Community': A Postmodern Mission Paradigm?

7/27/2019 'Community': A Postmodern Mission Paradigm?

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Journal of Anglican Studies

DOI: 10.1177/1740355303001001032003; 1; 31Journal of Anglican Studies

Michael McCoy'Community': A Postmodern Mission Paradigm?

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Community:APostmodern Mission Paradigm?*

Michael McCoy

[email protected]

ABSTRACT

To answer the question of the title of this article, the words community,postmodern,mission and paradigm are examined in turn and defined.The central place of the local church in contemporary missiology is dis-cussed, and the need for a missional and communitarian ecclesiology is

argued with positive but critical reference to the approach of the Gospeland Our Culture Network of NorthAmerica. The article ends by suggest-ing that community can indeed be seen as a mission paradigm for post-

modernity, and by posingsome

key questions facing the local church if itis to become a missional community.

UAS 1.1 (2003) 31-45]ISSN 1740-3553

Fourteen years ago, reflecting on the 1989 conference of the WorldCouncil of Churches Commission for World Mission and Evangelism(CWME) in SanAntonio, SouthAfrican missiologist David Bosch notedthe emergence of the theme of community in the section reports and the

closing plenary. Perhaps, he wrote, ...the search for community willturn out to be a major missiological theme during the 1990s.1 He himself

made that speculative comment more concrete for the 1990s and beyondwhen in Transforming Mission2 he opened the massive Chapter 12,Elements of an Emerging Ecumenical Missionary Paradigm, withreflections on the church in mission. This section was longer than the

* An earlier version of this paper was given at the SouthernAfrican Missio-

logical Society Congress, Issues Facing the Local Church in Mission at the Beginningof the 21st Century, University of Pretoria, 24-26 January 2001.I acknowledge thecritical comments of

participantsin the

congress,and of Steve Bevans SVD.

1. D. Bosch, Your Will Be Done? Critical Reflections on SanAntonio, Missionalia

17.2 (1989), pp. 126-38 (137).2. D. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Mission Theology (Maryknoll,

NY: Orbis Books, 1991).


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32 Journal of Anglican Studies

others, he wrote, because all the issues that will emerge in subsequentsections are, in one sense or another, already present here.3 In otherwords, the church-with-others, the incarnational community of faith, is

the starting point for mission in our time.As Bosch says later in the samechapter, it is the community that is the primary bearer of mission.4

4

He reinforced the point, though as something of an afterthought, atthe end of a posthumously published essay on a missiology for Westernculture, when he wrote:

the question about the feasibility of a missionary enterprise to Western

people hinges on the question of the nature and life of our local worship-ping communities and the extent to which they facilitate a discourse inwhich the engagement of people with their culture is encouraged.5

In view of the rediscovery in the twentieth century of the church,especially the local church, as the primary bearer of Gods mission, canwe go further than David Bosch did, and speak of community in its own

right as a new or emerging paradigm of mission for a postmodernworld? Or is it just one of many elements making up an ecumenical

paradigm such as that proposed by Bosch?

Seeking Clarity:Some Terms

InvestigatedOf the five words in the title of my paper, four are among the most used

and abused technical terms in contemporary missiology; so some discus-sion of each of them is in order.

Community ?Community has been described as an aerosol word, popularly sprayedinto discussions, giving a sweet scent and a hint of mist, cloudinganalysis.6 It can refer to anything from the whole of humanity (thehuman community) through the global network of movers and shakersknown as the international community, to the smallest local gatheringof people. It can refer to nations, regions, villages, neighbourhoods,pressure and interest groups, lifestyle groups, cultural groupings, andso on. Mostly it is used when we want to imply some kind of common

3. Bosch, Transforming Mission, p. 368.4. Bosch, Transforming Mission, p. 472.

5. D. Bosch, Believing in the Future: Towardsa

Missiology of Western Culture (ValleyForge: Trinity Press International, 1995), p. 60.6. A. Hake, Theological Reflections on "Community", inA. Harvey (ed.),

Theology in the City:ATheological Response to Faith in the City (London: SPCK, 1989),pp. 47-67 (47).




