Laziness

Hey folks, remember that series I was doing, where I attempted to summarize the book The Continuing Conversion of the Church? No? I suspected as much. I don't think I'm going to bother finishing that series, because I'm not convinced that I'm rendering anyone a service that outweighs the work involved. I suspect one or two of you were interested in that series, but I think I was managing to do a poor enough job of making those summaries readable that it wasn't really of benefit. However, if even one person comments on this post that they'd like me to finish that series, I'll happily do so. (Really! I remain a big fan of the book.) I'm just not of a mood to spend time on anything that doesn't serve someone, that's all.

Peace!

The Continuing Conversion of the Church (5)

Oooo-kay - I admit that the delay between installments of this series is getting a bit ridiculous. When it's done, I'll do a summary post with links to each chapter.

Chapter Five of CCotC, entitled "The Challenge of Reductionism", begins like this:

The risk of translatability is that sinful humans are its agents. The witnesses are always very ambiguous saints. They (we) never divorce themselves from the desire to bring this powerful and radical gospel under control. That means that in the process of translation, complex forms of reduction also take place.

What does Guder mean by "reduction" and "reductionism", and what consequences does this have for followers of Jesus and their attempts to participate in God's mission?

• The nature of the church's mission mandate is to be, do, and say Christ's witness. "This ministry of witness is carried out by frail and forgiven humans, whom God chooses, forms into missional communities, and sends." The church, made up of these frail, forgiven humans, "reduces the gospel as it translates it in its witness." This reduction is "as unavoidable as [that which] occurs in the translating of texts from one language to another." Reduction occurs in the translation of the Bible, and even in the translation of God's revelation into human language and culture by the Biblical authors themselves. However, Christians "need not fear that the witness is thus rendered irrelevant, or that relativism reigns."
• "When such reductions, which inevitably occur, are made absolute and then defended as normative truth, then we confront the problem [that Guder calls] 'reductionism.'" Guder's "thesis is that our particular Western reductionisms are the greatest challenge that the North Atlantic churches face when they seek to develop a theology of evangelistic ministry." "The reductionism we struggle with is related to our attempts to reduce the gospel, to bring it under control, to render it intellectually respectable, or to make it serve another agenda than God's purposes. Therefore, we cannot move contructively towards the formulation of a theology of evangelistic ministry without addressing...this reductionism.... To be faithful witnesses, we...must also be penitent witnesses, receiving the gift of conversion from God's Spirit."
• The history of reductionism begins very early in the Christian story. "First, the early church reduced its understanding of its own calling and allowed itself to become one more religion in the multiplicity of religions present in the first century," becoming "preoccupied with what distinguished it from others." "Second, this fundamental reduction was linked with the church's transition from a movement to an institution." Third, "growing antipathy between Christians and Jews...resulted in a pervasive reductionism of the gospel with regard to our rootedness in Israel and the Old Covenant, and the importance of the Jewishness of Jesus and the early church." "In very subtle ways, salvation became more and more focused upon the individual, and...the person's life after death."
• Guder recounts in detail a "spectrum of reductions" associated with the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine and the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Empire. These include: 1) a shift "from the event character of the gospel to the formulation of a defined faith system"; 2) a redefinition of eschatology from an anticipation of a future coming of the kingdom on earth to a conviction that the work of Christ on earth was complete in the establishment of the church, as "the future tense of God's kingdom came to be understood as the eternity that awaited the Christian after death"; and 3) a movement away from "the Biblical understanding of calling to witness and mission" and toward "the struggle to gain and keep salvation." The church began to make it its business to control, mediate, and manage this salvation on behalf of individual Christians.
• With the Reformation and the dawn of the "modern" age - with its centrality of scientific rationalism - many of these reductionisms remained unquestioned. In the Reformers' emphasis on our dependence upon God's grace, the central question remained that of "personal salvation, how one became sure of it, what one did about it, and how the church related to" it. "The 'individualization' and 'ecclesiasticization' of salvation...was not fundamentally questioned." "[T]he context of Christendom remained as the guarantor and protector of Christianity as the dominant religious force in society," and mission was not a major emphasis of the Reformers. With the Enlightenment stress on the "autonomy of human reason", the emphasis on the salvation of the individual only intensified. "Contemporary approaches to evangelism, with their emphasis upon method, program, results, and measurement, are a further consequence of the victory of Enlightenment thinking, even in those parts of the church which disavow Enlightened theology."

So where are we today?

Now...the church that is to proclaim the gospel appears to have become unsure of itself and incapable of persuasive witness. There are many reasons that so many Christians and Christian groups have become skeptical about evangelism, but high among them is the inability to formulate a gospel that can break through the individualization and privitization of religion. Moralistic reductions ("we are going to bring about God's kingdom on earth") have little credibility after one century of Christian social activism with minimal results.... Those groups that practice aggressive evangelism are, upon closer examination, also proclaiming a very reductionist gospel. While they claim to be opposing the secularizing and diluting tendencies of modern humanistic skepticism, they too often define the gospel in terms of happiness and evangelize for success, counting upon their mastery of method to produce results.

