The Church is dying out in the 21st century, failing particularly in the Canadian context. One has to acknowledge that across denominations the church is shrinking in almost every way. I believe something else besides failure is happening though. I am convinced that the Lord of the Church is reforming or rebirthing his church in this century after the example of the church in the New Testament. What is it going to be like? In the last two months I have discussed what a born again church might look like in terms of church buildings, leadership and the sacraments. This month in the final part of this three-part series I want to look at mission.
Mission
The apostolic or New Testament church existed on the margins of society, often functioning underground. It was a counterculture community. It did everything possible to differentiate itself from the practices of society that went against its core beliefs. In that sense, it was a prophetic community.
That being said, the New Testament church had a definite missional stance towards culture as well, which it expressed in evangelistic ways, often at great cost. New Testament communities of faith were an incarnational-sending people. It was the mission of each community of faith to go out to the people. They witnessed for Christ in the midst of the dominant culture and it often cost them dearly, sometimes even their lives.
There was a drift away from this with the coming of the age of Christendom. The church became perceived as central to society and the surrounding culture. Its approach to culture became attractional and extractional, i.e. ‘come to us’ and ‘we will take from you.’ The results have been devastating to Christ’s mission through the church.
Today, perhaps since the Enlightenment period as the church has struggled to continue in its Christendom mode, it often bends over backwards to reflect the dominant or popular culture even when it is blatantly non-biblical. Recently I listened as a leader within the Presbyterian Church in Canada said in a meeting of a church court, “mission is a pejorative word.” Certainly it would seem so. We all but dropped the word from usage at the national church level years ago. Have we become a church that has totally sold out to the dominant culture, so entrenched in an attractional mode as a survival strategy that we no longer have a missional stance towards culture? It would seem so to me. Congregations seldom have any real active mission in their own community. And mission support beyond the particular community of the congregation is so buried within bureaucracy that it pretty much feels like a church tax rather than direct mission involvement and support. It all seems to have become so attractional and extractional and abstract.
In the church born again for a post-Christendom age, faith communities will return to being small and existing on the fringe of society, return to being countercultural, return to being missional communities. Faith communities will once again become proactive with regards to mission in their own local communities, both prophetically as well as evangelically. This activity will not be guided by a denominational handbook nor for that matter by national doctrinal committees, but by a reading and interpretation of scripture done in community in small hermeneutical circles at the local level. Mission work will actually be done locally to serve people for Christ and to bring people to knowing Christ’s love. And beyond the local community of direct influence, faith communities will insist upon direct involvement with the mission work that they support abroad.
Presbyterians Sharing in the Presbyterian Church in Canada will change. It will become primarily a linking and facilitating organization rather than a money collection and dispersal agency of the church. Its work will become the exciting and needful work of encouraging and facilitating direct involvement of faith communities with mission at the local and the global level.
Conclusion
The church of Christendom has never been very good at embracing change. Change is usually forced upon it. In the West, the force for change is almost always economic pressure. Since small churches will experience that kind of pressure first, and since most small churches are in rural and semi-rural settings, the front line for the birth of a post-Christendom church in the Presbyterian Church in Canada may well be in rural and semi-rural settings. The rural church may well be the developing and proving ground for virtually all the changes I have alluded to. In this sense, the rural church, or at least the small church, will find itself on the forefront of the exciting reforms I envisage Christ to be bringing about.
But here is the thing. All of the major parts of the church entrenched in its institutional form will have to find a way to gracefully facilitate a deinstitutionalization to allow for the changes I envisage.
For example, the courts of the church, national church committees, national church offices and the colleges are going to have to make some important decisions very quickly. Either they will recognize the need for radical change and facilitate and support it, or they will end up becoming irrelevant. I fear it is the latter that is happening. From the perspective of a reborn post-Christendom church, particularly in rural Canada, the courts and committees of the church, church offices and the colleges are often seen as maintainers of the status quo and are rapidly being viewed as superfluous. Their attempts at change are too small, too slow and way too conservative.
This is not an age for dithering and tinkering with the stuff of institution like ordination and marriage to make them reflect the norms of contemporary culture whilst thinking that this is being progressive. This is an age that calls for brave and radical change rooted in deinstitutionalization. For example, the question that needs to be dealt with is whether the church should be ordaining clerics and maintaining a priestly caste at all. The question that has to be dealt with is whether the church should be officiating at all at what has become largely a civil institution of marriage.