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33McCoy Community:APostmodern Mission Paradigm?

bond, some shared concern or quality between people. Often it is meantto generate a slightly warm and fuzzy feeling in us, because communityisAGood Thing, isntit?

But our often idealized images of community, whether rural, smalltown or suburban, reinforced or parodied by television programmes like

Ballykissangel, The Vicar of Dibley or Seachange, usually mask the less

pleasant face of small communities: bigotry, intolerance and a stifling,repressive conformity.7 Community is not alwaysAGood Thing.The use of the word community is further complicated, in multi-

cultural contexts, by the wide diversity of significance it has in differentcultures. For those who have been nurtured in the Western liberal

tradition of individualism, community may be seen at best as a freelychosen and temporary opportunity to meet with others who are like-minded, at worst as an unwelcome source of restriction, imposing con-

fining norms on the autonomous self. For those who have grown up in

group-oriented collectivist cultures, community is part of life itself, theroot of personal identity and role, expressed in the well-known Xhosa

saying, Umntu ngumntu ngabantu (A person is a person through other

people).8And, as urbanization and globalization have their effect on us,many people find themselves living in multiple cultural worlds, livingwith

multipleidentities and

participatingin

multiplecommunities.

In common Christian use the word community can range from thetwo or three gathered in Christs name to the whole oikumene, and evenas a synonym for the solidarity of Christians with the poor and oppres-sed, people of other faiths, those in new religious movements, and soon.9 So when we talk about community as a key term in a postmodernmissiology, we have to try to be reasonably clear about what we mean.I want to reflect further on this below; but for now I suggest that Chris-tian understandings of community need to be rooted in the New

Testament word koinonia and its cognates.For Paul, the main user of the word in the New Testament, koinonia

refers strictly to the relation of faith to Christ (cf.1 Cor.1.9,1 Cor. 10.16,

7. T. Morton, Beware the C-word, Sydney Morning Herald - Spectrum, 4 Novem-ber 2000, pp. 1, 10-11 (1).

8. For discussions of this kind of anthropological analysis of cultural differences,see B. Malina, The New Testament World: Insights from CulturalAnthropology (Louisville:Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), pp. 63-73; E.H.F. Law, The WolfShall Lie Downwith the Lamb:A Spirituality for Leadership in a Multicultural Community (St Louis:Chalice Press, 1993), pp. 13-27; and also K. Giles, What on Earth Is the Church?A Biblicaland Theological Enquiry (Melbourne: HarperCollins Dove, 1995), pp. 19-22.

9. See Bosch, Your Will Be Done?, p. 137.

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2 Cor. 13.13, Gal. 2.9, Phil. 1.5, Philem. 6).10 Koinonia is the result of Gods

saving, liberating mission in Christ, as humanitys relationship with Godis restored, making possible restored relationships with others and with

the created order.In his critique of much recent Catholic andAnglican ecclesiological

use of the word communion (~omoMM/co~~MMmo), Kevin Giles arguesthat in the New Testament, koinonia is used

of the relationships that constitute the Christian community, the church-but, we add, never of the social reality thereby created. The word koinoniais always used as an abstract noun (of relationships and activities), andnever as a concrete noun (of a group of people or an institution). It istherefore not a church concept.11

He goes on to suggest that the word ekklesia better describes the concretesocial reality of the church as a community. That may be so, and Giless

emphasis on the relational content of koinonia is certainly correct; but I

question his view that koinonia is not a church concept. Does koinonianot lie at the very heart of Christian solidarity among the baptized?Asthe Missional Church team put it: The New Testament concept of koinoniadefines the Christian church as all those who have Jesus Christ and hismission in common.12

The key point is that koinonia is made real as the Spirit forms andtransforms those who follow Christ in Gods mission. The theologicalfoundation and framework of Christian community is Trinitarian.Andthat means that our sense of Christian community, and therefore our

ecclesiology, has to be rooted in relational terms, rather than in the hier-archical or bureaucratic conceptions which have dominated Christian

theology for two millennia.13 This may be obvious to us all, but it needs

restating, for reasons which I hope will become clear.