It sounds like we've got ourselves in a bit of a mess, and Guder's next chapter explores further "The Reduction of Salvation and Mission" and the consequences of this mess for our missional calling. But don't worry; after that he moves on to "Implications" and the beginning of a way forward for the Church. More to come....

The Continuing Conversion of the Church (4)

Chapter Four of CCotC is entitled "Translation in Mission". The following quote from its opening paragraph sets the context: "This history reveals over and over again that the missio Dei, as God works it out, is fraught with risk. This risk, I suggest, is the necessary companion of the love that God translates into reality in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This love is the content and motive of Christian mission." Guder then goes on to make the following points:

• The fundamental nature of sin is the desire of human beings to be in control - of their lives, of their destinies, of God. The "people of God" are not a bit more immune to that sinful need for control than are any other humans. This, however, is no barrier to God's gracious action for and through them. God takes a "risk communicating his love to creatures who may reject it. That loving risk is what makes the history of salvation and the living hope of faith possible."
• "By the gift of God's Spirit, this witness [of the gospel] may be translated into every human setting, since Jesus may be met and known in every human setting." "Because the joyful news is about God's mission, God's loving intentions for all creation, it is fundamentally missionary in nature, universal in scope, and, necessarily, translatable into the particular." "From the outset of the Christian pilgrimage, the translatability of the gospel has been a challenge and a risk for the church." "The church's continuing conversion today is always, in some way, related to the comprehensiveness of its missionary calling. We are still discovering the meaning of 'all the world' today."
• This translation is not just a matter of language, but of culture and history. The translation process is "profoundly interactive" with the culture and both challenging and confrontational for the culture. "That transformative witness will hallow some elements of the culture, adapt others, and reject others." Neither the missionaries' culture nor the receiving culture may be regarded as normative. "When other criteria and interests replace [the] priority of God's mission, then gospel reductionism is at work.
• "Missionary translation always includes the continuing conversion of the translator-evangelists." "The translatability is a challenge, even a shock for rebellious humans. As beings who are so concerned about control, we find the cultural openness of the gospel offensive. A translatable gospel is fundamentally not controllable. It unsettles us to discover that faithfulness to Christ can, in cultures different from ours, look different from the patterns we have evolved."

I'll end with a quote that ends the chapter itself:

The transforming power of the gospel must address, first and foremost, the traditional ways we have communicated the gospel. From there, it will move into our larger contexts and illumine where Christian witness may say "yes" and must say "no". As in every other culture in the world, Christian witness engages Western culture in diverse ways: accepting, adapting, changing, and rejecting. This means, among other things, that the culturally bilingual church must expect to change and be changed, must expect its own continuing conversion, as it encounters Christ the Lord in the cultures into which it now is sent as its witnesses.

One of our primary challenges as we undertake this transforming work is our reductionism of the gospel, which has been referred to above. What does Guder mean by "gospel reductionism?" Glad you asked...it's the topic of the next chapter. Which hopefully will be showing up here much more promptly than this one did! :-)

The Continuing Conversion of the Church (3)

Chapter three of CCotC is entitled "Mission as Witness". In it, Darrell Guder argues that the essential character of the mission of the followers of Jesus is to be his witnesses. To begin to explain what this means, I think I need to quote the first paragraph of this chapter in full.

What makes the gospel truly good news is the fact that the Jesus events are the outcome of God's loving decision to heal the broken creation. We have described this as God's mission. To demonstrate divine love, God brought about salvation for all creation in the death of Jesus on the cross. That joyful message is now to be made known to all the world. That is how God's mission now continues. The center or core of the missio Dei is evangelization: the communication of the gospel. Carrying the good news across all borders and into all the world is an essential part of the kingdom message which Jesus brought and embodied. Jesus Christ intended the mission of the apostolic faith community as the necessary consequence of God's redemptive work for all creation, which was accomplished in his life, death, and resurrection. "A clear line of connection can be drawn between the sending of Jesus and the sending of his disciples: as Jesus reflects in his actions the goodness and righteousness of his Father, who send him into the world, so his disciples become witnesses and the image of Christ to those to whom Jesus sent them.

