18th June, 2010

LENA JOHNSTONE

I would say that there are still a decent proportion of people within my local church who would not see themselves as being ‘on mission’.

Some of these would think ‘overseas’, when mission was discussed, despite an emphasis in church teaching on both local and global mission. Others would think of a minority within the church especially set aside for the purpose of reaching out into the community.

HANDS UP FOR MISSION? Lena Johnstone argues that the majority of the church should see mission as the purpose of the church if it is to be truly missional. PICTURE: © Rich Legg (www.istockphoto.com) "There is a difference between being a congregation with missions and a missionary congregation. This difference is more than superficial but is about the identity of the church; it is about how the church sees itself and its purpose."

The congregation has received teaching emphasising sharing faith with others in the community, being involved in the community and God at work in the world yet there doesn’t seem to be an overall embracing by the majority within the church of mission as the purpose of the church, and an ensuing understanding that all are ‘sent’.

There is no doubt that most in the church have a heart for reaching others with the love of God but we seem to have not taken that crucial move to becoming a missionary congregation. If the church, the worldwide church and the local church, are to be missional, then we must begin to explore what is required for our local church to become a missionary church as opposed to a church with missions.

Who Are We?

There is a difference between being a congregation with missions and a missionary congregation. This difference is more than superficial but is about the identity of the church; it is about how the church sees itself and its purpose. Any change from one to the other will involve more than just superficial changes. If a church is to move toward becoming a missionary congregation, then it needs to begin with its theology of why it exists and what God has called it to be and do. A good ecclesiology is required.

According to theologian Craig Van Gelder, the purpose and structure of most North American churches has developed around a church-centered focus rather than a mission-centered theology. I would assert that this is also true for many Australian churches. Van Gelder goes on to state that we need to rediscover the Missio Dei; we need to “develop a mission shaped ecclesiology that takes seriously the Kingdom of God and Gods work in the world”. It is at this most basic and yet fundamental level that a change in the way a local church functions must begin.  

Another theologian, George R Hunsberger, says there is a difference between church as a ‘place’ where things happen and church as a ‘people’ sent on a mission. It would seem that many Australian churches have developed an ecclesiology of church as a place (or even a people) where things happen as opposed to a people being sent on mission. As I reflect on the local church that I belong to I would assert that many in the congregation see church as much more than a Sunday gathering but maybe lack an ecclesiology of “all’ being sent. The language used within churches often creates our theology in that when we refer to church as Sunday gathering, even in the knowledge that it is so much more, some will have their thinking about church thus shaped and when we refer to missionaries as a select few set apart for overseas or even local ‘outreach’ work we potentially create a mindset of only some being ‘sent’.  

So how do we need to see ourselves if we are to become a missionary congregation? How would God have us see ourselves? What needs to change in our ecclesiology? Firstly we need to see ourselves as a community of salvation as Stanley J. Grenz puts it in his book Theology for the Community of God, and secondly we need to develop a strong missional identity as the people of a missional God, a ‘sent people.

Understanding ourselves as a community of salvation

For any local church to begin to change from being a church with missions to a missionary church, its understanding of its identity needs to be challenged and reviewed. As a church, we need to go back to why we were formed and God's purpose in and through us. In Theology for the Community of God, Grenz states that God's program for the world is “directed toward, and is experienced in community.” He notes that because of this, the church is far more than “a collection of saved individuals who band together for the task of winning the lost. The church is the community of salvation.”

Lesslie Newbigin adds to this in his 1995 book, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission, by stating that “Insofar as it’s true to its calling it (the church) becomes the place where men and women and children find that the gospel gives them the framework of understanding, the lenses through which they are able to understand and cope with the world.” The church is a gathering of the saved, a community of salvation but it does not exist just for those who have already received salvation. Rather, as Newbigin asserts in another of his books - Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture, the church is “the bearer to all the nations of a gospel that announces the Kingdom, the reign and the sovereignty of God”. He goes on to add "the Church calls men and women to repent of their false loyalty to other   powers to become believers in the one true sovereignty and so to become corporately a sign, instrument and foretaste of that sovereignty of the one true and living God over all nature, all nations and all human lives. It is not meant to call men and women out of the world into a safe religious enclave but to call them out in order to send them back as agents of Gods kingship."