10. J. Schattenmann, &Kgr;&ogr;, NIDNTT, I, p. 643.11. Giles, What on Earth Is the Church?, p. 16.12. D. Guder et al., Missional Church:A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North

America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 233. The argument of R.A.Atkins,

Egalitarian Community: Ethnography and Exegesis (Tuscaloosa: University ofAlabama,1991) using Mary Douglass grid-group model, that Pauline communities were

egalitarian small groups, characterized by high group, low grid behaviours, and the

possible implications of that for the formation of missional communities in post-modem contexts, is beyond the scope of this paper, but would be worth exploring, not

least in the context of cultures with high group/high grid or low group/low gridcharacteristics.

13. C. Gunton, The Church on Earth: The Roots of Community, in C.E. Guntonand D.W. Hardy (eds.), On Being the Church: Essays on the Christian Community(Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989), pp. 48-80.




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35McCoy Community:A Postmodern Mission Paradigm?

Pos tmodern ?

If community is sometimes used to cloud our analysis, then the word

postmodern often obscures it completely. I am no philosopher, sociolo-

gist or media studies expert, so I confess that I often find myself baffledby the wide variety of meanings given to the word in fields as differentas architecture and television soap operas.14 The joint authors of Mis-sional Church acknowledge that scholars who trace the emergence of thepost-modem condition have reached no clear consensus regarding eitherthe scope of the change or the reasons for it.15

I am tempted to follow the example of an early postmodernistHumptyDumpty in Lewis Carrolls story Through the Looking Glass, and to saythat, when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neithermore nor less. But let me try to be a little less perverse. For me post-modern refers to an emerging, still unformed complex of reactions tothe decline of the Enlightenment project known as modernity. Moder-

nity has been characterized by such features as the dominance of ration-

ality and reason, the development of the autonomous self, the distinctionbetween public and private, fact and value, and the notion of the socialcontract as the basis for community.16So postmodeMityl7 is not (at least, not yet) a coherent response to the

decline of

modernity,but rather a

rangeof

responseson all sorts of

levels, and in many different directions: postmodernity as an ethos is

protean.18 It has to do with the recovery of spirituality in the face of

modernitys denial of the sacred; it has to do with the celebration of

variety and pluralism in the face of failed ideologies of conformity; it hasto do with giving priority to personal preference over impersonal ration-

ality ; it has to do with narrative as truth-bearing in the face of abstract

theory; and, perhaps most relevant to this enquiry, it has to do with thesearch for a sense of belonging in the face of individualism and the

14. J. Docker, Postmodernism and Popular Culture:A Cultural History (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1994).

15. Guder et al., Missional Church, p. 38.16. L. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (Geneva:

WCC, 1986); Bosch, Transforming Mission, pp. 262-67; Guder et al., Missional Church,pp. 18-36; R. Bellah, Cultural Barriers to the Understanding of the Church and ItsPublic Role, Missiology 19.4 (1991), pp. 461-73; and J.R. Middleton and B.J. Walsh,Truth Is Stranger Than it Used to Be: Biblical Faith in a PostmodernAge (Downers Grove,

IL: Intervarsity Press, 1995), pp. 9-27.17. With R. Page, God Is with Us: Synergy in the Church (London: SCM Press, 2000),

p. 4,I use postmodernity, describing a lived experience, rather than postmodernismwhich refers more to an intellectual movement in art, architecture, literature, etc.

18. Page, God Is with Us, p. 32.




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breakdown of the social contract. Postmodernity also has its dark side,of course: the loss of identity and commitment to ideals, the exaltationof pleasure and consumption over compassion and responsibility, the

absence of shared norms and values, the fragmentation of social struc-tures. Sometimes it is defined not so much by what it is as by what it isnot.19

As we ponder the churchs response to these complexities, we have totry to discern how, as a faith community, we have ourselves been

shaped by modernity, how we have allowed our grasp of the gospel tobe distorted.20 Perhaps most important, we need to recognize how our

ecclesiologies have been successively taken captive by the classical

paradigm of political hierarchy and the modern paradigm of the bureau-cratic institution.21 Then we have to begin the hugely difficult but neces-

sary task of discerning how best to embody the gospel in our changedand changing cultural contexts.As David Bosch hinted after San

Antonio, and affirmed in Transforming Mission, a recovery of the churchas community is central to being a missional church in a postmodernsetting, not just because a church which seeks to be truly communitarianwill be able to bear a more authentic witness in postmodernity, but alsobecause a communitarian ecclesiology is closer to our origins in theTrinitarian

communityof our

missionary God.~

Mission ?

