For the last three days (the first ones of my sabbatical) I have been reading "Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission" by David J. Bosch while sitting in the top floor of the Main Library, overlooking downtown Indy. It is a dense but fascinating book which I understand is the text for people studying mission in seminaries.
Incidentally, while driving back and forth to the library, I have been listening to the book on CD "The Time Traveler's Wife."
While the plot line of both books is not merging in my head, I do have a sense that I am time traveling even just a little as Bosch starts his book by looking at how Jesus went about "doing mission" (or basically, how Jesus did what Jesus did), followed by how the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, the book of Acts, and then Paul's letters frame what mission was for them.
Bosch, among others, draws the distinction of when Jesus and his followers were more about being a movement, as opposed to being an institution (which we would eventually call "The Church"). That idea of that movement was fluid, risk-taking, focused on the kingdom entirely. It is exciting and a bit scary. Reading Bosch it's not hard to imagine how exhilirating those days were when the disciples were following Jesus, or the days/years following Pentecost as the people gathered as a body of believers throughout their known world.
As I consider our church, our very institutional church, I wonder about ways in which our understanding of mission can be more risk-taking and kingdom-focused. That's part of what this little two-month journey of mine hopefully will bring into focus.
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While I see a need for a much stronger institutional church to allow Christ to speak to the powers of the world (that's what I see anyway) it seems to me that the institutional church must be formed from this other church you speak of: an "either-and" rather than an "either-or." Does this make sense?
ReplyDeleteSurely, 1515 Frank, you are right that it has to be a both and proposition. With baggage and all, good and bad, our institutional church has been an instrument of God's mission. Sometimes, maybe more often than we're willing to admit, God has accomplished God's mission in spite of the institutional church (if you consider times when the institutional church failed to be on the same page with God's priorities, for example with regards to the sinfulness of the human slavery).
ReplyDeleteWhat intrigues me greatly about the notion of "movement" as opposed to "institution" is that perhaps "movement" can teach the church to be church/instrument-of-God's-mission with abandon, with unwavering focus on God's purpose for us. I don't want to romanticize "movement" but I just know that an institution may be at times too cautious: it may worry more about its survival or preservation or expansion than about doing what God has for it to do.
Javier, the book I am reading makes a point I have read elsewhere: the Church may find itself in a context very much like the context it saw before Christianity was declared the official religion of the Roman Empire (that is, before Constantine). Whether one agrees (I happen to agree), it seems true that "we are not in Kansas any more, Toto." Church doesn't have the privileged place it once had in culture. And you know what? I think that is actually a GOOD thing, because it will focus us more as a Church, as believers. Nothing like adversity, intellectual or cultural challenges to force us critically to analyze and sharpen our message (our brand?) and the living out of that message.
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