In a Glass Darkly
The metaphor comes, I believe, from the provenance of the theater. The wax nose is useful to the actor, for it proves highly pliable so as to produce any number of visages, though under intense lighting it may start to melt a tad. In the field of ideas it is of course less flattering, for it describes terms that seem to mean something distinct, though in fact they refer, as if through the looking glass, to whatever the author wants them to. A missiologist named Rosen, in the 1960’s, used the expression to critique a new term in his field, the missio Dei, “the mission of God.” It is an appealing idea, that our missionary efforts are but following in the tracks of what God is up to, and spiritually appropriate, insofar as the initiative ought always to be His. But what Rosen observed was that, mirabile dictu, for each mission theologian, the tracks led where their own theological, social, or political predilections would have taken them. You will recall that in our last lecture we started with some general observations about the use of the idea of “incarnation.” It should give us pause to realize that missio Dei comes to mean, for some missiologists of the Episcopal Church, basically the same thing. I have in mind, for example, the use of missio Dei by Ian Douglas, a friend of many here, and prominent voice in our Church on mission-related subjects. His definition of missio is God’s embrace of the specifics of cultural settings, as evidenced in the becoming human of Jesus. It turns out then that both missiological tropes move in the same direction, namely affirmation of our cultural specifics. Along with Rosen one begins to fear that the terms, virtually interchangeable, are vehicles to a pre-determined goal.
A not-so-distant mirror is informative. In the later 1950’s and early 1960’s, the term missio Dei first came into vogue, born out of the reflections around the mission conference in Willingen, Germany. No less a figure than Karl Barth stood in the background of the new usage, and one of its most passionate advocates was Lesslie Newbigin. But soon it was co-opted as the slogan of the movement favoring the radical secularization of the Church. For thinkers like Hans Hoedendjik, author of The Church Inside Out, it was a new era in which technological changes meant that all the cultural bets were off and the old ways of doing Church passé. No more emphasis on sterile doctrine, but rather something more relational. No more liturgies and buildings, but what he called mobile diaconal units. The Church needed to be attuned to the movements of God’s Spirit in the world and in the culture. For Hoedendjik and company the less related to the work of the Church per se the better! I hope this is starting to sound eerily familiar. Plus sa change…By the end of the decade Newbigin and others had become the avowed foes of the secularized Church, and so jaundiced about missio Dei.
With this cautionary tale in mind, consider here at the outset of our reflection a representative selection of recent Anglican schools of thought on mission: the fresh expressions movement in England, the North American total ministry movement, from the left the via media movement (whose purported goal is to renew evangelism in ECUSA), the Alban Institute, and the influence of the megachurches. If you read their web profiles, one way or another, each of those movements makes an appeal to the idea God’s mission, though what they reckon the content of that mission to be differs.
The Fresh Expressions movement is the contemporary effort in the Church of England to encourage growth, building as it does on the church-plant movement. For the most part is a serious attempt to come to terms with the reality of the utterly unchurched nature of nearly half the British population and the indifference of another quarter (what is called the ‘post-Christendom’ factor) as well as the shift away from geographic affiliations and toward what they call “networking”, not to mention the legal constraints of the C. of E. parochial system. A myriad of responses follows: cell church, café church, net church, reboot church, base church, youth church, and on and on.
Total ministry has its roots originally in the thinking of that Anglo-Catholic missionary prophet and eccentric of the first half of the 20th century, Roland Allen. He reread his Paul, borrowed the essential points of Henry Venn, and applied the idea of the independence of younger churches from the oversight of the missionaries with a single-minded zeal. The movement in ECUSA began in native contexts, but has spread to isolated rural parishes and beyond, and it now emphasizes locally raised-up clergy and the discernment of all the gifts necessary from within the local congregation.
Via Media in its notoriety needs little introduction, my point here being only that they would offer their political progressivist agenda as a means to draw people to the Episcopal Church. Their catechetical materials present, as far as I can see, a new version of a Tillichian-style correlation of doctrinal themes with cultural answers, a strategy that has governed the Episcopal Church for several generations, the new element being the greater emphasis on inclusion. (Of course the evidence for the success of this method is generally bleak).