I think enough has been said, in countless books, articles and congresses,about the twentieth centurys crisis in mission and the fragmentation ofthe former consensus about its meaning and content.23 There has been

enough deconstruction of our inherited missiologies to allow us toreconstruct. So I offer a summary statement about the nature of mission,

adopted by the Commission on Mission of the National Council of

Churches inAustralia in 1997:

Mission is the creating, reconciling and transforming action of God,

flowing from the community of love found in the Trinity, made known toall humanity in the person of Jesus, and entrusted to the faithful action and

19. Among Christians, responses to postmodernity have ranged from criticallyfriendly to hostile.Among the former, Middleton and Walsh, Truth Is Stranger Thanit Used to Be and D. Grierson, A New Path to the Waterfall, interMission 4.1 (1998),pp. 9-21 are examples.

20. See Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, and C.C. West, Power, Truth and theCommunity in Modern Culture (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1999), pp. 65-71.

21. See Gunton, The Church on Earth, pp. 48-54.

22. See Page, God Is with Us, pp. 10-19.23. See Bosch, Transforming Mission, pp. 1-8.




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witness of the people of God who, in the power of the Spirit, are a sign,foretaste and instrument of the reign of God.24

This statement expresses the conviction, widely accepted in contemp-orary mission thinking, that mission is Gods mission.25 It reminds us thatin all our talk about missional community, we must avoid the trap of

thinking that the church generates mission: it is Gods mission whichdefines the church.26 It also reminds us that Gods mission flows from

one community - the Trinity - to another - the people of God. It is amission which, originating in the relatedness of the Godhead, reachesout to create and restore relationships with and within all creation. So,if we are enquiring into the missional nature of the church in a post-modem world, we are

lookingfor a form of church which best gives

expression to Gods mission of reconciliation.27 Whatever its local mani-

festations, the missional church is a relational, reconciling community.

Paradigm ?And so to the fourth of the much-used buzzwords. Hans Kting, who

brought the word paradigm into theological currency, was himselfcautious about its use. He found it ambiguous, and, although he contin-ued to use it extensively in the sense defined by Thomas Kuhn,28 he

24. MISSIO,Anglicans in Mission:A Transforming Journey (London: SPCK, 2000),p. 21.I must declare my interest: as a member of theNCCAs Commission on Mission

at the time, I had a substantial hand in drafting the statement. MISSIO offered it as analternative to theAnglican Consultative Councils well-known but missiologicallyinadequateFive marks of mission (pp. 19-21).

25. L.A. Hoedemaker has raised valid questions about the usefulness of the missioDei concept. See The People of God and the Ends of the Earth, in F.J. Verstraelen,A.

Camps, L.A. Hoedemaker and M.R. Spindler (eds.), Missiology:An Ecumenical Intro-

duction. Texts and Contexts of Global Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), pp.157-71, esp. 162-66. Perhaps his concerns can be met if we insist on giving central

place to the New Testament vision of the reign of God in the missio Dei-a theolo-

gical emphasis which has often been lost, as Hoedemaker himself notes. The NCCAdefinition, I believe, clearly retains this emphasis.

26. An assignment in the Diploma missiology course of the Theological Education

by Extension College of SouthernAfrica (TEEC) during 2000 asked the question, Ismission a programme of the church, or the church a programme of mission?As I

marked the students answers, I was dismayed, but not surprised, by the number whosaw mission as a programme of the church.

27. See R.J. Schreiter, Reconciliation: Mission and Ministry in a Changing Social Order(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992).

28. An entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by themembers of a given community, quoted in H. Kng, Theology for the Third Millennium:

An Ecumenical View (London: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 131.




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equally preferred the phrase model of interpretation, explanation or

understanding.29So is it appropriate to speak of community as a paradigm of mission?

Can it be bracketed with those paradigms identified by Kiing, Bosch andothers who have applied Kuhns theory to Christian theology and mis-siology ? Is it sufficiently distinctive from other paradigms of mission tojustify a claim that the rediscovery of missional community marks aparadigm shift in missiology? My provisional answer is yes- but onlyif community serves as a hermeneutical key - in Kungs words, amodel of interpretation, explanation or understanding - for mission inthe postmodern era. Whether it can, or will, remains to be seen.

