Mission-Shaped Church

What on earth is the Church for? (Parish Grapevine - July 2005)

With increasing clarity we are recognizing that the Church is formed by mission.  God is sending love and in so doing gathers people who respond to his sending.  The word ?mission? has been greatly abused and misunderstood, but basically it means ?sending?.   The Church then is a creation of God?s sending or mission.

Forgetting some of our preconceptions of mission that made us feel so uncomfortable (like tele-evangelists and colonialism) more and more people are aware that the Church is shaped by the mission of God.  If the Church is shaped by the mission of God it is also shaped for the mission of God.

Everything we do needs to be measured against this nature and purpose.  Is there anything we do which is not mission-shaped?  If there is then we are doing it for the wrong motives.  Let me give an example: is our worship mission-shaped?  The service moves from gathering (a result of God?s mission), through listening to the ways of God?s mission in scripture, to celebrating his giving to finally being dismissed. The dismissal is in the words ?Let us go in peace to love and serve the world?.  That is mission-shaped worship.  Not going ?in peace to love and serve the world? indicates a different and self-centred motivation.

Other questions arise: are our buildings, our money, our weddings & marriages, our parish magazine, our Mothers? Union, our bells (etc) mission-shaped?  Considering these questions means changing the shape of the Church.  More dynamic shapes are emerging to replace the static ones, which means that there is no longer one way to be church but that, in the future, there will be an infinite number of what are referred to as ?fresh expressions?.

The report ?Mission-shaped Church? lists five values of mission to go alongside five marks of mission. The marks of mission are:

1.      To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom

2.      To teach, baptise and nurture new believers

3.      To respond to human need by loving service

4.      To seek to transform unjust structures of society

5.      To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth

The five values of mission are:

1.      A missionary church is focused on God the Trinity with worship at its heart.

2.      A missionary church seeks to shape itself in relation to the culture in which it is located or to which it is called.

3.      A missionary church exists for the transformation of the community that it serves. It is not self-serving, self-seeking or self-focused.

4.      A missionary church makes disciples

5.             A missionary church is relational. It is characterized by welcome and hospitality and its ethos and style are open to change when new members join.

David Herbert