Re Mission

Paul Fromont muses on the Prodigal Kiwi blog:

If the church according to St. Paul is the "new creation"; if Lesslie Newbigin has emphatically said, “the Church is the hermeneutic of the Gospel ” and as Andrew [Perriman] writes, “The church is the medium of its message”, what is the actual on-the-ground message that the church in the West largely conveys? Or, perhaps more to the point, what are the messages (pl) the church (and churches) conveys, and to what degree are these both hermeneutically and credibly aligned to the gospel and yet also critiqued and challenged by God’s “good news” embodied and enacted in Jesus of Nazareth, by means of the filling of the Spirit…? And, for that matter, is it actually possible for the church to get out of the way of the unfolding drama of God’s purposes for all of creation?

And while we're mentioning Andrew Perriman, here's some notes about his 2007 book (which I've only just caught up on - it came out in the interim between my leaving OC Books and arriving at National Mission)

Re:Mission: Biblical Mission for a Post-Biblical Church was published by Paternoster in their ‘Faith in an Emerging Culture’ series. The book builds on the argument of The Coming of the Son of Man but broadens the scope of its historical-realist narrative to embrace an understanding of ‘mission’ that arises out of the summons to Abraham to be the progenitor of a creational microcosm, a world-within-a-world, an authentic humanity.

The green-tinged picture of an escalator on the cover alludes to Jesus’ suggestive remark to Nathanael about the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of man. To Perriman’s mind it is an image that captures marvellously the intersection of the Bible’s two defining narratives: one about the vocation of a people to recover the original blessing as God’s new creation amid the nations and cultures of the world; the other about the rescue of that people through the suffering and vindication of the Son of man and the community that associates itself with him during a period of eschatological crisis. It is out of that clash of stories that we must fashion a sense of identity and purpose for the post-Christendom era.

A coercive church

Tim Keel is currently Senior Fellow of Congregational Studies at Laidlaw College in NZ.  In a recent post on his blog, he discusses some thoughts by Lesslie Newbigin on plausibility structures.  However, the part of his post that appealed to me most (and to Paul Fromont who pointed me to it) is this:

Perhaps one of the reason so many are baffled by Newbigin's emphasis on ecclesiology (the church) is because too often the Church has either dwelled comfortably and accommodatingly in the reigning plausibility structure of the broader society, or it has sought to impose some or all of the contours of its own plausibility structure on others, absent the spirit that animates the gospel itself.

"Part of the reason for the rejection of dogma [or a Christian plausibility structure] is that it has for so long been entangled with coercion, with political power, and so with the denial of freedom - freedom of thought and conscience. When coercion of any kind is used in the interests of the Christian message, the message itself is corrupted. The truth is that it is the dogma [the content of belief] rightly understood, namely the free gift of God's grace in Jesus Christ, which alone can establish and sustain freedom of thought and of conscience. We must affirm the gospel as truth, universal truth, truth for all peoples and for all times, the truth which creates the possibility of freedom; but we negate the gospel if we deny the freedom in which alone it can be truly believed." (From The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, pg 10)  [The comments in square brackets and the italics are Keel's.]

Christ and Mission

Christology is not a sufficient foundation for mission. With Jesus alone, we see mission, but not the engaged body; love, but no community, so says Len Hjalmarson in his latest Next Reformation post.

Is he right? He certainly gives plenty of good reasons why he should be right, and brings in various heavyweights such as David Bosch, Lesslie Newbigin, David Fitch, and Charles Ringma to back him up.

Hjalmarson isn't in any way denigrating Christ - he's expanding the limited picture of mission that many of us have, one that focuses all the attention on the minister and makes him the sole 'expert' in ministry/mission; that makes individual ethics more important than communal transformation; that sees a Jesus and Me approach to the Christian life as the norm.

Check out his post for his full argument.