Finding Focus:A Journey Outlined

The church in mission has been on a long and often tortuous journeyover two millennia. I alluded earlier to Colin Guntons characterization

of historical ecclesiology as either political (shaped by the structures ofclassical Roman society) or institutional (shaped by Enlightenmentrationalism). David Bosch has similarly traced the succession of para-digms in mission. Others have applied these insights in more accessibleways to the life of the local

congregationand the nature of

ministryand

ordained leadership.3o What they have in common is a conviction thatthe churchs existence is rooted in the mission of God, that the church isthe primary agent of this mission, and that this church has to have adifferent shape from those it has inherited.

The Local Church in Mission

There have been many important developments in missiology in the past100 years or so. But in my view one of the most important has been the

rediscoveryof the local

churchin mission.

I am struck by the way in which the history ofAnglican mission overthe past 200 years mirrors, in some respects anyway, the pattern of 2000

29. Kng, Theology for the Third Millennium, pp. 131-32.30. For example, L.B. Mead, The Once and Future Church: Reinventing the Congrega-

tionfor a New Mission Frontier (Washington DC:Alban Institute, 1991); R. Greenwood,Transforming Priesthood:ANew Theology of Mission and Ministry (London: SPCK, 1994);R. Warren, Being Human: Being Church: Spirituality and Mission in the Local Church

(London: Marshall Pickering, 1995); R. Page, God Is with Us: Synergy in the Church(London: SCM Press, 2000); and S. Bevans, A Spirituality ofAmerican Priesthood:

Implications Emerging from Our Sense of Mission, paper presented at the Consulta-tion of the Spirituality of theAmerican (Catholic) Priesthood, St Marys UniversityCentre for Continuing Formation, Baltimore, MD, 2001.




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years of Christian history.31 Some, like the Tractarians who plantedAnglicanism in SouthernAfrica or RolandAllen in China,32 havestressed the importance of the bishop as our primary missionary, invok-

ing (rightly or wrongly) apostolic patterns of mission.33 Some haveappealed to the pioneering witness of the monastic orders, the chief

agents of mission throughout the MiddleAges. Some have promoted therole of the voluntary mission agency, as Protestants have done since the

evangelical revival. But at the heart ofAnglicanisms crypto-missiology(we have never been good at being explicit about it!) is a conviction that

community is somehow central to mission. The parish churches whichdot the English landscape, and which remain in the minds of many

Anglicans the idealized picture of what the church is and should be,were originally missionary structures:

shaped and suited for the small, feudal, close-knit, isolated, agriculturalcommunity. Christian nodes were multiplied according to communityneeds. The mediaeval city was peppered with parish churches, but by thetime of the industrial revolution, missionary development had stabilised.34

As David Wasdells comment suggests, there came a point 200 or more

years ago when this particular mission strategy ceased to be helpful - afact which manyAnglicans have still to learn. We need to rethink our

favoured model of mission, that of church-planting through diocesanand parish structures.35 My point here, though, is that, even if the methodis no longer appropriate, its basis - the urge to cultivate local missionarycommunities - is sound.

Giving it Shape: Community-in-Mission

But what kind of community are we talking about? Even with the

rediscovery of the local church as the primary agent of Gods mission,

31. T. Yates, Anglicans in Mission, in S. Sykes and J. Booty (eds.), The Study ofAnglicanism (London: SPCK, 1988), pp. 429-41.

32. Cf. R.Allen, Missionary Methods: St Pauls or Ours? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,2nd edn, 1992).

33. For a good discussion of the tensions that this created between a mission

agency and the local bishop, seeA.K. Davidsonsessay on culture and ecclesiologyin nineteenth-century New Zealand in K. Ward and B. Stanley (eds.), The ChurchMission Society and World Christianity, 1799-1999 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns;

Cambridge: Richmond Curzon Press, 1999), esp. pp. 210-16.

