Mission - to boldly go (and all that jazz)

What is the Mission of the Church? Yes, evangelism (sharing good news in words). Yes, justice and service (sharing good news in actions). Yes, caring for all God's creation. Yes, enabling people to fulfil their God-given potential. Yes, nurturing the skills of discipleship in those who seek to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, that is, enabling each other to be active participants in the everyday business of bringing God's 'kingdom' about on earth - fostering the strategies which Jesus taught, of loving enemies, turning the other cheek, extending hospitality and friendship to those regarded as 'unworthy', resisting the temptation to dominate or exclude, practising excessive compassion, and so on. All of those things have a ring of truth about them, but also more than a hint of difficulty. But I'm not sure any of them can be sustained without another human and biblical art - that of dreaming! We must be bold in our dreaming. Too often we neglect this. Evangelical churches find it easier, in the sense that they have a confidence about the scope of their message - but progressives ought to have plenty to dream about too! So be bold: dream of a church which signals an alternative reality, which is unashamed about its hopes for a different quality of future, where the hungry are fed, where those humbled by globalisation are blessed by the dignity of human worth, where the 'last' are put 'first', where children and the vulnerable take centre-stage, where the violent and prejudiced ways-of-the-world are no longer seen as inevitable, and where all of us know our value through relationship with each other. be bold - dream of it - and the living of the dream may just inspire others to take a look ...

I wouldn't start from here ...

It must be said a lot, but if I was going to build the kind of Christian community I suspect we're called to be, "I wouldn't start from here"! And as soon as I write it, I'm acutely aware of the arrogance of such a comment - how dare I think that I know better! And how dare I belittle the efforts of people over the recent decades, often struggling against the odds. But there remains a problem: It's genuinely hard to see how we can move our existing church communities from 'where we are' to a point where we are 'ahead of the curve', as though we could even be 'ready' for this changing world as it comes round the corner toward us. Churches are so laden with layers of cultural accretions, things which seem so self-evident to insiders, things which define people's sense of spiritual safety and identity, that it's so hard to 'see' with other eyes, to see how little some of our 'stuff' connects with people in our neighbourhoods, even those who wish us well.
Look back into the 'original' stories of Christian discipleship, and you encounter a radical message and movement of life-changing awe and vitality, but much of it feels overwhelmed by churchy expectations - things into which people have been socialised and which have conditioned their growth (e.g. the idea that worship needs to be fairly formal, non-disruptive, even though some of the most life-changing growth happens through informality and disruption!)
So how do we unearth the church's true treasures? Well, we must begin by celebrating what is truly remarkable - the commitment of people who, against tough odds, have kept things going, even if 'keeping things going' has dominated other, more liberating purposes - and we must value people's different gifts, and reconnect people with their diversity, the differences between people who are already in churches, so we can begin to see how people not in churches are also very varied, and therefore in need of a range of ways of exploring faith and discipleship.
In fact, of course, there's no such thing as 'not starting from here', except in those self-deceiving spiritualities which pretend truth is always transcendent and never anything to do with our own experience; but we'd better get better at seeing where 'here' is - by asking ourselves, 'where are we up to? what do we think we're playing at? where are we in relation to the world around us? who is around us? and what are we for, anyway?' In other words, it's time to become highly attentive to whichever 'here' we're starting from, otherwise we'll never get 'there'...