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Part Two - The Whole Church
The second consultation considered the identity, role and functions of the church within the mission of God for the sake of the world. We did not attempt to provide an exhaustive systematic ecclesiology, but examined instead the many dimensions of what it means to be the whole church and what the church needs to be if it is to serve as God’s witness in the world.
Six themes, with papers and case-studies on each, shaped the consultation:
- The whole church in the whole Bible
- The whole church as a transformed and transforming society
- The whole church as a people committed to wholeness in the midst of a divided world
- The whole church called to be a blessing to all nations, especially in contexts of exile and migration
- The whole church and mission strategies
- The whole church in its bewildering diversity
The plenary papers and some of the case-studies have been published in a special edition of
Evangelical Review of Theology. The results of our meetings are summarised here.
Introduction
“Salvation belongs to our God.”
“You will be my people.”
“The earth is the Lord’s.”
The starting point for our ecclesiology must be the same as for our theology of mission and for our understanding of the world. Salvation, the church, and the world all belong to God
The concept of
missio Dei reminds us that our mission flows from the mission of God, for salvation belongs to God. Similarly, the concept of
ecclesia Dei reminds us that the church derives its identity and purpose from the God who called us and created us as a people for himself.
Mission belongs to God. The church belongs to God. The world belongs to God.
Our doctrine of God, in all its Trinitarian richness, must govern our ecclesiology. The opening of 1 Peter reminds us of our identity in relation to the work of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The rest of the epistle makes it clear that what we
do as a church flows integrally and inseparably from who we
are as church. Being and doing cannot be torn apart.
We are called to be who we are, and to live out what we are.
We found it encouraging that a recent statement of faith includes mission strongly in its effort to define the nature and purpose of the church.
The church stands in continuity with God’s people in the Old Testament, called through Abraham to be a light to the nations, shaped and taught through the law and the prophets to be a community of holiness, compassion and justice, and redeemed through the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The church exists to worship and glorify God for all eternity and is commissioned by Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit to participate in the transforming mission of God within history.
(from the new Tear Fund Statement of Faith, adopted in 2007).
We found it helpful to arrange our findings around the four great terms used to describe the church in the Nicene Creed, since it became clear that each one of them has strong missional significance:
“We believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.”
A. One
- We give thanks that the one church is God’s church and not our own, and hence finds its identity and purpose in the one God and King who called it into being and reigns over it as Lord. Biblically, the church is one in relation to the one living God (for he alone is its creator, redeemer and Lord, sustaining, sanctifying and indwelling it by his one Spirit); one in relation to Christ (for it includes all who are in Christ); one throughout history (for it includes all whom God has called to himself in all ages, before and after the incarnation); and one in all the biblical pictures of it (there is, e.g., only one household of God; only one bride of Christ; only one vine; only one priesthood and temple; only one flock; only one body – the body of Christ).
- Yet we confess that often we understand church according to our own limited perspectives. We easily approve of the congregation or tradition in which we participate, but fail to recognise the wider reality of God’s church in many different cultures and forms, including those that are strange and even disturbing to us. We repent of this and seek to cultivate the spirit of Barnabas who, when confronted in Antioch with a new and cosmopolitan manifestation of following Jesus, “when he saw the grace of God, he was glad” (Acts 11:23). We urge Lausanne to go on being a forum where all kinds and ways of being the church in mission can be recognized, embraced and affirmed, not without mutual critique and accountability, but certainly without instant rejection and condemnation of what is unfamiliar. We have most to learn from those who are most different from ourselves.
- We confess that ethnocentrism still manifests itself in the global church, tempting us to consider our own cultural, national, or tribal identity as superior to others. This fundamentally denies the oneness of the church in Christ, and should be challenged with renunciation and repentance, since it is the root of so much conflict even among Christians.
- We rejoice in the phenomenal growth of the church in the majority world of the global south, and for that reason we understand the intention of the statement that the “centre of gravity” of world Christianity has shifted to the south. However, we strongly discourage the further use of this term, for two reasons. First, Christianity has no centre but Jesus Christ. We are defined by no geographical centre, but only by our allegiance to the Lordship of Christ, and he is Lord of all the earth. The “centre”, therefore, is wherever he is worshipped and obeyed. Secondly, any talk of a centre (other than Christ) undermines the fact that Christianity, even since the book of Acts, has always been fundamentally polycentric. Anywhere on earth can be a centre, and any centre can rapidly become peripheral. The global nature of the church as “one throughout the whole wide world” subverts the language of a centre – whether geographical, numerical, or missionary. Mission is from everywhere to everywhere.
- The church as “one” also speaks of integration. Repeatedly in our consultation we found ourselves longing to move beyond the dichotomies that so often and sadly divide us. Or rather, in most cases, to move back behind them to an evangelical understanding of the church in which such dichotomies are seen as invalid in principle. These are some dichotomies we need to recognize as fundamentally false and damaging, or at best questionable. There are doubtless more.
- being and doing. The Bible calls us to live out who we are.
- word and deed. Both are essential parts of Christian life and witness, as our study of 1 Peter repeatedly showed (especially 1 Pet. 3). As Newbigin put it, the church by its life and actions is to be the hermeneutic, or the plausibility structure of the gospel. We will be heard because of our deeds as well as our words.
- evangelism and social action (or any form of Christian “action”). We believe that the struggle to articulate the relationship between these two was made necessary in the second half of the 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century because of the mistaken separation of them that had taken place in the first half. That is why we say we need to go back behind this dichotomy. In our view, they are both integral to biblical mission – in the sense that while they may be conceptually distinguished, they cannot be separated. The relation between them is intrinsic and organic, as much as the relationship, say, between breathing and drinking in the human body. It makes little sense to speak of either having priority or primacy. Both are integral parts of what it means to be alive! Without either, there is death. We therefore urge Lausanne to affirm an integral understanding of mission that inseparably includes both, rather than continuing chicken-and-egg debates about how they relate.
- church and para-church: We wonder if there is more argument about this distinction among mission agencies and church bodies than exists in the mind of God, or in biblical concepts. While recognizing that there are valid pragmatic or functional distinctions that may be made for the sake of good order and administration, we need to affirm the biblical truth that “where two or three are gathered” in the name of Christ, he is there, and the church is there – one, holy, catholic and apostolic.
- The oneness of the church must also be seen as an integral part of the plan of God for the whole creation. It has a prophetic and eschatological dimension. Paul sees the oneness of the church as the prophetic sign of that reconciled unity that will one day be true for all humanity and all creation in Christ (Eph. 1:10, 22-23; Col. 1:15-20). Our concern for the unity of the church (and all the practical, ethical, ecumenical etc. implications of that), must therefore be seen as also intrinsic to our understanding of what we mean by “the whole church” in its mission. It is significant that Peter includes the command to “live in harmony with one another” (1 Pet. 3:8) within a chapter that refers to positive witness to unbelievers.