The Alban Institute has over many years made contributions in a wide variety of specific areas of parish life: how to cope with burn-out (they virtually invented it), how to make a transition to a new pastor, how to welcome newcomers better, and so forth. Loren Mead’s influential The Once and Future Church waded into the theoretical realm more in his case for a “paradigm shift” from Christendom to post-Christendom, and so from ubiquitous “maintenance” to “mission.” What is less clear is what the content of the latter should, or even the extent to which that decision matters to the aforementioned shift. For Mead, as for a number of contemporary authors, “mission” carries only a qualified continuity with explicitly missionary efforts of the past, or with the effort to evangelize so that others might accept Christ as Lord. For the most part the word denotes the movement of the parish outward into the community, and a clear sense of focus about its purpose in so doing. So it seems ironic that one comes away with so little idea of what this purpose might, in specific content, be.
The megachurch movement is explicit in some more evangelical parishes, where “40 days of purpose” may be used, and in the more extreme cases, the Hawaiian shirt replace the collar, but the influence is far wider. The concept of the Seeker-friendly service has seeped into many Anglican parishes, most of which had no need to learn to soft-pedal exegetical sermons, since we were there already! Intentionality about growth and segmentation of the neighborhood market so as to meet pastoral needs on the other hand were probably new skills in many places that have borrowed from the movement.
Most of the efforts I have briefly described are sincere and at times promising efforts to revitalize the work of the Church in our present situation. My purpose is not to cast aspersions, but simply to point out that these efforts are so different in ideology and approach as to make their common appeal to an idea like missio Dei virtually meaningless. Another way to say is the following: if one were to ask, absent that phrase, what they all actually do think that mission is, you would receive back quite differing answers. Is it alignment with a progressive agenda? Or adaptation to contemporary cultural trends for the sake of the unchurched? Or the cultivation of a community life in contradistinction to those trends? Or the increasing involvement of lay people in leadership in general, or in the welcome of the unchurched in particular? In all likelihood no one answer is correct, and a number of these may be pertinent. But this does not take us closer to a way to understand how mission does, and should work. At a more general level, according to our cursory survey, “mission” would seem in some cases to mean a clearer focus on the community’s goal, in others attention to cultural trends, in others an outward thrust to Church activity, in others that thrust with an emphasis on witnessing for conversions. Some combine various of the above-listed. But does the exercise take us closer to understanding the missionary enterprise per se?
Where then are we to find a more helpful view of the missionary enterprise, one less pre-determined by other agendas? Missiology at its best has been a discipline which, while firmed rooted in the study of Scripture and doctrine, has been willing to trouble itself with looking at what actually happened on the ground. While the Bible gives us the mandate for mission, the great commission, we need to pay attention to the surprises that take place when people actually cross boundaries and proclaim the message in other cultures. In this endeavor the conversation partner has been the social sciences. To be sure, we would err to suppose that sociology could ever tell us why we should evangelize, or the goal toward which we aim to lead souls. But it can help to cut through the cant and the agitprop that clogs up every age. And in telling us what has succeeded and why, it can contribute, not to the why, but to the how of mission. It is when the normative vision of mission from theology and the social-scientifically enhanced descriptive reality of the history of mission meet one another that the discipline has proved most enlightening.
It should be no great surprise, then, that one of the most insightful accounts of the dynamics of a successful missionary effort has been offered by a noted British sociologist (who happens to be a traditional Anglican), David Martin. I want to give you a synopsis of his argument in a book that appeared a decade and a half ago, called Tongues of Fire, which dealt with the dramatic growth of thePentecostal Church in Latin America. And then I want to tease out of that account a more general theory of how mission tends actually to work.