This salvation community does not exist for itself alone but rather exists for the world; it is a sign of God’s rule, His kingdom, a living expression of His ways. As others have noted Jesus did not write a book but rather formed a community, a community that represents Him. So what then are we called to?  We are called to be a mirror of the ‘divine image’ to represent what Grenz calls the “divine community of love by being a community of love visible to the world.” We are called to be bound to each other in love and we are also called to reach out to the world in love.

Hunsberger, meanwhile, is concerned that many churches in reaching out to the world have done so through a ‘vendor’ model, seeing themselves as the distributor of religious goods. He points us back though to the New Testament Church whom he has noted were "Not business firms they were living, pulsing communities grasped by the news that the light and salvation of the world had come in Jesus Christ. As a consequence their relation to the world was changed. They represented to the world the news that had seized them. They did not look for religious customers; they gave the gospel away to the spiritually hungry and thirsty."

We are to be a loving community so gripped by the grace of God that we willingly and thankfully give away that which has been given to us. We are not to be communities that exist for themselves but rather we are to join with God in His mission to the world. It is important therefore that we understand Gods mission because it is to be our mission as well. According to DJ Bosch, author of the 1993 book Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, God’s mission is: "God’s self revelation as the One who loves the world, God’s involvement in and with the world, the nature and activity of God , which embraces both the Church and the world, and in which the Church is privileged to participate. Missio dei enunciates the good news that God is a God-for-people."

We need to understand Gods mission in the world and as his people become impassioned about this, yet as Newbigin has noted we must never separate the cause from the person, we must never separate the God we serve from the mission He calls us to as “when we separate the Kingdom from the King we fall into ideology and we become the victims of the law instead of bearers of the gospel”.

PART TWO

25th June, 2010

LENA JOHNSTONE

Church as missional/sent

The way that a church views itself determines the life it will lead, the witness it will have. If a church views itself as a ‘place’ for Christians to gather, then it will live out of this. If a church views itself as a place removed from the world, about only that which is ‘private’ then it will live in this way. If a church views itself as ‘on mission’ with God, as asserted above, then this will affect the way that it lives. It is therefore of utmost importance that we see ourselves as the church as God does, so that we may live as He would have us live. If He sees us as His representatives to this world, as His sign to the world of His way, then we must form our identity around this. If we are to be a people on a mission, a ‘sent’ people, then this is how we must live. So how then how do we live as a missionary congregation, as a people sent on a mission?

THINKING ABOUT CONTEXT? What is the context in which a church exists and what does that mean in terms of reachjing people? PICTURE: © Aaron Kohr (www.istockphoto.com) "If a local church is a salvation community, a sent people on mission with God, then it needs to begin to think about how to express this in its context."

In his 1996 article, Congregations with Missions vs. Missionary Congregation, J.R. Hendrick has noted that there has been criticism that we as the church in the West are “insular, world-neglecting enclaves of religious comfort and that have at times actually become, “isolated and estranged from the centers of work and leisure and from the centers of power where major decisions were being made on crucial ethical issues that shaped public life.” Hendrick asserts that churches have been charged with forgetting God's mission, with ignoring the fact that God is at work in the world and that God loves the world, not just the church.

If churches do not have a theology that they are on mission with God, that they are sent by God, then these accusations will be all too true. As Newbigin states, the question each local church needs to ask itself is “whether it is a credible sign of God’s reign in justice and mercy over the whole of life, whether it is an open fellowship whose concerns are as wide as the concerns of humanity, whether it cares for its neighbors in a way which reflects and springs out of Gods care for them, whether its common life is recognizable as a foretaste of the blessing which God intends for the whole human family.”

George R. Hunsberger has stated that there are a number of shifts necessary if churches are to move from being religious vendors, as he has described the current model of many churches in the West, to a ‘sent’ people on a mission. A sent people, a missionary congregation, will need to be about “cultivating habits of life” that enable them to be faithful to the Gospel. Rather than being program-orientated, they will need to be looking to see where God is at work and joining Him there. They will be churches who will be focused on getting the Gospel out rather than getting people in, knowing that in doing so many will come in. These churches will have missionary leaders who, according to Hunsberger, will seek “to form the kind of community that embodies and represents in its life, deeds and words the reign of God that Jesus announced is here”.

We need to understand our context

If a local church is a salvation community, a sent people on mission with God, then it needs to begin to think about how to express this in its context. Stephen B. Bevans, in his 1992 book Models of Contextual Theology, states that there is “no such thing as theology, only contextual theology”. This has two possible meanings, one is that we do, whether we realise it or not, bring our context to our reading of scripture, it also means though that in order to bring the Gospel to the world, we need to understand the context of those we are seeking to love and express Gods love to.