34. D. Wasdell, The Evolution of Missionary Congregations, International Reviewof Missions 66.3 (1977), pp. 366-72 (367) and M.J. McCoy, "Local Church" in Mis-

siological Perspective:An Enquiry, MTh, University of SouthAfrica, 1993, pp. 80-81.35. E.R. Morgan and R. Lloyd (eds.), The Mission of theAnglican Communion

(London: SPCK/SPG,1948), pp. 1-17, and see MISSIO,Anglicans in Mission, p. 22.




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there is a great deal of ambiguity about the phrase local church. Thosein the Catholic tradition (including manyAnglicans) mean the diocese;Reformed ecclesiology tends to favour the congregation; while radical

movements, from theAnabaptists to base ecclesial communities andRestoration churches, emphasize somethingmuch smaller than the tradi-tional church congregation. We need an ecumenical understanding oflocal church which transcends these disputatious oppositions, onewhich is small-scale, multi-storeyed, missional and relational.36 It isthese last two features which, in particular, need to be brought out.

Missional CommunityThere are many creative and helpful resources for equipping the localchurch for mission. Few of them, however, have grappled with the

complexities of this enterprise with the kind of theological, missiologicaland pastoral focus that I have found in the resources produced by the

Gospel and Our Culture Network (GOCN) in NorthAmerica. The

origins and focuses of this network have been summarized elsewhere.37Here I want to highlight the missional ecclesiology which GOCN pro-poses, especially in Guder et al.s book Missional Church.

Let me attempt a very brief summary of this missional ecclesiology. It

beginswith the churchs vocation to

representthe

reignof God as

sign,foretaste and instrument.38 The churchs calling is to live in the world asan apostle of Gods reign, being an alternative community whose inner,communal life... matters for mission.39 This inner life is cultivated byecclesial practices such as baptism, eucharist, reconciliation, discernmentand hospitality, each of them expressing the reality of Gods reign and

shaping the character of the communitys members.40 The role of the

leadership is to formand equip a people who demonstrate and announcethe purpose and direction of God through Jesus Christ.41 The basic

missional structure is the particular community, which is formed by theScriptures, and culturally diverse in its structures as demanded by the

36. McCoy, Local Church, pp. 71-74.37. J. Nieder-Heitmann, The Gospel and Our Culture Network in NorthAmerica:

Translating the Challenge in the SouthAfrican Context, Missionalia 30.3 (2002), pp.443-72.

38. Note especially Chapter 4 and see also P. Dietterich and I. Dietterich,ASystemsModel of the Church in Ministry and Mission (Chicago: Centre for Parish Development,1994), pp. 6-11.

39. Guderet al., Missional Church, p. 128 and see the whole of his Chapter 5.40. Guderet al., Missional Church, Chapter 6.41. Guderet al., Missional Church, p. 183 and see his Chapter 7.




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churchs catholicity.42 Larger structures of missional connectedness

help the particular community to remain faithfully part of the proclaim-ing, reconciling, sanctifying, and uniting church-the community of

communities in mission.43I focus here on the model of the centred/bounded church proposed

in Chapter 7, Missional Leadership: Equipping Gods People forMission.44

One of the abiding tensions in thinking about the local church inmission has been between what Ralph Winter called modality and

sodality groups,45 or what in a different context have been dubbed the

community church and fenced church.46 That is, a fairly sharp distinc-tion has been drawn between church communities which are open,

flexible and welcoming, with porous boundaries (if they have bound-aries at all), and those which are closed, inflexible, welcoming only tothose who are willing to meet rigorous membership standards, and thushave clear boundaries. Winter himself seemed to suggest that the

sodality - the clearly defined, committed, purpose-driven community -was the best kind of structure to engage seriously in mission, whereasthe modality existed primarily for fellowship and teaching. By contrast,a 1981 British Council of Churches policy document advocated opencommunities as the best model for effective mission and

ministry amongyoung people.Such dualisms are common in modernist thinking, and they need to

be transcended if we are going to develop genuinely postmodern mis-sional communities.