It is easy to dismiss Latin American Pentecostals, seemingly displaying some of the more unattractive features of commercialized American evangelical missions: they are theologically unsophisticated, shy away from political engagement even in repressive contexts, and retain a male-centered style of leadership. But Martin bids his readers look more closely. Immigrants to the cities found the warmth of their clans, and the vivid social life of the fiesta, but in a new community that made possible new aspirations. Their tongues were loosed, and their diseases cured, and the story they had heard in the village Catholic Church became their own. They learned virtues of gentleness and mutuality in the home, so that a whole new style of maleness emerged, the real liberationist revolution, while under the banner still of headship. All this could only happen in peaceable enclaves within the cracks of the old society with it authoritarian solidarities of church and state. In these enclaves a new way of living according to the Gospel could be imagined, and space could be found for it to germinate. Only later would this new life be let loose on the larger society for its gradual transformation.
Martin then makes an important move, for he cites historical precedents Was it not so with the monasteries in the early medieval period, or with the communities of the devotion moderna in the late middle ages leading to the reformation, or of the quakers with their Christian dreams of abolition and suffrage? Did they not first grow as cells in the social worlds broken apart by the end of an epoch, or by the fragmentation of te modern age?
We can listen to Martin in his own words as he describes what I would call the dense encrypting of the Christian belief and way. He then describes its dispersal into society in general, in what he entitles the summary of his argument the “peaceable operation of cultural logic”: :”primitive Christianity itself began as a movement active solely at the level of culture, and in this respect, as in many others, evangelical Christianity represents a return to this primitive condition. The contemporary evangelical in Latin America has walked out of the extant structures and devised an experimental capsule or cell in the interstices of culture. Here he may reinvent himself in an atmosphere of fraternal support and give ‘tongue’ to his frustrations and aspirations.’’’[and later in his summary he replies to those who might suggest that such capsules can have no effect on the wider society] the reverse may be true. Induction into new worlds and socialization into symbolic reversals may in time become diffused into whole populations…a mutation in self-consciousness or skills in public address and organization may be transferred into any other sphere whatsoever…[for] they are protean in their potential.” (pp. 286, 288)
Exhibit A, significantly for our purposes, since we mean to work our way toward the question of Anglican missions, is, for Martin, John Wesley and the Methodists. He and his movement are the prime case of adaptation of Christianity to the modern world, the breaking up of the old solidarities, with new pietist cells gathering their strength in the interstices and then spreading forth both in mission and in social reformism. Those Brazilian Pentecostals are but the next wave of a similar kind of phenomenon to the Methodists, and so rank, in Martin’s eyes, as Wesley’s grandchildren.
While Martin is describing but one case, he sees it as exemplary of a wider pattern. I want to take his extrapolation a step further, and argue that effective Christian mission tends to exhibit stages in line with what Martin describes in Brazil. We may speak of two stages. First of all, a community must grow up within whose confines the Christian faith and life can be built up with a certain intensity and clarity. In this age of ours of viral worries, an image from virology comes to mind. Within the cell walls, information is densely encrypted. Catechesis and liturgy are such encryptments, as are rigorous practices of devotion, or the recounting of martyrologies or the communal endurance of hardship. Within the walls, the density of meaning and the intensity of feeling reach a level of combustion by which the Christian community which can become a herald of the Gospel, though first it must have this space to itself, and so these communities often begin their life tucked away in the interstices of larger societal structures, in the cracks or fissures that Martin describes.
If we may continue our viral trajectory, the second phase involves both introjection of these cells into the larger body politic, and then replication of communities and practices. With the latter come diffusion of influence and conversion more widely in society. Of course our attempt to find a common pattern must proceed with modesty, since conversion takes place in a thousand different forms and patterns. Painting with so broad a brush cannot give a precise image. Still, we can in general conclude that the original cell often creates a counterpart in the new territory, one in which the missionaries seek to inculcate their own density of belief and piety. If we return to the material we covered in lecture 1, see the value of the much-maligned mission station, where a fledgling new Christian life could be sheltered and intensified in a small space. John Karanja has described how the first generation of Kenyan converts would flee to the mission station to avoid an odious planned marriage or other social or spiritual confinements. And in those new physical confines they learned the Christian faith, and so were enabled to return to their villages for events like circumcisions and witness to their faith as they declared what their new commitments did and did not allow them to take part in.
