I. Statement of Mission
To call this a “statement of mission” is to make a double-entendre. While on the surface, this will function in the conventional sense as a corporate declaration of purpose, in the context of a new vision for the Christian Church, the different connotations of the word “mission” already begin to make a statement: the mission of the Church is to be missional. The first step in realizing the nature of this mission is to recognize in both the election of the nation of Israel in the Old Testament and that of the disciples of Christ in the New Testament, election was not implied as an end in itself, but as a means toward a wider end: God’s plan of restoring and reconciling all his creation.
To put it more concretely, we can begin to define the Church’s mission, in the words of the mission theology of the Church of the Brethren, as “ a word of hope to all peoples. The church exists primarily for others…so that all might live toward God’s
shalom, experiencing power and redemption in an ever-widening covenant community.”
Within this community, it is important to promote the fact that all members of the Church are ministers of Christ who play a role in sharing the good news of Jesus Christ with others and inviting others to take part in the faith community.
In the specific context of the Church that is being developed and cultivated in my own community, we will develop our ecclesiology by emphasizing and appropriating this emphasis on a relational faith community. As a congregation with no building or boundary, our identity will be defined by our commitment to form, foster, and dwell in Christ-centered relationships with others. To this end, our hope is, as Stanley Hauerwas puts it, “to be faithful to the kingdom by showing the world what it means to be a community of peace.” We recognize our community as one “that God has made…ecclesially homeless,” and thus, “we can only pray [that this] will be the beginning of a unity, as John Howard Yoder would put it, from the bottom up.”
In this community, we place a value on addressing and welcoming the “other” into our midst because of our firm conviction that all people are God’s children. Our mission is to move from a preoccupation with homogeneity that is idolatrous toward a fuller engagement of otherness through which God mediates new life.
As the mission of Paul brought the gospel of Christ to the Gentile “other,” we seek to continue that process by committing ourselves to openness and vigilance in seeking out the opportunities God sets before us. We intend to take our location and cultural context very seriously, and to address the plurality of perspectives through conversation and openness to questions. In our gatherings, our goal is to cultivate and empower this dialogical awareness and engagement in order to equip each member for their own unique ministerial task. We seek to be a congregational community of the loved, so that we may actively and lovingly engage the world around us in our everyday ministry.
Within our cultural situation, we recognize and sympathize with the view point of postmodern thought. We take seriously the fact that many, if not most, of those in the community we feel called to reach harbor suspicions of authority–especially with regard to the dogmatic exclusivism of many who claim to represent the Christian faith but have served only to further marginalize, rather than embrace, many within our community. In this sense, we endeavor to be a deconstructive Church; to deconstruct the very vocabulary of our faith in order to better understand and live our identity. We must engage the marginalized in dialogue, and humbly subject ourselves to their perspectives and criticisms so that we can undertake the task of deconstruction in solidarity with them, and only then begin to reclaim the true and full meaning of “church.” Deconstruction in this sense is a community-centered act of interpretation, wherein we open ourselves to marginalized interpretations of the context in which we live, and then establish a community of interpreters of the scriptures, and from there, of the life we are called to live in faith.
With Derrida, we affirm that “there is nothing outside the text,” so that we can proceed to deconstruct our own interpretive worldview and determine which text is guiding and shaping our identity: that of the Bible, or those of the secular consumerist world.
II. Biblical and Theological Foundations
When Jesus instructed his disciples to go among the nations and continue making disciples, they became a faith community centered on the gospel message that they had received God’s love and shared this love and salvation by cultivating and engaging practices of reconciliation, forgiveness and ministering to the needy and the marginalized people among them.
In this sense, faith is seen not merely as a two-way affair between us and God, but rather a three-way (or trinitarian) engagement with both God and our neighbor.
This can be emphasized by a Christocentric ecclesiology instead of a Church-centered ecclesiology; the tiny seed of true ecumenical unity can only be rooted in the mutual recognition that our existence is centered in Christ.
Furthermore, confessing Christ as our only Lord is the source of our engagement with and in the world, not the reason for a retreat from it. It gives rise to our call to be an actually “Embodied Body of Christ, incarnated into the real world, tak[ing] on…the functions of power in the world.”
Ultimately, the foundation of our identity in Christ finds its expression in the fact that he is the “image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15).
