Where Everybody's Crazy

I was asked recently by the editor of our in-house magazine to come up with something controversial for him to print. Well, he didn't use those exact words, but the implication was very much there. And he pointed out a phrase I used a while back about church planting, and wondered if I could expand upon it. Here we go.

Our mission, WEC, defines itself as a church planting mission. Our strapline is "reaching people - planting churches". I was present at the UK field meeting when we decided on our UK strapline, because "church planting" has a different connotation where I come from. I met someone on a bus in Oxford who had come from a certain denomination to "plant a church" in Oxford. I told him that we already had more than fifty, most of which were growing and serving the community well, but that wasn't what he was interested in. We didn't have a church from his denomination, so he came to plant one. "Church planting" in UK parlance can look very similar to ecclesiastical colonialism. I will come back to this idea later.

So anyway, at the UK meeting, we ended up after a fairly laboured process with the strapline "planting where there is no church", which avoids the unfortunate juxtaposition of those two words. I noticed, though, at the meeting, that many people did not understand the point of a strapline.

A strapline is not meant to be true. The idea that WEC is "planting where there is no church" is, well... Here's a chart which shows the correlation between the number of WEC workers in a country (from our communication directory) and the percentage of Christians there (using the methodology and figures found in Operation World).

Do you see how, as the number of workers increases, the pink bar gently falls? No, neither do I.

Anyway, that's OK, because straplines aren't meant to be true. They're just for advertising. We say that we're reaching people and planting churches, but in reality, WEC has more people primarily involved in medicine and teaching - activities which are explicitly considered secondary by our constitution - than the 16% of WEC missionaries who are primarily involved in pioneer church planting. (These numbers come from our communications directory.)

The point of straplines is that they represent the vision and hope of the organisation. They reflect what we're aiming at. We're not a church planting mission by any means, but we do want to be.

But sometimes I wonder why. I am sure that some people will consider "church planting" to be the "Biblical mandate". Now the Bible is a fairly big book and if you look hard enough you can find a mandate for anything, but I think that in this case, they are mistaken. We have a mandate to make disciples, a mandate to baptise in the name of the triune God, to be witnesses to the ends of the earth, to preach the good news to all creation, to heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the leper and drive out demons. Plenty, I feel, to be going on with for the moment, without any need to make up other work for ourselves. But if you want a mandate to plant churches, you will have to find it from someone other than Jesus Christ - and I'm not convinced that that is a very good idea for anyone who considers themselves to be his follower.

It is true, of course, that Jesus does talk about the "church". He mentions the word all of twice - once when he talks about how Peter will be the rock on which it will be built, and that gets pretty Catholic pretty fast so we try to ignore that one, and once when the NIV spectacularly badly translates "ekklesia" as "church" rather than the obvious contextual meaning of "town assembly". (cf. Kittel & Bromiley, TNDT, p.400.) Jesus concern, and his mandate, was that of disciple-making. The church was what happened as a result.

Why is this distinction important? I leave the explanation to Bosch: (Transforming Mission, p.332.)

The medieval missionary policy of plantatio ecclesiae had still operated on the assumption that one day, all the world would be put under the sway of the church. By the middle of the nineteenth century such an ideal was no longer deemed possible, at least not in Protestant circles... So the Protestant variant of plantatio ecclesiae was the carving out of small, exclusive "territories" of Anglicanism, Presbyterianism, Lutheranism and the like. The "advance of the gospel" was measured by counting tangible things such as the number of baptisms, confessions, and communions, and the opening of new mission stations or outputs. The church had, in a sense, ceased to point to God or to the future; instead, it was pointing to itself. Mission was the road from the institutional church to the church that had still to be instituted... The relationship of these churches to society and to the wider ecumenical and eschatological horizons was largely ignored.

Anyone can plant an empty church. Anyone can plant a social club which meets on a Sunday and sings some songs - and then write back in their newsletter having justified their continued existence. The success of a "church planting mission" like WEC directly depends on the number of churches it plants - a recipe, if ever I saw one, for the kind of base ecclesiastical colonialism we saw in my young friend from Oxford.