The team which produced Missional Church has largely succeeded, Ibelieve, in doing just that. First, building on the foundations established

42. Guder et al., Missional Church, Chapter 8.

43. Guderet al., Missional Church, Chapter 9.44. Guderet al., Missional Church, pp. 183-220.Although the whole book is jointly

owned by the team which produced it, each chapter is the work of one particularmember. Chapter 7 was drafted byAlan Roxburgh, who, the year before MissionalChurch appeared, issued a book dealing with the missionary congregation as a liminal

community, and setting out ideas about the character of its leadership (A.J. Roxburgh,The Missionary Congregation, Leadership and Liminality [Harrisburg: Trinity PressInternational, 1997]). His contribution to Missional Church, while not directly dealingwith the issue of liminality, considerably develops the ecclesiological dimensions

implicit in the earlier book.

45. R.D. Winter, The Two Structures of Gods Redemptive Mission, Missiology2.1 (1974), pp. 121-39.

46. See British Council of Churches, Young People and the Church: The Reportof a Working Party Set Up by the BCC Youth Unit (London: British Council of

Churches, 1981), pp. 32-41.




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earlier in the book, the missional community is defined as the pilgrimpeople of God who are on a journey towards the fullness of the reign ofGod.47 Then the categories of centred and bounded sets are introduced

from sociological analysis as an alternative to the traditional distinctionbetweenfringe and core membership. The congregation as a whole isa centred set-a community of those who are invited on a journeytowards the values and commitments identified with the reign of God.The centred set represents the church as a people on the way toward thefullness of Gods reign in Jesus Christ, which is open to all who maywant to be on this journey.48 The bounded set is a sub-set of the congre-gation, a covenant community, those who have chosen to take on thecommitment, practices, and disciplines that make them a distinct,

missionary community.49 Here the modality and sodality models, theopen and closed churches, are no longer in opposition to one anotherbut are symbiotically joined. The centred set is where people are madewelcome, where they can explore the cost of discipleship and experiencea sense of belonging as they journey further on the shared pilgrimage.The bounded set is that covenant community within the congregationwhich knows itself to be a sign, foretaste and instrument of Gods reign.Both sets are headed in the same direction: towards the reign of God.The role of the

leadershipis to cultivate and form the

congregation,calling them into the covenant community of the bounded set, and

directing their attention outward towards their context.50 Thus the

particular community, empowered by Gods Spirit, not only lives out the

gospel internally but opens up the gospel externally by the way it lives,so that others may see and respond.51We need of course to approach this kind of missional ecclesiology

critically. It has been developed within a specific context, that of NorthAmerica, by a group of Protestant scholars, and aims to give the church

in that context a model which would help it engage in mission in a post-modem setting. Members of other ecclesial traditions in other contexts

may fear either a loss of the churchs openness to the wider communityor (conversely) an erosion of its distinctiveness. Some may feel that it istoo churchy - that it limits Gods missional activity to the actions of thefaith community, and doesntallow for the mission of the Spirit in theworld beyond the Christian church. Some may also wonder how a

47. Guderet al., Missional Church, p. 204.48. Guderet al., Missional Church, p. 206.

49. Guderet al., Missional Church, p. 208.

50. Guder et al., Missional Church, p. 212, see the diagram at p. 213.51. Guderet al., Missional Church, p. 247.




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particular missional community can effectively engage in national,regional or global mission challenges such as globalization or theAIDS

pandemic.Further, it is not always clear whether the centred set is considered

integral to the missional community, or whether it is only a kind of

preparatory waiting room. Finally, the centred-bounded typologymay resonate with the experience of many urban and suburban churches;but does it apply to rural church communities, or to congregationswhich are strongly shaped by group-oriented, collectivist culturalnorms? I suspect that many such congregations might find the typologyless helpful. However, as the effects of urbanization and globalizationbecome more

apparentin multicultural

settings,it

maywell be that this

kind of model will become more relevant in a greater range of congrega-tions. We live, after all, in a very diverse and constantly changingcontext.

This model of missional community52 therefore invites creative engage-ment and practical action. It meets the criteria I mentioned earlier for anecumenical understanding of local church: it is small-scale, multi-

storeyed, missional and relational.And, if one of the marks of post-modern society is the search for community, then this kind of missional

congregation has the capacity to offer people a sense of belonging, andto invite them on a meaningful journey towards the God who loves,heals and reconciles.

