position is already taken.  Yes, learning to see ourselves as missionary-ministers matters a lot.  But as we start to realise that aim it is also vital that we don’t forget that we are also missionary-ministers,  servants of our people, people who are themselves called to serve the world that the world in turn might learn to serve God.

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 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.

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.

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.