We have long recognised the need to bring the truth of God in non-Western countries in ways that are contextual yet possibly because of many Western countries’ Christian heritage, we have failed to see the need to do so in the West. In a country such as Australia – termed by some as post-Christian, it is no longer good enough to assume that those waiting to hear the Gospel will recognise it in the forms that we previously brought it in. It is time for the church, if it is to be missional, to pay close attention to the culture it finds itself in and the needs of the people it seeks to bring the Gospel to.

In order to move from being a congregation with missions to a missionary congregation, it is essential to do the hard work of understanding the culture we find ourselves in. The beginning place is to actually see the need to do this.  As Hunsberger has noted it is now time for us who have sent so many cross cultural missionaries to recognize “our most fundamental mis­sional calling is to live the same way in our own culture that we counsel others to live in theirs. This we cannot do unless we are seriously attentive to the character of our culture, receptive to the shaping force of the gospel, and willing to bear our missional identity as a gospel-shaped community.”

We need to recognise that to be missional we must be cross-cultural. As Hendrick says: “The beginning point for develop­ing a missionary congregation will be that it understands itself to be living in a cultural situation that in many, if not most, ways is antithetical to the life, teachings, and gospel of Jesus”

We need to know our mission field

The first step in entering another culture in order to bring the Gospel is to begin to understand that culture, to know the mission field. As stated above this is has done in global missions as a matter of course yet for a number of reasons has not been part of the outworking of our desire to be missional locally. In overseas contexts we have sought to know the people, their ways, values, language and worldview. Yet often we have failed to do the same here, this however is an essential part of what it means to be missionary congregation. A church that seeks to be missional must know the context in which it finds itself if it is to effectively bring the gospel.

Hendrick makes it clear that members of a missionary congregation will care for all peoples and their ways and will seek to approach their own context and culture with an open and teachable spirit (1 Peter 4: 7). Hendrick asserts that this involves “learning its ‘language’: befriending its people, endeavoring to understand its mores and traditions, and, where possible, make common cause on matters related to the good of all”. He states that this is to be done despite “the suspicion that they may be theologically worlds apart”. For Hendrick this requires study of the immediate area of the local church, so that its demographic trends, ethnic group relations, unjust systems and power arrangements and the situation of marginalised persons can be understood. Yet Hendrick also asserts that a missionary congregation will go beyond the examination of surface features of context and seek to understand the deep underlying fea­tures of the culture in which they and their neighbors are ‘enmeshed’.  He asserts that “such serious and respectful attention to both context and culture provide the ground on which authen­tic mission can be built.”

According to Stanley J. Grenz and Roger E. Olsen – writers of Who needs Theology? An Invitation to the Study of God, we need look no further than the life of Jesus as a model for such respectful and observant treatment of culture: “Repeatedly our Lord tailored his mes­sage to meet the needs of his audience. He allowed his awareness of their questions to shape his response.” Grenz points to the differing ways that Jesus spoke the Gospel to the Samaritan woman (John 4: 1-26) and to Nicodemus. (John 3: 1-21). To the Samaritan woman, He spoke of her life and the context she was living in within her community but the language and concepts He used when He spoke to Nicodemus, a Jewish teacher, were entirely different. “In each case, Jesus perceived the inner questions, struggles and spiritual aspirations of the person he was addressing…” write Grenz and Olsen. “He then presented his message as the answer to their quest in a manner they could understand.”

If we are to be a missionary congregation then we too must bring the Gospel in ways that answer the questions people are asking, in language that makes sense to them. We need to do the hard working of listening and attending to our culture and the individuals within it before we speak. Each locality has a story, each person has a story and in order to bring them the story of God we need to know their story.

To all of this it is essential to add a caution. We need to tread carefully as we do the hard work of understanding our context. As Grenz asserts, attempting to understand our context can lead us into the error of giving too much weight to the questions and concerns of contemporary men and women. The danger this presents, he says, is three-fold. Firstly it may lead us to take our theological agenda from our world rather than from the Word, leading us to potentially overlook the Biblical insights that don’t seem to address specifically the questions our context is asking. Secondly, focusing too much on culture may blind us to places where our society and the Bible are at odds and we may fail to Biblically critique our culture. Seeking to understand must never become the same as accepting it. Lastly focusing on culture may lead us to allow our world to determine the content of theology. Grenz and Olsen write: “We may fall into the trap of ‘cultural accommodation.’ In the attempt to be relevant we may lose the gospel.”