Conclusion

Can we validly describe this kind of vision of community as a para-digm ? We can, if we adopt community as the interpretative key for our

theology of mission. It is rooted in the primary community, the creating,redeeming and sustaining God who calls people into relationship withone another, with creation, with God. It is expressed in the formationand cultivation of communities of people who are on a journey togethertowards Gods reign of justice, peace and wholeness.And if those pil-grims come to share an entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques,and so on 53 which focus on their identity as a koinonia which is a sign,foretaste and instrument of Gods reign, then, I suggest, we can say that

52. Stephen Bevans has pointed out to me that he prefers the phrase communion-in-mission. The word communion is kind of a catholic word. The GOCNs mission-

al community sounds a bit Protestant to Catholic ears! (e-mail note, 7 March 2001).However, the ecclesiological emphasis is very much the same.

53. Kuhn, quoted in Kng, Theologyfor the Third Millennium, p. 131.




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community, as here described, constitutes a paradigm of mission in an

increasingly postmodern world.Is this vision of community postmodern? It is, for at least three

reasons. First, it is holistic: it transcends familiar dualisms such as thosebetween inner and outer life, between core and fringe, between missionand maintenance. Second, it both recognizes and responds to the searchfor a sense of belonging which characterizes late modernity, in whichtruth is sought less in rational discourse and more in personal encounter.So missional community is less about what Christians do and more aboutwho they are-and how they live together. Third, a focus on communityas the key to our ecclesiology and our missiology-or, better, a missional

ecclesiology - helpsus to recover the Christian narratives of

relationshipand reconciliation, which have largely been buried under the layers ofclassical and modem conceptions ofwho we are and what were about.The experience of the church as community offers postmodern people the

opportunity to taste truth in face-to-face encounter and live the story in

relationship with others.However, as the authors of Missional Church suggest, missional com-

munities :

do not seek the homogeneous oneness hoped for by modernity, nor do

they celebrate the fragmented diversity of postmodernism. They welcomeand nurture the incredible richness and particularity of perspectives,backgrounds, and gifts but always within the embrace of Gods reconcilingunity.54

And, to be missional communities rather than self-serving commu-

nities, they need to resist the ideology of intimacy which denies differ-ence, distance, conflict and sacrifice. The missional community needs tobe radically open to diversity. It needs to incarnate the attractive,

welcoming,non-coercive mission of

Jesus.55I

imaginethat most of our

congregations would find it very hard indeed to be that kind of commu-

nity. But, as Norman Kraus put it, The life of the church is its witness.The witness of the church is its life. The question of authentic witness isthe question of authentic community.56Can our parishes become missional communities, vitally engaged in

their own local contexts while also relating to the wider world throughthe missional connections of the diocese, the Province, theAnglicanCommunion and beyond? How can parishes become more authentic

witnesses to the reign of God in multicultural, fragmenting, increasingly

54. Guder et al., Missional Church, p. 179.55. Page, God Is with Us, pp. 12-13.56. Quoted in Guder et al., Missional Church, p. 182.




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postmodern societies? What concrete forms might those communitiestake? How will they deal creatively with the increasing reality of beingon the margins of post-Christian societies? Will they give fresh impetus

toour

ecumenical and missionary vocations? How will they transcendthe denominational paradigm which grips and paralyses so many of ourlocal churches, negating our vocations to unity and witness?And howwill the potential diversity of truly contextualized, incarnationalcommunities be handled by our ecclesial structures, which are them-selves products of a modernity which tend to favour uniformity and

conformity? Such questions go to the very heart of the identity andfuture ofAnglicanism as we seek to be faithful servants of Godsmission. 57

57. The missional ecclesiology and the associated training material developed bythe (Roman Catholic) Lumko Institute in SouthAfrica offers creative and contextualanswers to these questions. They have been taken up in a number ofAnglican

diocesesin

SouthernAfrica. See L.P. Prior, Towardsa

Community Church: The WayAhead for Todays Parish (Delmenville: Lumko Institute, 2nd edn, 1997) for a popularversion of the Lumko Institutes framework. L.P. Prior,ACommunion of Communities.The Mission and Growth of a Local Church as Reflected in the Lumko Institute, MTh,University of SouthAfrica, 1993, gives a fuller scholarly account.

Documents

Community': A Postmodern Mission Paradigm?