Today a lengthy post which you may prefer to skip! This is the draft text of the paper I shall be presenting. It is still very rough around the edges and my prayer is that in conversation etc it can be much improved! It may even change entirely!
Lesslie Newbigin
One of the strongest memories I have from 2012 is of a visit to a village church in Andhra Pradesh. Roughly 100 gathered for worship. Roughly 50% of the village are Christian. There seemed to be roughly the same number as men as of women. The church was established by missionaries in the 19th Century. We met two of the evangelists who continue the work today. In 2011 10,000 became Christians in the Diocese.
Lesslie Newbigin frequently refers to his experience in the village. It was clearly an inspiration and perhaps underlies a great deal of the immense legacy he has left.
However, I am wondering whether he missed something as well.
Over 20 years ago, when I was beginning my first pastorate, I read Lesslie Newbigin's 'On Being the Church for the World’ in a book on Parish Churches. I was thinking about the shape my call should take in parish ministry - in part of the urban overflow of London. I had not come across him before. Newbigin has the wonderful image of the church as a sign.
'The point of a sign is that it points to something that is not yet visible. If you want to go to Winston Green you don't put up a sign in Winson Green: you have a sign in Handworth or Edgbaston...' He points out that denominations represent spiritual surrender to a secular age. Then he speaks about how he carries out his ministry in Winson Green. He begins by telling how he and the local ministers (Pentecostal, URC, Church of the Firstborn) meet and pray and plan together. 'We try to ask what, in spite of our divisions, our unity in Christ has to mean for the life of this community in Winson Green'.
'And then?' I want to ask. But then... he stops. There is no 'secondly'. It seems to peter out. I came away disappointed. This seemed to be ecumenical naval gazing. I was surprised to discover recently that the contribution was by someone I had come to admire, someone who spent so much time opposing ecumenical naval gazing. So I have been puzzling.
As I have read my way into Newbigin, I realise that
- yes, I have misunderstood him; but
- in addition, perhaps he too missed something.
On the former, I will be brief. Newbigin speaks of the church as
- a foretaste of something different from the world, 'a communion in the Holy Spirit in the life of the triune God.’
- 'an instrument through which God's will for justice and peace and freedom is done in the world.'
He also writes “I do not think we shall recover the true form of the parish until we recover a truly missionary approach to our culture. I do not think we shall achieve a truly missionary encounter with our culture without recovering the true form of the parish. These two tasks are reciprocally related to each other, and we have to work together on them both.’
So, I had failed to give emphasis to what he says about ‘sign’ and ‘foretaste’. In addition, though Newbigin himself is pointing the way to further work to be done.
More recently, I came across Mark Laing who helped me think through my misgiving. I was encouraged to find someone who shared my hesitation! In From Crisis to Creation, p239), he writes:
‘Earlier [Newbigin] had realised that the parochial model emphasised “coming” to the neglect of “going” and was thus “not true to the biblical picture of the church as a missionary community. In re-endorsing the parochial model, Newbigin is disappointing in not providing clues for restructuring of the church which would enable it to be a community of God and the mission of God. Instead, Newbigin attempted to combine the inherent tension between the “coming” and the “going” of the congregation, by reiterating the Indian village church as his defining paradigm.
Oddly enough, for me the emphasis upon the village paradigm as one that might emphasise mission had the opposite effect: it communicated a fear of ecumenical naval gazing. But I have come to suspect that there is an inherent weakness in the paradigm, which has to do with context. It is powerful and relevant in rural situations. However, translated to my more urban situation it has a weakness which I instinctively sensed. It may be one that is relevant to you as well as me, as you evangelise both in the village and in the city.
The weakness is that a village has a givenness as a community. Where we visited in Andhra Pradesh there were 200 living there. 100 were Christian, 100 Hindu. In that church (n.b., one church, so important!) a community exists.
In many situations of church growth there is community, or something else that binds that group together.
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However, for may English towns, and in urban situations, for those not yet associated with a church, there is not this community. And in the heresy of the individualism that the west has preached for decades, all community is undermined. Laing notes this when he says (From Crisis to Creation, 225) ‘In the rural situation the parochial model was still tenable where the concepts of “locality” and “neighbour” retained their meaning. But in the urban setting “[l]ocality had been abolished. Neighbourhood is no longer a word that refers to a place. Man in no longer a neighbour; he is at best the point of intersection of two or three unrelated worlds.”’ But Newbigin does not seem to have made the connection with the paradigm of the village mission; namely that his powerful paradigm misrepresents so much of modern life.