Hunsberger has noted another concern which is that we have the potential to lose our sense of "sentness;' if we become too ‘self-absorbed’ in the attention we give to our own circumstances. Yet if we pay no attention to this we will still lose our missiological edge, our ‘sentness’ so as a church we must seek to understand our context with these cautions in mind.

PART THREE

16th July, 2010

LENA JOHNSTONE

We need to indwell the Scriptural story

Understanding our culture is not enough on its own for a church to become missional. It is only part of what is required to become a missionary congregation. While there are those that believe we need to begin with Scripture and those who believe that we need to begin with culture in order to bring the Gospel, I would suggest that there is not so much an order as a need for a natural progression from one place to the other and then back again.

CONTEXT AND SCRIPTURE: Lena Johnstone argues that while it is important to understand the context in which the Gospel is to be preached, a missionary church must always return to the Bible to formulate its approach. PICTURE: www.sxc.hu "We need to be literate in both our context and the Word so that we may translate the story of God in meaningful ways for our context. It therefore becomes essential for any congregation seeking to be missionary to indwell the Scriptural story."

It is because of the mission of God revealed to us in the Word that we seek to bring the Gospel, yet if we do not take the time to hear the needs and understand the worldview of our context we will not know how to bring the Gospel. However, in order for us to bring the Gospel we must take what we have learned from listening and attending to our context and bring this back to the Word, as Grenz and Olsen note:  “Having discovered these, we go back to the Bible for a response. We take our culture with us to the texts. We read the Scriptures asking, ‘How does the Bible provide answers to the questions people today are raising?”’

M.W. Goheen, in the 2001 text As the Father has sent me, I am sending you: J. E. Lesslie Newbigin’s Missionary Ecclesiology, suggests that the Christian story provides us with a set of lenses, not something for us to look at, but rather something for us to look through. He says the Christian community is invited to “indwell the story tacitly aware of it as shaping the way we understand, but focally attending to the world we live in so that we are able confidently, though not infallibly, to increase our understanding of it and our ability to cope with it…so as not be conformed to this world, not to see things as our culture sees them, but-with new lenses-to see things in a radically different way.”

We need to be literate in both our context and the Word so that we may translate the story of God in meaningful ways for our context. It therefore becomes essential for any congregation seeking to be missionary to indwell the Scriptural story.  Writes Hendrick:  "The Christian's ultimate loyalty is to the story of Scripture. The believer seeks to indwell Scripture in such a way that its models and story become the means by which he or she makes sense of the world. Yet the believer is also part of a community that embodies the cultural story. Thus the debate between these two different ways of looking at the world is internalized. The commitment to Scripture shapes the debate: the cultural story is constantly brought under the scrutiny of the Biblical story.”

We need to know the story, live the story and represent the story. We are called to be a sign of something different, of what the story represents. We can only do this if we are shaped by the story ourselves, if it shapes our worldview.  

For Newbigin, contextualisation takes place with the meeting of Gospel and culture within the life of the church. According to Goheen, the church lives at the crossroads between two ways of understanding and living in the world. “More specifically, contextualization is the encounter of two all­ embracing and competing understandings of the world shaped by two different stories-the story of the gospel and the reigning story of the culture-within the life of the Christian community.”

We need to be a sign of the Kingdom, a living alternative

“How is it possible that the gospel should be credible, that people should come to believe that the power that has the last word in human affairs is represented by a man hanging on a cross? I am suggesting that the only answer, the only hermeneutic of the gospel is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it. I am, of course, not denying the importance of the many activities by which we seek to change the public life with the gospel…But I am saying that these are all secondary and that they have the power to accomplish their purpose only as they are rooted in and lead back to a believing community.”

- Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission

It is only as we are a living pulsing community of God's love to the world, living with Him as the centre, that we can be a sign, that we can not just bring the Gospel but live the Gospel. In order to do this our centre must be God Himself, we must be grounded in the Word and empowered by the Spirit. We must indwell the Scripture so that it becomes a part of us, so that it not only informs us but forms us. If we are the only way for the world to understand the truth of Christ then we must live this story in a way that both make sense to the world and yet points to something much greater than ourselves.

