World-Shaped Mission. Janice Price

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СКАЧАТЬ of us to them. It was a confident age that understood its role in the world as one of superiority in religion and culture. It was a time of large vision fuelled by technological and economic progress which was exported to a supposedly needy and less advanced world.7

1.9 The evangelical revival inspired a large and expansive vision of mission as many Christians sought to express their faith at home and overseas. It was this context that saw the birth of many of the Anglican Mission Agencies though some had already been working for many years.8 Many Christians gave their lives in the course of exercising sacrificial service on the mission fields as they were then understood. Their service expressed love of God and neighbour. However, such service sometimes had unintended consequences as the presence of a dominant foreign power resulted in social disruption.

      1.10 The twentieth century after World War I saw a drastic change in how the church imagined mission. The 1910 World Mission Conference in Edinburgh can be interpreted as the height of Western missionary confidence with its belief in the possibility of reaching the whole world for Christ in their generation. However, the Western world post-1918 saw its moral foundation diminish rapidly. The systematic brutality of battle caused many to question their previous confidence in Western civilization and to re-assess the nature of sin and evil. The middle of the century saw the end of World War II and colonial rule by the Western nations. These changes in the social and political realm brought a time of significant questioning about the role of the Western churches in world mission.

      1.11 In the Church of England, which claims to value diversity as part of its identity, there are many differing ways in which mission is imagined and of what it means to be faithful to the gospel. There are other ways in which imagining mission differs. For example, the place of the church building as a tool in mission, the nature and practice of worship and the role of the evangelist to name a few. What is important is to acknowledge that how mission is imagined affects the way it is expressed practically.

      1.12 The current context in twenty-first-century Britain is complex and challenging. The Church of England together with its ecumenical partners is discovering the language and practice of mission and evangelism anew. For the Church of England, it is searching to interpret and express them as English Anglicans in the mission contexts of today.

      What is shaping the mission imagination today?

      1.13 World Christianity

The shape of world Christianity is changing. The centre of Christianity is shifting from the West to the Majority World9 in the East, to Africa, Latin America and Asia. It is more accurate to say that the future of Christianity will have multiple centres of Christianity. It is in the churches of the Majority World that growth is being experienced at a phenomenal rate. The Pentecostal Churches are popular and are growing fast. A significant development globally has been the emergence of theologies of the Spirit as agent in mission.10 The Christianities of the Majority World are diverse and culturally distinct – just as Western Christianity is culturally distinct. The churches in the North and West will continue but in increasingly diverse forms. The churches in the different global regions will no longer resemble the churches of the West. This is to be warmly welcomed as the churches throughout the world express Christian faith in ways that are culturally appropriate and relevant. Relationships between the churches of the Majority World and the West will be as important as ever, if not more so, and historic relationships will undergo sometimes painful re-evaluation. This is an Ephesian Moment11 when the old forms of the historic churches of the West live together with the new and emerging Christianities of the Majority World. It is increasingly evident that changes in the world economic order will influence patterns of mission in the future. The growing economic significance of China, India and Brazil, for example, will have a considerable effect on patterns of world mission movements and partnerships. The presence of large numbers of women and young people in the churches of the Majority World has the effect of embedding them into serving local communities and future generations.

      1.14 Most significantly, world Christianity lives in an inter-religious global context which is increasingly political in its outworking. This has highlighted the particular tensions that face Christians who live as a minority faith in complex inter-religious contexts. It has also highlighted the importance of inter-religious dialogue as an aspect of relationships across cultures. Here the concept of mission is highly problematic where conversion can be forbidden by law and communicating Christ’s gospel is limited or even prohibited. It has also highlighted the fact that relationships in one part of the world affect those in other parts within very short time periods. The post-9/11 world has brought inter-religious dialogue to the top of the world mission agenda.

      1.15 The Church of England

In the Church of England many parish churches are actively reorientating their priorities to a mission focus and this is bearing fruit both in the depth of spiritual life and in numbers involved in churches. This is also the case ecumenically as all denominations in Britain reorient their lives and priorities towards participating in God’s mission in the world. However, there is still a journey to make. In the Church of England the mission imagination of many, but by no means all, parish churches primarily concerns survival. The demands of expensive church buildings as well as the need to pay the quota to the diocese continue to put pressure on parish churches to draw inwards or to see those outside the church as a source of income and funds rather than those who God loves and for whom the church exists. In many places it is not that parish churches do not want to think creatively about mission. Rather it is that the necessity of upkeep of buildings and ministry saps creative thinking. For many, inside and outside our parish churches, the church building exerts a power and influence over memory and association which can lead to tension as important landmarks change and are even threatened. Mission for the Church of England has been a synthesis between parish or community, church building and ministry, largely but not exclusively by the clergy-in-parish model. This way of imagining mission in the local context has proved to be remarkably resilient. It has allowed for variations – for example, church planting, team and group ministries, local ministry teams but has not fundamentally changed. The Decade of Evangelism saw attempts to re-shape these relationships with Robert Warren’s work on Building Missionary Congregations.12 This analysis advocated the move from ‘Maintenance to Mission’ and urged Anglican Christians to imagine their life in new ways based on God’s mission in the world.

      Mission-shaped Church

      1.16 The publication of Mission-shaped Church in 2004 was highly significant in shaping how the Church of England imagines mission in two areas. First, it acknowledged that the parochial system was

‘no longer able fully to deliver its underlying mission purpose. We need to recognize that a variety of integrated missionary approaches is required.’13

      Secondly, it advocated that the Church of England is itself now a church in mission and that to be effective witnesses to Christ’s love Christians need to cross cultures in our own context. In particular it articulated the nature of changing communities in England based on network rather than geography and how personal and cultural identity is being shaped by these changes. The report relates this to a post-Christendom context where the gulf between Christian faith, the church and cultural context is growing and how the church needs new ways of relating to its context. In essence this would mean adapting to a missionary strategy which focused on telling the story of Jesus within a culture that was in the process of forgetting that story, or for many, hearing it as a new story. This was a new understanding of incarnational mission – not only confined to the parish model but СКАЧАТЬ