But how all this church planting relates to the Kingdom of God is unclear. Indeed

questions were seldom asked at this time about the relationship of this churches to the kingdom of God. Their very existence appeared to be its own justification and no further discussion of mission goals was required. (Scherer, Gospel, Church and Kingdom, p.77.)

The church is not the goal. The Kingdom of God, in all its various and unfathomable richness of manifestations, is the goal. The church is purely the community of those who live in the Kingdom of God.

If you think you can "plant" a church, then your understanding of church is way too small.

490 years ago day, a church which was already split into two became split into three and thence into thousands. People want to celebrate this? The effort to reform the church failed, and admitted its failure by crawling away and creating a little sub-church of its own. I shall "celebrate" Reformation Day by rereading Christ Is Our Peace:

And then there was the Reformation, and the Church was divided into the three; Western church, Eastern church, Protestant church. The Reformers didn't want to bring the Church into schism; they wanted to reform the church itself. But they couldn't do that. Other than starting up their own churches, they couldn't find a way to express their faith, and so, in weeping and mourning, they left the church that had been one, and started their own churches.

But then there were so many divisions in the church that the church fell into complete division. The Reformers wanted to bring the Church back to what it was, but instead they ended up magnifying the divisions inside the church. According to a survey, there are currently 20,000 Protestant denominations alone. 20,000 denominations.

Church planting is not the Biblical imperative. Disciple making is the Biblical imperative.

Forget that and you end up in the numbers game.

While I'm being contentious, here's something I've been thinking about for a couple of days as a result of a Usenet discussion. What is a Christian? I've come to believe that's actually the wrong question. It is, to be sure, only a very recent question, one which has occupied only the past, say, 10% of the Church's life, and so, since it's very new, and since it's a wildly different category of question to the ones we're used to answering, as a Church we don't really have a very good answer yet. The answers that we do have seem to start "someone who accepts" or "someone who believes", which rather reduces Christianity to a set of dogma, a bunch of formal propositions to be accepted. This doesn't look anything like the informal way in which Jesus banded his followers together, and how they continued to operate after he ascended. (Perhaps a better definition, if we have to have one, would start "someone who has been transformed" or "someone who has been met". But we like verifiability, so that probably wouldn't fly.)

The reason why it's such a confusing and unconventional question is because Christians throughout the ages saw themselves as members of a different race, citizens of a different nation, the Kingdom of Heaven. To ask what made them Christian, without reference to their nation, would be a meaningless question. This even continued for the first couple of hundred years after the Reformation. A Christian cannot be separated from the community of faith. It's only when our thinking became individualised that our faith became more and more individualised and reducable to doctrinal principles of faith. (I'm talking in broad sweeps here, there are always one or two individuals throughout a historical movement that are thinking totally outside the box.) What makes me an Englishman? My membership of the set of "English people". What makes me a Christian? My membership of the Church.

Over time this new nation had to circumscribe limits of behaviour for its members. When problems arose within the community, the community got together to decide what was and wasn't acceptable. From this we get the body of the Councils and Canon Law. As far as I'm concerned, whether or not they got it all right or not is irrelevant. They decided on who is and who is not part of the Church. You have to have boundaries. The important thing to realise is that these boundaries were not defining the faith; they were defining the community. The Catholic problem is that is assumes that the faith and the community are entirely the same - but Jesus has sheep who are not of this fold. The Evangelical problem is that it assumes that the faith and the community are entirely separate - but Jesus did not call people into mental assent of propositions, but into a transformed community which seeks to follow his example.

Here are some categorisations that Christians fall into. Now I'm not saying that categorisations like this are all necessarily bad, because we all think in different ways.

What we don't need to do is fight about them. For instance, many would claim that those who tick any of the boxes on the bottom line aren't Christians at all. :)

I'm sure that some of these are mutually incompatible or mutually redundant. (All fundamentalists are literalists, for instance, and you won't find many literalist cessationists.) And I'm sure there are lots of distinctions I haven't thought of. Now, what do all those words mean?