As an embodied community, our confession is that the original intention of God’s creation of humankind (Gen. 2:7-25) is restored in the person of Christ. Furthermore, this comes with the promise of not only a restored humanity, but also of the pouring out of God’s Spirit on all creation (Joel 2). Sin can thus be characterized by a distortion of proper relationships in three spheres: between humans and God, between humans and each other, and between humans and the rest of creation. As the Body of Christ, it is our task to speak to and work for restoration, redemption, and reconciliation in all three of these spheres.
We are called to remember that the whole world belongs to God, who creates, sustains, and nurtures all his creatures, and to take this as our basis to free ourselves from anxiety and the supposed need to secure our own well-being for ourselves.
As in the parable of the rich man who builds a storehouse (Luke 12), we often fancy ourselves to be owners and masters rather than the vigilant stewards whom Jesus commands to be ready and watchful.
We are called to be a liberated Church, in which there are no distinctions of privilege, race, or nation, because all are baptized into the priesthood of Jesus. Thus, we are to be a Church of liberation in two senses: baptizing the world into the liberation of Christ, and also liberating the laity within the Church to participate and find their own roles within this process.
Thus, we may conclude that the people in this participatory Body of Christ are, as Moltmann puts it, “personally addressed and taken seriously…needed, with their own particular abilities and gifts. Free decision in faith, voluntary community, mutual recognition and acceptance of one another, together with a common effort for justice and peace in this violent society: these are the guidelines for the Church’s future.”
In the spirit of openness, and in the openness of the Spirit, we seek to incorporate the entire narrative of the Bible, and a full spectrum of the theological interpretations thereof, as our Biblical and theological foundations. While we find our mission more specifically located in the call to embrace one another in our diversity through our new-found identity in Christ (Gal. 3:28) and to minister to the marginalized and the least among us (Mat. 25:40), we recognize the need to avoid Gospel reductionism and to root this mission in the full context of the Bible.
Even as we strive to rethink the meaning of “church” in a postmodern context, we must remember Christ’s call for love and unity among his followers (John 17), and remind ourselves that a necessary prerequisite for loving the unloved of this world is continuing to love the entire Church, seeking to promote its unity in Christ even as our congregations differ in manifestation.
III. Specific Context of our Ministry
A congregation is a community which seeks to discover together its place within the world by telling its story and determining God’s will for how its members ought to live out their faith.
Charles R. Foster cites two ways in which congregations have historically been gathered: the “territorial parish,” and the “voluntary congregation.”
Our goal is to bridge this divide by being a voluntary faith community whose mission is to engage and interact with the local community, or parish, through both individual and corporate ministry. Our location, in this sense, will be twofold: our first location is the neighborhood in which our house church gathers, but our second locations become the places in which the individual members of our congregation spend their lives throughout the rest of the week–in the workplaces, schools, families, and other everyday contexts in which we challenge ourselves to see our role as ministers of Christ.
The location of our weekly gatherings is in an apartment complex near the University, which is located in a neighborhood that includes people of all ages and walks of life. Although the majority of residents is Caucasian, there are also several African-Americans in our community, including one couple that is an integral part of our congregation.
Strengths Conducive to Diversity
The importance of elements of African-American culture for our congregation, such as spoken word poetry, hip-hop music and spirituals, help our community to be effective in embracing and integrating cultural and ethnic diversity. Our commitment to the importance of creative expression through the arts (visual, musical, and linguistic) creates an open and integrating forum in which diverse perspectives and cultural traditions can be combined and appropriated into our community’s identity. Another strength is that the leaders in our community are all actively engaged in and committed to strengthening relationships with people from different races, ethnicities and nationalities. With our diversity constituted in terms of relationships and social networks, we are well equipped to provide a harmonious and friendly multicultural environment.
Since eating together is very important to us, we also try to share food from many different cultures and enjoy experiencing and trying new things together. By sharing a dinner of Indian food, for example, we can promote unity in diversity because the Caucasian and African-American members of the group find common ground in sharing an experience that is outside of their respective cultural backgrounds, while simultaneously making a gesture that validates and welcomes Indian culture into our community.