Writes Hunsberger: “A tandem requirement is that evangelism must be grounded in a credible demonstration that life lived by the pattern of commitment to Jesus is imaginable, possible and relevant in the modern and postmodern age...the current need is for a demonstration that a faith in the gospel of God can be the genuine organizing center integrating the fragmented pieces of modern living. Only when that is seen lived by someone who believes that way will the message about the reign of God have credibility.”

He goes on to assert that "The gospel will be perceived as a feasible alternative when those who do not know God have some positive, personal experiences with people who do.” People who have learnt how to live the story of the Gospel within the framework of their culture, people who represent the Kingdom in the here and now. Grenz puts it this way: “As this holy people, we are to proclaim in word and action the principles of the Kingdom, showing others what it means to live under the divine reign. A missionary church is to be a sign of the Kingdom, of the divine reign, by the way they live and love and by the words that they proclaim".

JV Brownson, in an article in the 1996 text, The Church between Gospel and Culture: The Emerging Mission in North America writes: “it is ultimately through our lives in all of their contingency and particularity, that the universal claims of the gospel, will find a credible voice in the midst of our fragmented and suspicious world. It is only when the announcement that Jesus is Lord is spoken by someone who takes the posture of a servant that it can ever be heard as the gospel. It is only through the convergence of word and deed that the fragmented suspicion of our postmodern world will be able to discover a new Way that is also truth and life.”

A missionary church needs to become a living alternative. An example of the way that the story of God can be lived within the local context. As the church we are not just a sign of the Kingdom but a living example of the Kingdom at work both in us and through us. This is only possible as we do the necessary work of both understanding our context and living according to the Word. 

Hunsberger and Van Gelder assert in the 1996 text, The Church between Gospel and Culture: The Emerging Mission in North America, that mission cannot mean only bringing a message or suggesting a new world view, “Rather, it must come to form as a lived, daily-life experience that demon­strates the healing the gospel produces.” We are to show the way by living according to the Way. It is only in us that the Gospel can be truly contextualised in a way that is a meaningful example of what it means to be ‘grasped by the Gospel’ in our locality.

Yet this is possible only if we live with Christ as our centre. But, says Newbigin, “it is always possible and necessary to define the centre. The church is its proper self and is a sign of the Kingdom only insofar as it continually points man and women beyond itself to Jesus and invites them to personal conversion and commitment to Him.” The church is always to be pointing the world back to Christ not to itself, this means understanding itself as a sign of the Kingdom of God and as God’s chosen vessel but not as an end in itself. It means, the church allowing itself to be transformed by God, for the sake of the world, not only its own sake.

We must also remain aware that we are in the process of being transformed ourselves. We must acknowledge that we are imperfect examples with “treasures in jars of clay” (II Corinthians 4: 7) though this must never become an excuse for not living according to the Kingdom or of being transformed by God, neither can we present ourselves as the perfect “final product” of the Gospel, as like Paul we acknowledge that we have "not yet been made perfect" (Philippians 3: 12). Rather we can offer a living, breathing, at times flawed alternative of the process of conversion.

PART FOUR

25th July, 2010

LENA JOHNSTONE

A voice against culture

As the church seeks to be a sign of the Kingdom, an alternative to the culture that they exist in, they will need at times to be a voice against culture. The way that the church responds to its context will be varied depending on the circumstances and context that the church finds itself in. That said there are times and situations when a missionary church will be required to take a stand against its culture.

TAKING A STAND: Lena Johnstone argues that there are times when the church must take a stand against the culture. PICTURE: © Andy Gehrig (www.istockphoto.com) "(W)e must acknowledge that there will be times when the church must take a stand against aspects of a culture or a particular outworking of a culture if it is to stand for Christ, if it is to be a credible alternative and sign of the Kingdom."

Lesslie Newbigin both affirms the creational structure of culture but also recognises that an idolatrous foundational worldview shapes every part of culture. As MW Goheen asserts in the 2001 text As the Father has sent me, I am sending you: J. E. Lesslie Newbigin’s Missionary Ecclesiology, because the Gospel is comprehensive it calls for a discipleship that embodies all of life and therefore does not “fit” into any cultural story: "It is totally impossible to fit the story of a crucified and risen Lord into any view of the world except the one of which it is the starting point. From any other point of view it is either scandalous or meaningless."