Further:

• The New Testament is fundamentally a missionary document; it does not "explicitly command the church to do mission - it assumes that mission is what these communities are all about. Although the Great Commission in Matthew 28, along with the other post-resurrection statements of Jesus in the Gospels and Acts, present Jesus explicitly sending his followers, these are an affirmation and validation of what these disciples were already doing, since the beginning of the church.
• "The early Christian communities understood themselves to be witnesses to what God has done. The earliest evangelization was that done by eyewitnesses...." "It is fundamental to the goodness of the 'joyful message' that it can be witnessed, experienced, reported on,and passed on so that others might join in the experience." "The New Testament cluster of terms based on the root for 'witness' (martyr-), in a broad diversity of forms and nuances, defines comprehensively the missional calling of the church in the New Testament."
• The language of witness - of being witnesses, rendering the testimony of a witness, and giving/bearing/living out witness - permeates the New Testament, especially the letters of Paul, the Gospel of John, and the book of Acts.
• "The essence of witness...is the gracious action of God that produces such witnesses and their testimony." This commission as witnesses "comes from outside ourselves and is, in fact, a constant surprise for us. It is the result of God's initiation of God's mission."
• Witness is theocentric, Christocentric, and pneumatological. Witness is to God's saving activity in Christ's incarnation, death, and resurrection, and is enabled and empowered by the Spirit.
• Witness is historical, "based on unique and particular events that have universal importance as history continues."
• Witness is eschatological. "The missionary message is that the kingdom of God is near, breaking in, present and active in Jesus Christ, and yet to come in all its fullness."
• Witness is ecclesiological. "God's people are called and equipped for witness as particular communities whose lives and actions are a continuing demonstration of their message.
• Witness is multicultural and ecumenical. "Witness is spread throughout the world as the mission community translates the Gospel into every culture."

OK! Having established the centrality of mission and evangelism in Chapter One, the surprising expression of God's mission as Good News in Chapter Two, and the fundamental identity of Jesus' followers as those who are, do, and say his witness in Chapter Three, we move beyond foundations into Part Two of the book: "Challenges". And the challenges flow right out of the last bullet-point above: the absolutely necessary process of translation required as these witnesses spread the Gospel and translate it for each new culture. How does this cause challenges? Find out next time....

The Continuing Conversion of the Church (2)

Chapter 2 of Guder's book is entitled, "God's Mission is Good News". He begins by saying that "Our theory of evangelistic ministry must be rooted in a biblical theology of mission and, above all, dominated and shaped by the gospel it seeks to proclaim." Toward the formation of such a theory, Guder makes the following assertions:

• "The fundamental certainty of biblical faith is the fact that there is good news about God." This good news is rooted in a particular history, in times and places, and is the continuously surprising story of God's good, loving actions in those times and places. The appropriate response to this story is joy, thanksgiving, and reciprocal love.
• God's mission - the missio Dei, the arc and thrust of these historical actions - is motivated by God's compassion. In compassion, God created, and in compassion, God acts to heal God's broken creation. The epitome of this compassionate mission is the incarnation of God in Jesus and the sending of Jesus on his earthly ministry.
• The expression of God's mission on earth is the "kingdom" or "reign" of God, which Jesus proclaimed to be "near" throughout his ministry. The kingdom is both present and yet to come, and it "is defined by the very character and action of God, which means that it cannot be reduced to simple definition nor made to serve human purposes." The nearing of the kingdom invites response - the acceptance of an invitation - but it also causes negative resistance on the part of the powers of the world, and inevitably leads to suffering.
• Jesus' compassionate sacrifice of himself on the cross is the center of the gospel. It is the inevitable consequence of the breaking in of the kingdom and the ultimate action of the compassionate mission of God.
• "When God raised Jesus from the dead, the message and the messenger merged, the king and the kingdom came together." "The gospel is the person and work of Jesus as the salvation event towards which God's mission has been moving and from which that mission now moves into the entire world on the way to its eschatological consummation when God fulfills all his promises [at the end of the age]."

Toward the end of the chapter, Guder summarizes:

The missio Dei has always been the gospel, good news about God's goodness revealed in God's Word through Israel's experience, leading up to its climax and culmination in Jesus Christ. Throughout the biblical witness, God acts, initiates, and sends. God's compassion leads to his salvific witness in human history. The Father sends the Son. This exclusive focus on God as the subject of his mission is essential to the gospel, for it makes clear that humans, in their lostness, find hope in what God has done for them, not in what they might imagine they can do for themselves. Now, however, on the cross and at Easter, the salvation of the world was accomplished. God's mission now broadens to embrace the whole world for which Christ died. The gospel of God's love fulfilled in Christ is now to be made known to everyone. Because of the evangel [good news], the call to evangelize is now heard. God's mission continues as that call takes shape in the apostolic community, the church.

So that's what Guder means when he talks about the "good news", "gospel", or "evangel", and since the book is about evangelistic ministry, this is what that ministry is meant to proclaim. But what is the relation of those ministers to this good news, and to the God and Christ that the good news is about? Guder's answer - explored in the next chapter and using a fundamental New Testament vocabulary word that's packed with meaning - is that we are "witnesses." I'll try to help unpack what that means next time.