We should note the obvious, that the creation of a new cell from the old is not itself enough, that the mission must proceed to the second stage. A classic example of failure so to proceed may be seen in the ancient Thomas Christians of Malabar, in southwest India, who formed a tight-knit communion in imitation of the Syrian missionary predecessors, and succeeded in adapting to their native Hindu surroundings. But they succeeded too well, and came to be seen, and to an extent to see themselves, as but one more caste in the Hindu social system, and so became encased within their own cell wall. It was to this situation that the Anglican missionaries tried to minister in the 19th Century when they tried to re-evangelize the Mar Thoma Church, an effort that resulted, contrary to their hopes, in several splits and in an Anglicanized Mar Thoma body. The were a Church whose undoing was too thorough an inculturation, with no capacity to replicate and diffuse.
Once the cell has formed itself anew, it must be replicated and so its influence disseminated in the new situation in ways multifarious and unpredictable. One may, for example, think of the congregational missionaries in Tahiti, or the Anglicans in rural India, who as good evangelicals hoped and worked for the devout conversions of individuals, and what they got was a theocracy on the one hand, and tribal mass conversions on the other, both cases proving the sense of humor of the Holy Spirit. The intrusion of a new faith in an existing cultural system is not easy. And so there are some predictable kinds of a events which create openings, fissures, spaces. Here again we can take advantage of some of the observations in our first lecture about the reasons for the rise of the Christian faith in Africa: believers who live between cultures, the dislocations of the mfecane, the search for new social forms to meet old needs in such situations etc. These all amount to the fissures and resulting spaces in which the new cells could, and dramatically did, lodge and grow. .
A listener might retort that we have said nothing more than that we must learn the faith, go to others to tell them, and then help them to lead new and Christian lives. The trouble comes, perhaps, because we tend to think of this process in ways that are on the one hand too small, and on the other too grand. We think either of individuals sharing the faith, and so they must, or we talk of transforming cultures, and so we as Anglicans have hoped to do. But our model emphasizes that in the history of missions it has been specific, intermediate-sized communities, attaining a certain degree of intensity and so combustibility, which have been the precondition for effective evangelization. In some cases these have been the younger churches, ancient or modern, themselves. In other cases our argument crosses paths with our first lecture, especially with respect to the kinds of intermediate institutions which are apt instruments of dense encryptment: Catholic orders, pietistic ecclesiolae, sodalities, cohesive classes of converts like the young courtiers of Buganda, mission societies, Methodist class meetings, cursillo, or in the case of Brazil, independent churches. In the Anglican orbit specifically, one may point to the replication of a sodality in the propagation and growth of the Mother’s Union, recently called the “fourth instrument of unity” by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was born in the zeal of English evangelicalism, and fostered by Victorian enthusiasm for voluntary societies, but it has gained a yet greater prominence and clout in Africa, the wife of bishops, also heads of the MU, serves as essentially second bishops. Or one may point to a replication that creates something new. The best example is the Melanesian Brotherhood, mirroring in its lay vows the monastic tradition of the Anglo-Catholic missionaries. It provided outrigger evangelism and island parish leadership for generations.
In each case the group in question attained within itself the critical mass of belief and piety to make the dispersal possible. By contrast the early decision of the American Episcopal Church to move away from sodalities and to declare itself in toto a missionary society, however laudable in theory, seems to have sowed the seeds of later problems. In recent years our common life has been characterized by just the kind of thinning out catechetically, in practices, and ethically, which make missionary energy less likely. So should be no surprise that talk about the decade of evangelism has in most places (Texas being a notable exception) has served as a substitute for the real thing. Only with this density do we find communities with the passion to share an urgent message, and a message in turn that has the distinctiveness to matter as a life-or-death matter to its hearers. Only members of communities with the requisite density can live amidst the contrary commitments of the larger society so as to maintain their bearings and even negotiate appropriated adapted forms of expression of the faith.