Can we then find a more complete way ‘to combine the inherent tension between the “coming” and the “going” of the congregation’?
First of all a negative. Newbigin is very helpful in identifying the ‘why’ of why this is so important. "The life of the Church is radically corrupted if it is separated from the missionary task” (Newbigin, Relation of Older and Younger Churches in India: Uncensored Remarks", quoted in Laing and Weston, Theology in Missionary Perspective, The Indian Church by Mark Laing. In From Crisis to Creation, 17f,
Laing summarises what happens when mission is separated from the church The development of a type of self-sufficient, introverted congregation, lacking all sense of the Church catholic:
- A failure to develop adequate ministry;
- Missionaries seeing themselves as accountable to the mission agency, not the Indian church;
- Unwillingness to devolve.
However, the need for mission cannot be argued from a pragmatic necessity for survival (and Newbigin does not take this approach). It has to flow from theology, the nature of the gospel, the character of God.
Perhaps a useful analogy is that of a growing child: the child is important in themselves (the coming together of a congregation as a ‘body’). But without growth the child is not a healthy child. For a child there is something inherent about growth.
Can we argue this for the church not just pragmatically but also theologically? I think we can. A renewed emphasis on the eschatological (for which Newbigin calls) comes to our aid. The future of the church is as a foretaste of God’s kingdom. ‘The church faces the world… as arrabon of that salvation, as sign, first-fruit, token, witness of that salvation which God purposes for the whole.’ (Newbigin’s The Basis, Purpose and Manner of Inter-Faith Dialogue).
Does this help us in the here and now? I think it does. For the church community is to be valued in and of itself. But at the same time it is but, as it were, an infant, which needs to grow both in size and maturity (- which takes us from the Body of Christ imagery of Paul in Corinthians to the cosmic language of Ephesians and Colossians.)
We can thus affirm Laing when he offers us the vision of a minister who leads the congregation into the world “enabling” “sustaining” “nourishing” rather than simply teaching (From Crisis to Creation, 240) And unpacking what this means is part of Newbigin’s agenda.
How can this be expressed ‘on the ground’ in terms of the structures of the local church? If the church is being pulled by the secular forces undermining community, then there needs to be that within the church which acts as a community-builder.
In traditional English parish Anglican ministry this has been the Vicar, or priest - one per parish. But in other contexts this does not occur. The Church of England has generally been moving towards developing ministry teams. But progress has been painfully slow.
I suggest that underlying this is the ‘scandal’ of the denomination system which can overflow into a top-down authority structure which disempowers the congregation. Where the local church has a healthy sense of community (such as in the Andhra Pradesh village), there is not a problem. Where other factors knit the church together there is not a problem. But where these factors are not present - and is often the case in settled suburban life in the UK - the denominational system can result in an unhealthy dependency culture.
St Paul was always careful to maintain a distance between himself and the local church community, the existing power structures can be reflected in the ministry of the vicar/ priest - often in an unconscious way. This is the same battle that Roland Allen was fighting when resisting the control of missionary societies over local churches. Henry Venn of the CMS was arguing similarly 80 years before Roland Allen.
What is needed I suggest for England is that the lay team ministry (eldership) of the local church is more strongly affirmed, with the vicar / priest taking a more episcopal role. This would achieve three things:
- a more genuinely local church with local ministry;
- a local and consistent leadership which would affirm the identity of the local congregation;
- a church able to embody local expressions of mission much more readily, and thus
- a church where there is a sense of local responsibility
- and a church which thus seeks God’s guiding and leading and is empowered all the more by God’s Spirit in its mission
I do not believe it is yet the case in England. Much of this may well already be the case here in CSI - perhaps we can speak about that.
How this is developed is open for discussion (the New Testament offers a range of ministry options.) Some church take an eldership line. Other possibilities include Lay Presidency and Local Ordination. I personally favour the latter but perhaps this is again part of what needs too be decided locally.
Here is CSI you have wonderfully put aside so much denominational clutter as you have forged unity. We can learn from you, and perhaps all learn how to have the mind of Christ as to what community is about in an age which so often seeks to value the individual above all else.
The Anglican Church is the ideal context for this for at root I do not believe that it is a denomination. In the UK the vision - flawed as it was - was too be the Church IN England. It has in effect become a denomination, but maybe it can revisit some of its history - redeemed - to find the way forward.