General categories

The first category is the general politics. Evangelicals will tell you that "evangelical" means that they are committed to sharing the Gospel. This is bogus. That's the literal meaning of the word, but it implies all sorts of attitudes about the Bible, about morality, and the way atonement works, and so on. The fact that they will focus on the literal meaning and not tell you about the subtle shades of meaning tells you what you need to know about these.

Conservative evangelicals are evangelicals but even more so. The standard joke about conservative evangelicals is that their Trinity consists of the Father, the Son and the Holy Scripture. You won't find conservative evangelical charismatics, say.

Fundamentalist evangelicals are like evangelicals but... think American right wing. Yes, those. The only category of "fundamentalists" in the world who proudly self-apply the title; to everyone else, it's an insult.

Ecumenicals want the church to stop fighting and all pull together. To do this, they have to try to keep everyone happy, which means everybody thinks that the ecumenicals are compromisers. They are the OpenBSD of the Christian world. Everyone knows that that's what they ought to be, but at the same time really don't want to do it the way the ecumenicals have, and so don't do it at all.

Liberals tend to take a less firm view of Scripture and personal ethics, but are very strong on God's love and concern for society. Evangelicals really hate liberals. They are the enemy. I haven't worked out why.

Other religions

This column is about how they relate to other religions. Exclusivists claim that Christianity, and in particular, church membership, is the only way to be "saved", and other religions are frankly wrong. To be slightly unfair, exclusivists like sending people to hell. Inclusivists claim that Jesus Christ is the only way to be saved, and either he will save all those of other religions (the universalist position) or we don't know how God will deal with those of other religions. As the diagram suggests, there's a wide variety of shades of thought inside those two categories, including some overlap. Pluralists, and yes, there are Christian pluralists, say that all religions are the same.

Holy Spirit

Pentecostalists and charismatics are, to all intents and purposes, identical, but giving them different names leaves them with one more thing to fight about. I can't tell the difference, but I think pentecostalists say that you must have and display the gifts of the Spirit, and particularly the gift of speaking in tongues, to be saved and function as a Christian, whereas charismatics just think it's a good idea.

Cessationists say that the gifts of the Spirit are simply unavailable, because once the Church compiled the Bible it had everything it needed. You would think that Church historians would have mentioned the time when the Spirit left the Church alone, but never mind. There are not many cessationists, but those that are about do make a big noise.

Bible

Literalists hold the Bible to be literally true. This is one of the tenets of Christian fundamentalism. Historicists say that there are bits of the Bible that are historical, primarily the death and resurrection of Jesus, and bits which are mythological, and smart people can see the difference if they try. Revisionists are a bit more sceptical, and hold things like the Jesus Seminar to vote on what Jesus was actually likely to have said and done. Modernists treat the Bible as true apart from the supernatural bits. I'm sure there are those who are even more sceptical and treat the Bible as completely ahistorical (I'm thinking of Moltmann or Bultmann or one of the -manns) but I don't know what they're called and there are very few of them.

And the rest

Once we've dealt with theology and philosophy, we can finally get into denominations, and there are plenty of those to choose from too.

For myself, I'm one of those wacky postmoderns who wants to tick all the boxes. Especially the one that says "Christian". Which I've deliberately not put on there, since for many people that's the least important one.

So a while ago, I blasted out my reserves about going to church. It was perhaps not coincidental that I was going to what I felt was a pretty lifeless church at the time. Now I'm going to an altogether different church, and things are different.

Well, not completely different; the form is still very traditional, the sermons even longer and drier, but... I love my church. What's changed? Two things I can immediately identify: first, it's a Japanese church, and I enjoy being with Japanese Christians. Which is just as well, you know.

Second, it's a sociable church. After the service, we had tea and chatted for an hour or so, then went out for dinner, and then sat in a coffee shop to chat a bit more. Of course I'm still very new and I don't really know anyone, but this way I feel I've got some chance of actually getting to.

You see, in my previous rant, I forgot the golden rule: that church isn't about structures or activities or services; church is people, people meeting together to meet God and encourage each other. Meeting God is of course the most important, but I can remember churches where I feel I've met God but nobody else, and I've pretty quickly found myself in another church. You can meet God in your bedroom; to meet as church, you need to meet as a community.