How then do the distinctive features of Anglicanism contribute to mission, so understood? Note that I didn’t say “unique features,” for all these features are shared with other traditions. But taken together they do provide a distinctive profile. First, our account allows us to look at the history of the English Church afresh. The early missionary activities, both Celtic and Roman, had the density of the religious order. Anglican history, from the Reformation on into the modern period, has had this as its pre-history, gone except in the sanctoral and in architectural remains. The system we have was developed over centuries to tasks of replication and diffusion. This is particularly true of the first distinctive feature I want to focus on, the ideal of the formation of a Christian nation through parish pastoral care and the round of Prayer Book services. Only in the 18th and 19th centuries, with the seeming exhaustion of that effort, do we see a second wave of encryptment, in renewal movements evangelical and catholic, and in the mission societies they spawned. Our theory helps to understand why this era of mission societies was so successful. We can also see how particularly easy it is for Anglicans to overlook the first stage, to suppose it not to be necessary, to assume that only the slow and uneven formation that is ordinary parish life, with intermittent surges of individual witness, to suffice. It is as if, missiologically, part of our history is submerged. Now this distinctive of the national church was for the most part shucked off by the younger churches throughout the 19thand early 20th centuries, and its loss is a decisive factor in the history of North American Anglicanism. But the idea has also proved to a powerful spur to the imaginations of the younger Churches, and increased the breadth of evangelistic aim and of social and political involvement of these Churches.
Closely connected to this first distinctive, the national Church, are two more, the use of the vernacular (3rd) and the forming and binding effect of the Book of Common Prayer (4th). The former is simply assumed, though its fundamental importance in the worldwide mission to the Gentiles has only recently been shown, most powerfully by Lamin Sanneh. It is ensconced in the Articles of Religion themselves: “it is a thing plainly repugnant to the Word of God, and the custom of the primitive Church, to have public prayer in the Church or to minister the sacraments in a tongue not understanded by the people (Article 24).” In Anglicanism this locally specific translation principle was balanced, not only by the canon of Scripture, but also by the Prayer Book. The densest of encryptments of the tradition, and yet accessible to the whole laity, the Prayer Book provided a means for a coherent Christian life forEngland. And it has served a similar function in the communion as a whole. Its translation has served to develop local languages and to provide within them Christian vocabularies. Prayer Book Swahili has the same gravitas and cadence that Shakespearean English has! It was a means to replicate catholically reformed Christian communities in a vast array of cultural settings, and yet allow an international visitor to understand the liturgical medium, if not the language, immediately. In east Africa at least, it does not stifle enormous musical and devotional creativity, but rather provides the traditional framework for the former to flourish.
The fourth distinctive is perhaps the most obvious, the episcopacy itself. Here we need to distinguish between the ways in which bishops have related to Anglican missionary activities, and the ways we imagine they could or should. In the case of the CMS, as with the Methodists, the bishops were at first a positive hindrance, though the founders insisted, as we have seen, that they be included. And yet once the 19th century missionary movement came into full swing, it was soon seen how crucial the bishop’s role was. Yet even within this consensus there was a disagreement. Anglo-Catholics emphasized the missionary bishop, leading from the front in breaking new ground, and insuring that the church that was planted was truly apostolic. Evangelicals
preferred a native bishop who would be selected locally after the Church had been planted. They feared that the missionary bishop would come eventually to dominate so delay the extrication of the mission society from the scene. A dramatic case of counter evidence to this worry was surely Jackson Kemper, patron saint of our friends at Nashotah House. He surely did exercise a ministry as missionary bishop that served as exemplary for the practice of evangelism and church planting. The other example in which the episcopate per se was envisioned to have a missiologically definitive role was that of Maoriland. There a deliberately ethnic episcopate was eventually created on a non-territorial basis, though its emergence only followed the deliberate neglect of early CMS missionary foundations on the part of the more catholic bishop. What then are we to make of the inherently missionary potential of the episcopate, particularly for Anglicans? Certainly they should have such a role, given that they are traditionally entrusted with the task of making sure that the faith is passed on. Still the encrypting we have described often has taken place in societies themselves in the interstices or margins of the structure of the Church. Perhaps we can say the special ministry of the bishop is to encourage, and at the least to remove obstacles, to appropriate voluntary societies and ministries. But we can go further, for the conflict between the ideal of the native and the missionary bishop was specific to that moment of transition from the mission society to the native church. In our time, when the episcopates of all the third world churches are native, we see the convergence of the two: now the bishop is at once the native, embodying the catholic faith in the locale, and the missionary, displaying a zeal for proclaiming the news to those who have not heard. Bishops living this out are liable to be found in contexts which have evidenced the kind of the encryptment we have described. In such cases, the bishop can be precisely what the ordained are supposed to be, embodied sacramental signs of an essential dimension of the Church as a whole, in this case its proclamatory nature. For a Church catholic in its sacramental structure like Anglicanism, this is the manner in which mission can become “built-in” and not optional, but again this only is liable to actually be the case where the requisite density of faith and practice are found.