New Mission

“The Anabaptist writer and practitioner, Stuart Murray Williams, has been the most trenchant critic of the tendency of older church plants to copy the outward forms and style of their sending church, without asking whether the new mission context was different. This can result in failure to let the shape and form of the new church be determined by the mission context for which it was intended. The call for new kinds of churches can become subverted into the production of MORE churches.”
Pg 20, The Mission Shaped Church (various authors)

Similarly:
In The Open Secret, Lesslie Newbigin said: “the significant advances of the church have not been the result of our own decision about the mobilizing and allocating of “resources” [rather] the significant advances have come through happenings of which the story of Peter and Cornelius is a paradigm, in ways of which we have no advance knowledge.”
(both quotes courtesy of the Next Reformation blog)

ANZAMS Mini-Symposium

Mini-Symposium

Aotearoa-New Zealand Association for Mission Studies (ANZAMS)

Date & Time: 30–31 October 2009 | 1:30pm (Friday) – 3:30pm (Saturday)

Venue: Laidlaw College, Auckland Campus – 80 Central Park Drive, Henderson, Waitakere 0650

About the mini-symposium

Theme:

"From Edinburgh 1910 World Mission Conference to Edinburgh 2010 - Witnessing to Christ Today: Perspectives from Aotearoa/New Zealand"

A selection of papers will be presented which will discuss some of the themes of next year's Edinburgh 2010 centenary celebration, including:

• Metaphors of Mission in the Gospel of Matthew
• Newbigin's Trinitarian Missiology
• Missiologists as Key-holders for Theological Education Reform
• Migrant Theologies
• Christian Communities in Contemporary Contexts
• Global Christianities and Mission Studies
• History as Evangelism
• Global Christianities and Mission Studies
• Assessing the Impact of NZ Missionaries on the World Scene
• And more!!
  

Speakers

Among those presenting will be Ross Langmead (AAMS Australia), John Roxborogh, Steve Graham, Rosemary Dewerse, John Hitchen, George Wieland, Hugh Kemp and Peter Lineham.

Cost (including meals)

Prepayment: $50 (cheques payable to SGM Conference Account)

Door: $60

Accommodation
Limited accommodation may be available at Laidlaw College at extra cost.

For further information and registration, email Ian Dally, or phone +64 9 837 9758.

Newbigin on the Net

Via a blog leading to another blog leading to a link, I came across the Newbigin.net site this morning. Lesslie Newbigin is one of the best-known mission thinkers of the 20th century and we can boast a direct connection to him through one of the people working in this office. (What's that about six degrees of separation?)

Here's the information about the site:

Newbigin.Net is a dynamic searchable database concerned with the writings and life of Bishop J.E. Lesslie Newbigin. It includes both a comprehensive bibliography of his writings and a wide-ranging collection of texts written by him - over two hundred in all. It also contains some significant interactions with his thought.

Newbigin.Net provides researchers with extensive tools for the in-depth study of Newbigin's thought, including such areas as the theology of mission, ecumenism, and "Gospel and Culture".The website contains the full text of many hard-to-find or previously unpublished items.

A DVD titled "Bishop Newbigin in India" is now available. Containing 72 slides, it includes commentary by Lesslie Newbigin describing mission and ministry in the Church of South India. Produced and mastered at World Mission, Church of Scotland, from feature material assembled by Time Life Magazine about 1958. May be ordered by email from: Rev’d Murdoch Mackenzie or by snail mail from: "Torridon", 4 Ferryfield Road, Connel-by-Oban, Argyll PA37 1SR, UK.

Tom Wright on the Church

A couple of extracts from Tom Wright's address to the Fulcrum Conference Islington 2008

“… the church, in its very life as well as in what it says to communities and individuals, [is] … indeed the missionary body of Christ, the community at which the principalities and powers look and realise, perhaps with an angry shock, that Jesus is Lord and they are not; the community at which ordinary people look and realise, perhaps with an eager start, that there is after all a different way to be human and that they want to find out what makes it tick.

Let the Bible shape your eschatology; let that biblical eschatology shape your mission; and then let that eschatologically-shaped mission shape your view of the church; and you'll find that, instead of the shrill functional pragmatism of today's muddled left, insisting on breaking old rules because they're outdated, and the equally shrill and functional pragmatism of today's muddled right, insisting on keeping old rules because they're the old rules even at the cost of unity, you will have a robust, biblical, Christ-centred, Spirit-led, costly ecclesiology that will be in good shape to take forward God's mission into the next generation…

…The late, great Lesslie Newbigin was once asked whether, when he looked at the church, he was an optimist or a pessimist. I make his reply my own. I am neither an optimist, nor a pessimist: Jesus Christ is risen from the dead!”