Challenges to Diversity
The biggest challenge our congregation has in ministering to the full diversity of our surrounding community is not the difficulty of forming inter-cultural or interracial relationships so much as the difficulty in addressing age differences. The primary weakness of creating a community that embraces and engages with emerging postmodern culture, and whose practices are admittedly non-traditional (at least on the surface) is that this severely hinders our ability to relate to older generations who feel uncomfortable and alienated by the culture and practices of our younger generation. To avoid isolating ourselves from older members of the community, our only recourse is to refer to the core of our mission: the formation of relationships and social networks to integrate others into our faith community. When we truly commit ourselves to seeing strangers as our neighbors, whom we are commanded to love, then we will devote ourselves to overcome this obstacle and welcome others into our community.
Additionally, since I am coming from a house church in which younger members are the minority, and since this congregation is one of the primary models for the foundation of our own, we can work to integrate our ministry with that of the older members of the other house church to promote age diversity to a greater degree.
IV. Description of Leadership
The leadership of our congregation is much more fluid than fixed. Since it is one of the foundational goals of our congregation to empower and emphasize the ministerial role of each member, there is no formal delineation between clergy and laity in the conventional sense. Leadership and authority in our context are determined relationally. Owing to my familiarity with Biblical studies as a seminary student, I take on a role of leadership with respect to our weekly engagements with scripture. This, however, does not manifest formally as a sermon so much as it underscores my leadership role as facilitator and moderator of a group discussion on a given topic or text and its interpretation. While my insights and knowledge are for guiding and shaping discussion, our communication remains dialogical and open to questions, interactions, and contributions from all members.
Our commitment to diversity in leadership is evidenced by the fact that of the four founding members of the congregation, I am the only male. Where female leadership has often been, and still often is marginalized by many Christian congregations, the goal of equipping and empowering women in leadership and ministry is central to the life of our faith community. Furthermore, our leadership is unique in that we are all lay people, in the sense that our primary vocation is something other than professional ministry. Thus, each leader speaks from the context of their individual ministry in various fields such as psychology student, Starbucks employee, elementary school teacher, salesman, and, in my own case, social worker for the developmentally disabled. When we meet as a congregation, each member is given the floor to speak from their individual context about how their ministry is going, and to challenge the rest of the group by modeling the kind of ministry we are each held accountable for. In this way, we cultivate our congregational ministry to and with the world and our community, exercising the utmost caution against engaging solely in ministry at the world.
V. Snapshot
As a deconstructive Church, we take very seriously the role of our community in interpreting the life of faith as guided by the Biblical text. For that reason, we open ourselves to the entirety of the Biblical narrative to interpret the context of our scripture readings, and open ourselves to tradition in our awareness of ancient interpretations even as we seek to discover new interpretations that guide our present life and community.
As an “Embodied Body of Christ,” we incorporate practices that cultivate and express our “passionate concern for humans, for animals, for the earth and for the real material bodies in which we dwell…marked by concern for bodies abused and broken, neglected and uncared for, sick and dying, and bodies healthy and whole.”
We will endeavor to welcome all others into our midst, including those who are already weekly members (even clergy) of institutional congregations, in order that we may work for the unity of the Church while we minister to the world around us with healing and hope.
We seek to embody a missional rather than a consumer-oriented Church; a congregation whose members come to meet each other’s needs and work together for the needy in the community.
We seek to be a participatory community rather than a mode of religious entertainment that merely creates a product to meet the needs of a consumer congregation; and beyond this we seek to be guided by a vision of Godly human existence that challenges and speaks out against the dominant assumptions of our consumption-consumed, capital-crazed culture.
In our gatherings, we will facilitate participation and intimate community by meeting in a living room, with chairs and couches arranged in a circle so the group is seated facing one another to promote comfortability and conversation. We seek to create a holistic spiritual experience that engages the whole person in multi-sensory worship by cooking and eating together, creating a mood of meditative reverence by appreciating darkness and candle light, and appreciating the ancient roots of our faith through symbols and imagery that evoke the Church’s long history and tradition.
To uphold the ministerial leadership of all members, preaching will be radically redefined in our congregation. Each member will be encouraged to “preach” from their own realm of personal ministry. My personal contribution to preaching will come largely in the form of imparting my own knowledge and familiarity with the Bible to guide and shape group discussion, as well as to teach and explain parts of the text that are challenging for group discussion and interpretation. In this sense, my preaching will largely be deconstructive, as an exercise in deconstructing terms like “gospel,” or “sanctification,” or “Armageddon” that comprise the lexicon of the Christian faith, but are seldom understood.
