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From
Bishop John
An address by John Harrower to the Living Stones Network National Conference, Hobart, 25-29 August 2005
presented 25 August 2005
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Mission-Shaped Church:
A New Context for the Network
An extraordinary impact
The Mission-shaped Church Report of the Church of England has made an extraordinary impact since its release in 2004 on the Anglican Church of Australia. Church Army leader, George Lings, and the Report's Chairman, Bishop Graham Cray, have visited Australia and presented both the statistical findings and the stories of Anglicans at mission in England. This has been of great encouragement and challenge to Australian Anglicans.
Mission-shaped Church: church planting and fresh expressions of church in a changing context describes
- how society is changing
- twelve different kinds of fresh expressions of church, and
- challenges the whole church to turn outwards in mission because of God's call to be mission-shaped.
Mission-shaped Church challenges the church to shift resources towards fresh expressions of church alongside the parish system.
What might this mean for the Living Stones Network? - Have we been bypassed?
The Living Stones Partnership
May I remind you of the key elements in the document produced by the Bishops who initiated The Living Stones Partnership in Australia?
We affirm that as baptised Christians we are all charged with serving God in response to the Biblical imperative of mission by using the gifts and skills God has given us. This means identifiying and carrying out our ministeries as the People of God in the midst of our daily lives.
The vision for mission and ministry to which the Partnership is committed has been known by a diversity of names including ministering communities, collaborative ministry, local ministry, total ministry, mutual ministry and shared ministry. We prefer to use the expression 'ministering communities'.
The Living Stones Parnership exists to help Anglican congregations to become ministering communities. This involves assisting Anglicans to identify their gifts and use them in ministry in their congregations and in God's mission in wider communities. The desired outcomes will reflect the personality and needs of each diocese and local context.
The Living Stones Partnership is open to Bishops, Clergy, Lay People, MDOs and enablers and others who share the Partnership's purposes of implementing the vision in their own spheres of ministry and mission. Preferably the Partnership will increasingly be between teams from a Diocese or Region reflecting the diverse makeup of the ministering communities.
The Partnership affirms the following principles:
- That change is needed to the received model of church and ministry which has presented the view of the full-time priest as the 'professional Christian' and the people as consumers of religion.
- That all Chrisian Ministry is rooted in the Biblical imperative of mission, and in Christian Baptism.
- The recognition of a variety of ministries, including locally formed and licensed priests and deacons.
- The importance of a covenant of learning which provides for initial education and training, as well as continuing education.
Commitments
The Partners are committed:
- to mutual support, sharing and stimulation, critque, Biblical and theological reflection and to encourage new ways of engaging in ministry
- to pray for each other, communicate with each other and serve as resources for one another in ministry development
- to meet annually to share their work and learning, and to rededicate themselves to the purposes and commitments of the parnership
- to offer innovative thinking for leadership and organisational structures that encourage ministering commnunities appropriate in each diocese
- to use processes to discern the giftedness for ministry of the whole people of God
- to offer appropriate training for these emerging forms of leadership and organisation
- to nurture and support the whole people of God in mission and ministry in daily life.
Some reflections
- When we examine these guidelines we are in fact ahead of the Report! This network is a fresh expression of church - and we began before the 2004 Report.
- The Mission-shaped Church gives us great credibility. Mission is now on the agenda. Missiology is at the heart of this report and it is at the heart of the Living Stones Network. In Perth last year we agreed to call our approach, 'ministering communities in mission'. Mission-shaped Church gives us permission to talk, do and share missiology. Let's continue to do so with even greater confidence and enthusiasm.
- The Living Stones Network meets the three most common criticisms directed at the Mission-shaped Church Report. These criticisms being a) it is not sufficiently sacramental, b) it does not develop and integrate ecclesiology and missiology, and c) it does not give practical 'how to' in order to become a mission-shaped church. Let us consider these crticisms of Mission-shaped Church one at a time.
- The Living Stones Network affirms the sacramental nature of the Church in initiation and nurture. Through extensive local and diocesan discernment processes people are called and ordained as priests so that the ministry of word and sacrament are an integral part of the life of the Christian community.
- The Living Stones Network works hard at both ecclesiology and missiology. The ministering communities in mission model has a wholistic understanding of the Holy Spirit's work in calling the people of God, so forming the Church, and then sending these same ones who have been baptized into Christ into the world; that they may be Christ in the world. At a pragmatic level this may be seen in the emphasis on valuing both the established congregation from which the ministering community emerges and the new emerging ministering community itself. The old is held in love as it is being born into the new. At a diocesan level we also affirm both the established parishes and the ministering community parishes.
- The Living Stones Network trains and encourages through the teaching ministry of the enabling priests and diocesan training events the exchange of mission ideas; the practice, the 'how to' of being at mission. The action/reflection model of learning through the worshipping life of a ministering community in mission is very powerful.
Two challenges for us
To keep mission-shaped. It is all too easy once the early enthusiasm of the ministering communities has waned for them to fall into the inward looking ways of a 'club' that exists merely to themselves and for their self-support.
In an article entitled, 'Fresh expressions or just fresh packaging' (The Record, Friday May 27 2005, pp.9,10) George Lings warns us to be actually doing mission, to avoid domesticating our pioneers, and here I think especially of the prophets and evangelists among us, and to be alert to changing our language but failing to change the substance of our outreach. He sees 'a serious danger that churches are opting to become a bit more mission flavoured. That won't change the gap to the non-churched; it won't bring mission into the DNA of the church.'
Lings believes 'the shifts of instinct needed (to be a mission-shaped church) are significant (and largely absent):
- from working only to modify existing church, to deliberately creating what is different
- from adding numbers to an existing church, to multiplying the number of churches
- from monopoly into diversity, not just more of the same, allowing the creation of church among those who don't find the way we do church helpful.'
He finishes his warning with the reminder that all mission is based on the principle of dying to self in order that Christ's life might burst forth both in ourselves and in others.
This poses the question for each of us: What existing forms of being church am I prepared to give up for the sake of others experiencing God's love in Christ?
The Anglican Consultative Council's 5 Marks of Mission have been given a wonderful 'airing' by the Mission-shaped Church report and we do well to keep them before us.
- to proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God
- to teach, baptize and nurture new believers
- to respond to human need by loving service
- to seek to transform unjust structures of society
- to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the earth.
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To articulate our values. The Mission-shaped Church raises the issue of 'Values' and
sets out 5 Values for a Missionary Church:
- A missionary church is focused on God the Trinity
- A missionary church is incarnational
- A missionary church is transformational
- A missionary church makes disciples
- A missionary church is relational
What are the values of the Living Stones Network?
As a starting point could we simply adopt these values? Or should we be starting somewhere else? What values are already embodied in our principles?
These two challenges arise from this outstanding work, Mission-shaped Church: a wonderful gift to us from the Church of England. I am sure it will bring us more healthy challenges.
May God continue to guide, guard and bless our ministering communities in mission; God's living stones.
Shalom
See further information about this model of ministry.
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