Anglican mission so described, then, has a great deal to do with mission societies. The features that most distinguish us as Anglicans, the Prayer Book tradition and the episcopacy, contribute both to what I have called encryptment as well as replication and diffusion. From the vantage point we have achieved thus far, what can we now say about the views of Anglican mission we surveyed at the opening of this hour? First, look beyond the words that are used to talk about mission in our Church, to see the kind of community and ethos out of which the words are spoken. Many of the ideas espoused in the Church of England’s Fresh Expressions may blow away with the next wind. But the initiative as a whole will have an impact, because it has roots in the larger evangelical movement in England since the late 1060’s. It emerges out of a social world marked by a thicker encrypting of the faith, embodied in a culture of prayer groups, renewed mission societies, friends in vibrant younger Churches, strong theological college programs, and so forth. Such a wider movement is also marked by a long-standing commitment to evangelism grounded in a doctrine of salvation. By contrast, no such grounding doctrinally or practically may be found in something like Via Media, and such mission talk leads to no discernible or long-term activity. At the surface the case of total ministry is more complicated, for one distinctive of evangelicalism in general and its Anglican version in particular has been the emphasis on mission by as wide a segment of the laity as possible. But, again, the espoused role for laity cannot be separated from the doctrinal commitments of those evangelicals, their urgency about bringing the Gospel to people in Lagos or London who were perishing without Christ, an urgency which followed their theology. Without this prior matrix of doctrine and practice, total ministry might become a technique, and as such be able at best to delay church decline. A similarly,the diagnostic insight from the Alban Institute about the post-Christian plight of the Church is accurate enough, but its call for Church transformed toward “mission” gives no indication of what the content of that mission should be, nor any ready means for a Church capable of a dense encryptment. So, contemporary accounts of Anglican mission may well highlight a valuable dimension of mission, lay involvement, experimental approaches among the unchurched (as in the case of fresh expressions), etc. Our perspective on mission provides the conditions under which such proposals have an opportunity to flourish.