The Continuing Conversion of the Church (1)

The first chapter of CCotC is entitled "Mission and Evangelism: the Emergence of the Theological Challenge". In it, Guder recounts:

• The rise of optimism in the modern age. The wonders of science, technology, democracy, Western culture, and the Christian social gospel, and the progress and spread of all of these, would surely (it seemed) save us from all ills.
• The gradual disestablishment of Christianity as the "official" religion of Western societies (aka the end of "Christendom"), accompanied by the adaptation of Christian theology to harmonize it with modern rationalism. This lead directly to the polarization of Christian thought into "fundamentalist" and "liberal" extremes.
• The creation of the categories of "mission" and "evangelism" as programs of the church as Western culture encountered other cultures and sought to bring them the Gospel - along with Western culture itself.
• The emergence of "mission", as in the missio Dei or "mission of God", as a major topic of theological inquiry, after the terrible atrocities of the 20th century ushered in the failure of modern optimism and the dawn of the postmodern era. If Christian "mission" was not merely the export of glorious Western Christian culture, what was God's mission?
• The growing awareness of "evangelism" as being, biblically, at the heart of mission, and also at the heart of Christian discipleship itself.

Toward the end of this first chapter, Guder gets to the heart of where he's going with his book (p. 26):

If the Christian community is to carry out its mission of gospel witness, then its evangelization will be directed both to itself as well as to the world into which it is sent. We need to free our language and our thinking from the idea that evangelistic ministry is only directed to nonbelievers. The New Testament is...addressed to believers from beginning to end, and it evangelizes at every turning. Evangelizing churches are churches that are being evangelized. For the sake of its evangelistic vocation, the continuing conversion of the church is essential.

So where does Guder go from here? Tune in next time....

The Continuing Conversion of the Church (intro)

I recently finished reading Darrell L. Guder's book, The Continuing Conversion of the Church, one of the books in the Gospel and Our Culture series that also includes the classic Missional Church, edited by Guder. I don't think it's an exaggeration for me to say that this has been the most formative single book I've ever read, apart from the Bible and perhaps the World Scripture (which is a topic for another time). Do I think there's one book, apart from the Bible, that every thinking Christian should read? Heck no; everybody's at a different place in her journey. But if I did think in such a one-size-fits-all manner, and I did think there were such a book, this might be that book. At least until I finish Lesslie Newbigin's The Gospel in a Pluralist Society,which I'm reading now. (After that, it's David Bosch's Transforming Mission. Serious stuff, wot?)

So anyway, I think Continuing Conversion is a pretty enormously important book, and since I know it's not going straight to the front of everybody's "to read" queue, I'm going to go ahead and try to give a taste of the book in a series of posts. I don't pretend I'm up to the task of doing it justice, but maybe it'll be helpful to somebody nonetheless.

This book took me a long time to read. There were several reasons for this. First, I was trying to read a whole bunch of other things at the same time, like I always do, and I'm not a particularly fast reader. Second, it's not exactly Harry Potter. Every sentence of this book is packed with profound theological/ecclesiological/missiological meaning, and I really needed to read a little bit, chew on it a lot, then read a little more. Third (and I really only realized this as I was nearing the end), this book was somewhat painful for me to read, because I kept on reading some of the book and thinking, "Yes! Yes, that's it! I need to go and put that into practice!" But in my current context, with the vast bulk of my working time devoted to my secular day job, and with my "big church", Holy Comforter, really only beginning (in my opinion) to grapple with what it means to be a missional church, I kept on feeling this let down feeling: no matter how much I wanted to put this theology into practice, I really couldn't right now. Not much, anyway.

Anyway, I finished the book, and like I said, it's had quite an effect on me. So in this series of posts I'll do what I can to pass a tiny bit of that transformation on to you, gentle reader. In this intro, I'll just try to summarize the overall argument of the book. This may not make too much sense until I unpack it in follow-up posts, so bear with me:

The fundamental identity of the church is that of a people called and commissioned by Christ to be, do, and say his witness. Living that mission requires that these witnesses translate the gospel whenever it engages a new culture. But a hazard of that necessary translation process is that in the process of translation, the gospel will be reduced and diminished. This gospel reductionism has happened repeatedly in Christian history, and today's church is captive to its own gospel reductionism in many ways: some dating from before the dawn of Christendom and the establishment of Christianity in the Roman Empire under Constantine, some from the modern age, and others from present-day cultural compromise. This fundamental identity as Christ's witnesses means that the heart of Christian ministry is evangelization, but the most urgent need for evangelization is the continued conversion of the church itself: an invitation to the church (at every organizational level) to repent of its gospel reductionism and move toward the fullness of the gospel.

Got all that? I'll attempt to make sense of it in follow-up posts. Prayer may be required. :-)