Towards the end of the evening, I realised that I couldn't nthink of any problem that Christians face that doesn't fit either one of these two categories:
- Church-less mission: without a church (a community shaped by baptism, euscharist and word-ministry), proclamation, service and other missionary acts lack any basis or focus.
- Mission-less church:without a mission (presence, proclamation, persuasion, power and propogation) a group claiming to be a church lacks any meaning or purpose.
4 comments:
What about the individual's relationship with God?
Hmm, good point. I wonder if a person's relationship with God can really be addressed on its own. Perhaps this is possible in an acddemic sense, but I'd question whether it ever happens this way in reality.
Where do you class a church who has a keen sense of mission but goes about it in a way that is irrelevant to culture around them? It does not appear to have a lack of a community or mission (though the quality of both is by definition flawed) but for whatever reason fails to cross the cultural divide.
One example of this, though certainly not the only one, would be churches for whom the aim of their mission to fix people/rid them of sin as opposed to exemplifying God's love & grace. Does this fit in one of the boxes?
Perhaps my original claim does need some revising. Instead of thinking only in terms of church and mission, perhaps I need to add a third category.
"The whole church taking the whole gospel to the whole world"was the catchcry for mission in the last century (by ecumenicals in the first half and evangelicals in the second). It would seem that simply trying to 'fix people' whether spiritually or any other way is a failure to proclaim (and live) the whole gospel. Dallas Willard is perhaps the most articulate at distinguishing the real gospel of the kingdom from the gospel of sin management in The Divine Conspiracy.
I'm sure many churches fail to cross cultural barriers in order to take the gospel to the whole world. And as tragic as this is (for them and their cultural neighbours) this does not necessarily mean total failure: within a church's own culture are people who still need to see God's rule and be invited to join it. Of course, if there is an artificial 'church' culture that is perhaps a remnant of a bygone era that keeps Christians from sharing the culture of their community, then this itself becomes an obstacle to mission.
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