Church for Every Context. Michael Moynagh

Church for Every Context

of life, the church has failed to accompany people into the numerous settings where they now live. It has become detached from their concerns, failed to open sufficient doors to newcomers and persisted with an ecclesial model that is self-defeating. The birthing, still at an early stage, of contextual churches in the splinters of society could herald a church that serves people in the ordinary settings of life, and becomes significant to them once again.

To serve these contexts well, new churches will need to connect with expressive selves who lead immanent lives, have a desire to be good, are increasingly sociable and, if they are interested in spirituality at all, prefer it in the form of a quest. Churches will be supportive communities that engage with practical, everyday concerns, respond to ethical desires, connect transcendence more tightly to day-to-day realities and provide a welcoming environment in which individuals can tread their spiritual paths. Churches that do this will be in tune with the network society. They will be focused, serving specific groups of people, but also be networked, pooling resources for mission and discipleship. They will be emergent, displaying the self-organizing properties of networks that now shape society.

All this describes some of the potential contours of church in every context – church in the different settings of life, church that enriches everyday existence in life and church that is responsive to the dynamics of network life. Yet if contextual church is a plausible response to today’s cultural landscape, what are its theological foundations? It is to this question that we now turn.

Questions for discussion

How far should the church adapt to changes in society and how far should it seek to be distinct from society?

Can it be said that the expressive self is a Christian self minus God? Or is prioritizing the search for fulfilment fundamentally flawed?

How would you theologically evaluate the network society?

1 Evenness of size is important because it affects the amount of competition. To take an extreme example, if 80 per cent of a suburb were Mormon and they had only one place of worship, while the remaining 20 per cent had three alternatives, the amount of choice for the 80 per cent would be less than if there were several Mormon churches.

2 In his well-received report to Britain’s Methodist Conference in 2011, General Secretary Martyn Atkins spoke candidly of Methodism having too many chapels, an up-to-date echo of Gill’s theme.

3 The ‘Workpaper’ recognized that this argument made all sorts of assumptions and that practice would be more nuanced. But using Church of England figures (and proxies) available for annual gains and losses, the number of parishes, the size of churches and the number of clergy, the model predicted that the average congregation would stabilize at around 150, which was a little lower than the national average for a single clergy congregation (Urban Church Project, 1974, p. 11).

4 Yoder’s comment is echoed in John Hull’s opposite criticism of Mission-shaped Church, ‘We looked for a mission-shaped church but what we found was a church-shaped mission.’ (Hull, 2006, p. 36) I am grateful to John Flett for drawing my attention to the Yoder quote.

5 For a brief introduction to the idea of post-secularity, see Graham Ward (2009, pp. 117–58).

6 ‘Minipreneurs’, www.trendwatching.com (accessed 22 February 2011).

7 Post-Fordism is accessibly introduced by Kumar (1995, pp. 36–65).

8 To do this it will have to engage carefully with the critiques of media technology, such as those provided Sherry Turkle (1995, 2011), though she may overstate her case.

9 The range of views is well summarized by Bretherton (2010, pp. 6–10). Percy quotes Putnam (Percy, 2010, p. 73) but not sociologists like Anthony Giddens and Manuel Castells who are more hopeful.

10 A Microsoft survey of over 1,000 British people found that each person’s average number of friends increased by an astonishing 64 per cent between 2003 and 2006; nearly a third of the sample had made friends online. (‘Britons Make More Time for Friendship than Ever Before’, November 2006, www.microsoft.com.) McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Brashears (2006) found that the mean number of people with whom adult Americans could discuss matters important to them had dropped by nearly a third between 1985 and 2004.

11 Danah Boyd, ‘Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites’, First Monday, December 2006, www.firstmonday.org.

Part 2

Towards a Theological Rationale

What is the Purpose and Nature of the Church?

One of the first questions often asked about new contextual churches is whether they are truly church. Indeed, many of the concerns about these communities arise from calling them church. In offering a theological rationale for these churches, therefore, Part 2 starts with a discussion about the nature of the church. It then considers the place of mission in church, the communal nature of mission in the local church, the extent to which new churches should be contextualized, whether it is legitimate for these churches to focus on a specific cultural group and whether new contextual churches are faithful to the tradition. These chapters draw on, and are intended to contribute to ongoing reflection – still at an early stage – about new contextual churches.

Whereas the traditional approach to evangelism begins with the current church and asks how people can be encouraged to belong, new contextual churches go to where people are and ask what church should appropriately look like in their context. Many young adults think that this is common sense. Meeting with friends to form a new Christian community in everyday life and calling it church seems an obvious thing to do.

It makes all sorts of people nervous, however. Are we playing fast and loose

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Church for Every Context. Michael Moynagh