My start point here is that mission and church are intrisically linked, two sides of the same coin and I have written extensively on this over the years so hold this in mind as you read the rest of this post.

I have been thinking a lot about HOW we should approach the task of mission and church, both HOW we should approach the thinking we need to do about it and HOW to develop the practices we engage.

When we come to the subject of mission and church Our default is to ask What type questions like ‘What is church? What do we do in mission?. BUT I think we need a different start point because if we take the idea that there can we can have a fixed answer to those questions, we can never get to an answer because we close ourselves to the possibility of interruption and contextual emergence that is intrinsic to the idea of a body, a movement, a people, a bride. We immediately start to fall into same the trap that Jews did and Marks gospel for example went to lengths to avoid of having a perceived idea of a messiah so miss it when it comes. I think the same can be applied to church and mission hence the need for thinking on the HOW because the what that emerges is contextual, co-created, emergent, the signpost is not the way, the map is not territory.

Drawing from Grenz and Franke who explore a method for ‘doing’ theology in a post modern age that uses the interaction of culture, Biblical text and tradition we can note that the established idea of mission as a bridge into church holds little weight Biblically and is not consistent with the images of church offered in scripture. Secondly the missionary traditions of people such as Vincent Donovan, Christianity Rediscovered, Stanley Jones, Christ of the Indian road, and Water Buffalo Theology, written by Kosuke Koyama, all the way back to Acts 17, where Luke records Paul contextualising the gospel and using the language of the Unknown God reinforce the need to move beyond a contextualisation of the message towards a journey of discovery on both sides. Robert Schreiter sees this journey as inculturation which he describes as “the dynamic relation between the Christian message and culture or cultures; an insertion of the Christian life into a culture; an ongoing process of reciprocal and critical insertion and assimilation between them”. The emphasis being the reciprocal nature that allows the process to question our current assumptions (answers) about what church and mission is, and move us away from this to more of an emerging process. (see my last post on Habitus and mixed ecology).

Putting this kind of process approach (the how question) at the centre rather that what questions about church and mission flips the script entirely. It is a journey which fuels the individual in their understanding of God, enabling them to see the missionary endeavour as an act of worship to God, and encounter the presence of God in the whole process, which in turn brings us full circle to an understanding not of mission as a bridge into church, but church and mission as a dynamic, subversive, irritative interaction between the individual, community and Missio-Dei on a redemptive path together. Perhaps it is only without the What question that we be can led towards the future and find ourselves as co-creative participants of the way.

(for a wider read on the missional context that initially prompted this approach check out Reconnected – Releasing the missional imagination in a post modern world)