Church for Every Context. Michael Moynagh
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Название: Church for Every Context
Автор: Michael Moynagh
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Журналы
isbn: 9780334048077
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How would you theologically evaluate the network society?
1 Evenness of size is important because it affects the amount of competition. To take an extreme example, if 80 per cent of a suburb were Mormon and they had only one place of worship, while the remaining 20 per cent had three alternatives, the amount of choice for the 80 per cent would be less than if there were several Mormon churches.
2 In his well-received report to Britain’s Methodist Conference in 2011, General Secretary Martyn Atkins spoke candidly of Methodism having too many chapels, an up-to-date echo of Gill’s theme.
3 The ‘Workpaper’ recognized that this argument made all sorts of assumptions and that practice would be more nuanced. But using Church of England figures (and proxies) available for annual gains and losses, the number of parishes, the size of churches and the number of clergy, the model predicted that the average congregation would stabilize at around 150, which was a little lower than the national average for a single clergy congregation (Urban Church Project, 1974, p. 11).
4 Yoder’s comment is echoed in John Hull’s opposite criticism of Mission-shaped Church, ‘We looked for a mission-shaped church but what we found was a church-shaped mission.’ (Hull, 2006, p. 36) I am grateful to John Flett for drawing my attention to the Yoder quote.
5 For a brief introduction to the idea of post-secularity, see Graham Ward (2009, pp. 117–58).
6 ‘Minipreneurs’, www.trendwatching.com (accessed 22 February 2011).
7 Post-Fordism is accessibly introduced by Kumar (1995, pp. 36–65).
8 To do this it will have to engage carefully with the critiques of media technology, such as those provided Sherry Turkle (1995, 2011), though she may overstate her case.
9 The range of views is well summarized by Bretherton (2010, pp. 6–10). Percy quotes Putnam (Percy, 2010, p. 73) but not sociologists like Anthony Giddens and Manuel Castells who are more hopeful.
10 A Microsoft survey of over 1,000 British people found that each person’s average number of friends increased by an astonishing 64 per cent between 2003 and 2006; nearly a third of the sample had made friends online. (‘Britons Make More Time for Friendship than Ever Before’, November 2006, www.microsoft.com.) McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Brashears (2006) found that the mean number of people with whom adult Americans could discuss matters important to them had dropped by nearly a third between 1985 and 2004.
11 Danah Boyd, ‘Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites’, First Monday, December 2006, www.firstmonday.org.
Part 2
Towards a Theological Rationale
5
What is the Purpose and Nature of the Church?
One of the first questions often asked about new contextual churches is whether they are truly church. Indeed, many of the concerns about these communities arise from calling them church. In offering a theological rationale for these churches, therefore, Part 2 starts with a discussion about the nature of the church. It then considers the place of mission in church, the communal nature of mission in the local church, the extent to which new churches should be contextualized, whether it is legitimate for these churches to focus on a specific cultural group and whether new contextual churches are faithful to the tradition. These chapters draw on, and are intended to contribute to ongoing reflection – still at an early stage – about new contextual churches.
Whereas the traditional approach to evangelism begins with the current church and asks how people can be encouraged to belong, new contextual churches go to where people are and ask what church should appropriately look like in their context. Many young adults think that this is common sense. Meeting with friends to form a new Christian community in everyday life and calling it church seems an obvious thing to do.
It makes all sorts of people nervous, however. Are we playing fast and loose with the language, using ‘church’ when it does not really apply? Are we taking seriously what mature church entails? Others wonder if all this talk about church risks putting a straitjacket on mission, encouraging practitioners to worry more about being church than about being contextual. This chapter considers the purpose of church, asks what constitutes the essence of the church and discusses what mature church involves.
What is the purpose of the church?
As God’s visible people, the church has its purpose in relation to the kingdom of God, which was a central theme in Jesus’ ministry. In Luke 4.17–9, for instance, Jesus identified himself with Isaiah’s vision of the kingdom. The vision included peace for the entire earth (Isa. 2.4), light where there has been darkness (9.2), harmony in the whole of creation (11.6) and a world of health, justice and abundance (65.17–24). Jesus taught the values of the kingdom, challenged the assumptions of his society from a kingdom perspective and demonstrated the power of the kingdom through his miracles. His life, death and resurrection inaugurated the kingdom, which will be established in full when he returns. In the ‘between time’ church bears witness to the kingdom. But what does bearing witness involve?
Church-shaped kingdom?
There is a spectrum in how theologians understand the relationship between church and kingdom. At one end are those who say the church is where the kingdom is made real in the present (Higton, 2008, p. 335). This ‘church-shaped kingdom’ view was assumed in the church-centred approach to mission common in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the mid nineteenth century, Henry Venn and others in the Anglo-Saxon tradition argued that church planting should be considered a goal of missionary endeavours, alongside personal conversion. Mission came to be seen as church extension overseas (Scherer, 1993, pp. 82–4). The kingdom of God was not discussed in connection with church and mission till the 1930s.
J. C. Hoekendijk, whose solution was not without problems, summarized СКАЧАТЬ