I will attempt to embrace diverse perspectives where appropriate and incorporate these voices to challenge myself and the congregation to ask questions and engage the life of faith critically. Outside of our Biblical studies, however, each member of the congregation will preach through their ministry outside the Church in building relationships, and through sharing these experiences within the Church to encourage and challenge the rest of our faith community. Another vital component of the preaching in our community will be to express our message and tell our story through the arts. We will share our poems, songs, paintings, crafts, and personal stories as we participate together in the worship experience and share the joys of our experiences of God’s work in and through us.
VI. Conclusion
The impetus for our experiment in deconstructing, redefining and reclaiming the name of the Church is to challenge ourselves to re-envision the nature of Christian leadership. By recognizing the focus of the priesthood of all believers and the ministry of all Church members, we can move beyond going to church as a weekly gathering toward being the Church in ongoing mission.
From there we can learn to see our ministerial roles as engaging the community and forming relationships, moving beyond a gospel of self-realization toward a gospel of serving others.
This will take place as we move from an inwardly focused Church committed to its own self-preservation to a congregation of disciple-making disciples engaged in social transformation.
It is our firm conviction that maintaining this community-oriented focus, far from reducing our faith to a mere “social gospel,” will enrich and animate our weekly gatherings as we commune to encourage one another and experience the depth of the presence of the Spirit together. Our emphasis on daily ministry will remind us that the spiritual practices of worship are rooted in and related to our material everyday existence. Our experience of corporate worship will in turn ground our everyday lives in the Spirit and remind us to be vigil stewards, committed to a Kingdom and a Lord that are not of this world. Though we will face challenges and conflicts along the way, maintaining a commitment to nurture relationships and remain dedicated to a message of hope and healing will provide us with an over-arching vision and purpose that trumps the temptation to avoid embracing diversity. As Eric H. F. Law puts it, “To live as faithful people, we must not avoid the world, but find the courage to enter it, knowing God will protect us.”
By grounding our security and our safety in God’s promise to provide for us, we can begin to let go of our insecurities and anxiety and live faithfully as Jesus commanded his disciples to live (Luke 12).
VII. Appendix
Bibliography
Belcher, Jim. Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional. Downers Grove, IL: Ivp Books, 2009.
Brueggemann, Walter. “Vision for a New Church and a New Century Part I: Homework Against Scarcity.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 54, no. 1-2 (2000): 21-39.
____ “Vision for a New Church and a New Century Part II: Holiness Become Generosity.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 54, no. 1-2 (2000): 41-44.
Foster, Charles R.. Embracing Diversity: Leadership in Multicultural Congregations. New York: The Alban Institute, 1997.
Gibbs, Eddie. LeadershipNext: Changing Leaders in a Changing Culture. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005.
Kim, Van Nam. A Church of Hope: A Study of the Eschatological Ecclesiology of Jurgen Moltmann. Lanham, MD: University Press Of America, 2005.
Kimball, Dan. The Emerging Church. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2003.
Law, Eric H. F.. Sacred Acts, Holy Change: Faithful Diversity and Practical Transformation. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2002.
Ramsey, Duane. “A Biblical and Theological Basis for New Church Development.” Brethren Life and Thought 36, no. 1 (1991): 142-150.
Reist, John S. “Founding or Finding: A Theology for New Church Development.” Journal of Religious Thought 43, no. 1 (1986): 102-115.
Rhodes, Stephen A.. Where the Nations Meet: The Church in a Multicultural World. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998.
Smith, James K. A.. Whos Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2006.
Swartzentruber, Elaine K. “Marking and Remarking the Body of Christ: Toward a Postmodern Mennonite Ecclesiology.” Mennonite Quarterly Review 71, no. 2 (1997): 243-265.
Wright, David. “The Beloved, Ambivalent Community: Mennonite Poets and the Postmodern Church.” Mennonite Quarterly Review 77, no. 4 (2003): 547-558.
Yancey, George A.. One Body, One Spirit: Principles of Successful Multiracial Churches. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003.
Additional Resources
The following websites provide information, pictures, forums and links pertaining to new
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