At the conclusion of this essay, I wan to consider two implications of this way of looking at the missionary enterprise. In an essay on an Anglican view of evangelism, Bishop Stephen Sykes, yet another friend of SEAD/ACI, proposed a doxological and liturgical approach: mission is to advance the praise of God. He cites William Abraham’s work on The Logic of Evangelism, which moved in a similar direction by restoring questions about evangelism to the framework of the ancient baptismal process. Obviously this converges with interest in the baptismal covenant and the rediscovery of catechesis). We have voiced doubt about the helpfulness of invoking major doctrines like the incarnation or the missions of the triune God in the service of missiological understanding. Just as we saw that the catholicity of the Church was a handier tool to think about mission than “incarnation,” so the baptism process has more to offer than something higher-flying like the missio Dei. We have in mind here the whole baptismal process: evangelistic contact, inquirers’ stage, catechesis, moral formation, creedal traditio, confession of the faith, the waters, and sealing with the Spirit, mystagogy, and finally evangelism. This framework does not settle matters; but it houses an on-going struggle in the Church about conversion, especially in a Church like ours committed to infant baptism. What are the stages of conversion and in what ways does it comprise conscious assent and spiritual transformation? This question was central to the Reformation, the evangelical movement, and the charismatic renewal of our time. It provides the framework in which the Church acts out, in corporate terms, the tension between the conversion that is the catholic practice of baptism, and assurance and evangelical assurance, which are properly aspects of initiation into Christ. Similarly, the tension between the whole Church and the renewed sodality can be comprised by the baptismal process. It provides a convenient coat-rack for emphases sometimes set one against the other: evangelization, works of social concern, doctrinal assent. Finally it provides the necessary context for sound talk about context. The apologetic word must be adapted to the hearer and his or her world, but it is uttered on the way to the catechesis within the community and forms the believer’s thinking according to the rule of faith. Evangelism may indeed be context-specific, but it is a stage on the way to assent to the one, catholic, and apostolic faith. So any attempts to softpedal doctrinal questions with a move to mission will not suffice; in this framework they belong inextricably together. General rumination in the Church about unity and diversity either makes sense in this framework or it makes no sense at all.
Recently, knowing that these lectures loomed, I asked the Dean of the Cathedral in Dallas, Kevin Martin, a person who knows a thing or two about evangelism, what was particular about Anglican mission. He made a strong case that Anglicans have always insisted on engagement with the culture. This goes back in our history to being an established, national Church praying in the vernacular. It was, you will recall, the pinnacle of relations between Christ and culture, according to H. Richard Niebuhr in the book we were all bottle-fed in seminary, in which the hero was F.D.Maurice and the type of Christ-transforming-culture, and through him much of modern western Anglicanism. Its’ advocates would claim it is a valued part of what it means to say that we are an “incarnational Church”, a phrase we have been worrying over. This claim has been the occasion for pretension and self-deception in recent times, as Martin would be quick to admit. But it is worth holding on to, for all the trouble it has caused us, for through it, our struggles to remain part of the Church catholic take on wider significance.
So, secondly, we can at this our conclusion ask ourselves what our thesis adds to an answer about what it could mean, truly and soundly, to be an “incarnational” tradition, to engage culture, to be an exemplar of Niebuhr’s Christ-transforming-culture. What can we redeem of this Anglican missiological self-understanding? The argument in these two lectures amounts to a series of conditions for the valid use of this claim. What are the other things that must be true, or must be present, if we are to claim this about ourselves? Contextuality is something you could claim about, or strive for, in a Church that had a strong and clear sense of its catholicity. It is in fact the plasticity of the Church catholic. Without this prior, though perhaps implicit, understanding, the concept ends up as an unreflective cultural rubber-stamp. Entailed in this theology of the Church catholic is the tradition of being constrained as churches and as a communion. “Contextuality” also leaves open the question of “how.” The answer usually involves the density of faith and intensity of zeal in missionary sodalities. Contemporary missiontalk, far from being an escape from the issues we as Anglicans are so painfully trying to sort out, or the responsibilities of overseas sending and evangelism we as a Church have avoided in recent years, sends us back into these frays with renewed urgency.
This lecture has aimed at some analysis rather than practical prescription, but before I close I do owe you some sense, if only through a glass darkly, of what we should be moving toward. Authentically Anglican mission will be found where an evangelical identity, generously understood, remembers that it is ecclesially constrained, and where the place of societies of renewal within the wider church is recognized. A vigorous mission will be found where a traditional sense of doctrine and practice provides the dense encryptment required. Such mission will be enhanced where the distinctives, and in particular the episcopate, become exemplars and encouragements for the replication and diffusion of cells of new Christian life. Two centuries ago, the men and women who founded the CMS knew they lived in a moribund Church, nor did they suppose their efforts could retrieve their Church. They exerted themselves to form a society to spread the Gospel for they were compelled by Christ so to do. Along the way, the Holy Spirit changed the Anglican Church as they never could have imagined, and its fruit we see in the vitality of our global communion. May it be so for us, and to our surprise as well.