This means that we must acknowledge that there will be times when the church must take a stand against aspects of a culture or a particular outworking of a culture if it is to stand for Christ, if it is to be a credible alternative and sign of the Kingdom.  As Goheen adds, “the cross provides the clue for a third way: the cross both identifies with the sorrow and suffering of humankind yet exposes and destroys the sin that was the root of it all”. A  Gospel of love cannot condone aspects of culture that are unjust and unloving. Jesus Himself did not and paid for this with His life.

We also must be willing to pay a price to see the world transformed if we are to be a missionary congregation.

Hunsberger and Van Gelder suggest that we as the Western church are either tending towards a comfortable accommodation of culture or are withdrawing from culture as opposed to actively engaging it by our way of life. They quote Donald Posterski that we have ironically done what is seemingly impossible: "We have inverted the dictum of Jesus: we are of the world but not in it. We have become 'both captured and intimidated by the culture'. If he is correct in his assertions then we need to reassess our response to culture and recognize where we are not living the gospel but are being transformed and influenced by the story of the world.  In our minds and hearts we have not sufficiently departed to the loyalties of the gospel, and with our hands and feet we have not become deeply enough immersed on behalf of the gospel."

We must be involved in actions of justice and public ministry, we must continue to share our faith, the Gospel that has transformed us and seeks to transform the world, so that, in Hunsberger's words, we offer “new life possibilities to people whom God already loves". Not so that we might cure all the ‘ills’ of the world or even change all people but so that we are truly modeling in the here and now, “the truth and the final purpose of God, even if imperfectly.” Goheen, meanwhile, states that there are two appropriate responses to culture if we are to be faithful in contextualising the witness of the Gospel: "affirmation and rejection, solidarity and separation. The absence of either of these will muffle the call of Christ. The absence of solidarity will mean that the summons is not heard in understandable terms. The absence of separation means that the call of the gospel will not lead to true conversion."

We as the church must be so thoroughly immersed in the story of the Word that we know which is required when. For, according, again, to Hunsberger and Gelder, “if there is too little identification with the culture the church becomes a sub cultural ghetto. If it assumes too much of the culture’s perspectives and values it domesticates and tames the gospel.” Neither of which is the posture of a missionary church to the world.

A missionary congregation, according to Goheen, will pray for and seek its own transformation first, as we may find it difficult to understand the degree to which, for example, individualism and materialism shape us: "A missionary congregation understanding that it, too, partakes of the values, assumptions, and norms of culture will constantly seek to understand how it has accommodated uncritically to its surroundings, seek forgiveness where appropriate, and pray for freedom from cultural ways that enervate faithfulness."

If we are to bring change to our culture we must first seek to be changed and even before this recognise where we need to change. We can only do this if the Word is our primary story and if we are attuned to the Spirit of God

A voice 'for' people

Standing against culture is not the only stand that a missionary church must make, yet it is essential, regardless of the stand that the church is taking either for or against culture, that it always be for people. As Goheen writes: “the missionary church must be recognizable as the church for its particular context. That for must be defined in terms of the way Christ is for the world.” He notes that the way we best understand Christ as for the world is in the atonement, “in the cross, Christ is, on the one hand, totally identified with the world; at the same time, Christ is totally separated from the world". A missionary church must likewise be for the world. In the words of Newbigin this means that we must be a church that “does not exist for itself or for what it can offer its members...It means a church which is a credible sign of the malkuth Yahweh the just and loving rule of God over His whole creation and His whole family".

A missionary church must ultimately exist for the sake of the world as a living example of what it means to be ‘grasped’ by the Gospel and formed by Scripture. It is only as we are transformed that we can be the vessel for Gods transforming love for the world. What an honour to be a people set aside for the purposes of God, to be called to give witness to Him in our very lives. A missionary church will, in the words of a local pastor I know, be seeking to “pour itself out” for the sake of the world.

Conclusion

If a local church is to move from being a church with missions to a missionary church then it must begin by understanding its identity and purpose and develop a good ‘mission shaped’ ecclesiology. This will involve understanding itself as a salvation community that exists for those in the world not just itself, and also as a sent people on mission with God. It will also require that the church seeks to understand its context and listen to those whom it seeks to bring the Gospel to and that as a community they indwell the Scriptural story and become a living alternative, a sign of the Kingdom within their context. This may at times require them to be a voice that stands against culture, but it will always mean that they will be a voice for people in the same way that Jesus is for the world.

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