While I was away this week, I had some time to start reading Urban Ministry: The Kingdom, the City & the People of God, co-authored by Harvie Conn and Manuel Ortiz. It really is an excellent book, although I've discovered that just reading through it is not sufficient—I am going to have to go back to the beginning armed with my trusty pencil and ruler and take the time to pore over the material and mine the gold from this thick volume.

One of the themes Conn and Ortiz develop in the book is that the city is a fundamentally religious place, a theme I will be looking at in the next few posts as I continue to work through the book. In ancient history, the religious character of the city was much more overt, but the more subliminal religiosity of today's cities does not obscure the fact that it still remains a fundamentally religious place. Conn and Ortiz write that in the city we find

urban mazes searching through the city for meaning and order to existence—quests that never escape their religious origins. With organized systems that structure religion around the supernatural, building temple and mosque. With unorganized common or folk religions that focus hopes for safe air travel in the 'spirit of the air' embodied in a straw idol and then discard it at the Kimpo airport in Seoul as the plane is boarded. With the surrogate religion of the great England bowler Harold Larwood, who claimed, 'Cricket was my reason for living.' With the unorganized invisible religion that finds its answer to the yearning of the heart in sex or ideology, work or family (191).

Of course, this is just a testament to the reality that human beings are themselves, at the core, religious beings. Conn and Ortiz cite John Calvin in the first book of his Institutes of the Christian Religion:

God himself has implanted in all men a certain understanding of his divine majesty. Ever renewing its memory, he repeatedly sheds fresh drops...[All men] continue to retain some seed of religion. So deeply does the common conception occupy the minds of all, so tenaciously does it inhere in the hearts of all! Therefore, since from the beginning of the world there has been no region, no city, in short, no household, that could do without religion, there lies in this a tacit confession of a sense of deity inscribed in the hearts of all (I.iii.1).

With that in view, Conn and Ortiz ask a pressing question: "Who waits in the urban shadows of these dead-end mazeways distorted by sin, these blurred human paths along which we stumble through the city, blindly searching for links to the cosmos and its norm, to the riddle of our existence?" (191). Whoever these people are, let it be the church that shines light into those shadows, being the presence of Jesus and his Kingdom in the city. We are called as the people of God to "seek the peace and prosperity of the city" and to "pray to the Lord for it" (Jeremiah 29:7). The best thing for any city are churches that actively seek to love and serve their cities.

In a place where a plethora of idols compete for its citizens hearts, in a place where meaning and purpose is distored or even lost, in a place where people's identities can be reduced to nothing, let us proclaim the message of the gospel that crushes all idols, provides total meaning and purpose, and gives people their ultimate identity as citizens of the Kindgom and children of the King.

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If you are not familiar with Lesslie Newbigin's story, he grew up in Britain and studied at Cambridge, where he was converted and trained for the ministry. After getting married, he spent nearly forty years in India as a missionary. When he was in Britain as a child and a student, it was still something of a "Christian" society, but upon his return in 1974, he discovered a country that he could describe as nothing less than pagan.

Michael Goheen, in his doctoral dissertation on Newbigin's missionary ecclesiology (which is available online for free!), writes that Newbigin had come to understand the church's relationship to the culture as a missionary encounter because "the church embodies the gospel as an alternative way of life to the culture in which it is set and thereby challenges the culture's fundamental assumptions" (365). Newbigin borrowed language from the sociology of knowledge to express this notion of a missionary encounter in his book, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. He writes,

The gospel gives rise to a new plausibility structure, a radically different vision of things from those that shape all human cultures apart from the gospel. The Church, therefore, as the bearer of the gospel, inhabits a plausibility structure which is at variance with, and which calls into question, those that govern all human cultures without exception (9).

Goheen adds that "all cultures exhibit a plausibility structure that embody and transmit the fundamental beliefs of its inhabitants. Those fundamental beliefs stand in opposition to the gospel and if there is to be a missionary encounter, the church itself must be a community that embodies an alternative set of foundational beliefs" (365-366). If the church is faithful in doing this then three things will result: first, the foundational beliefs of a culture will be challenged; second, the church will offer the gospel as a credible alternative way of life; and third, the church will call the culture to radical conversion and invite it to live and understand the world through the lens of the gospel. At that point, the culture is left with the choice of accepting or rejecting the gospel and the lordship of Jesus Christ. As Newbigin expresses it in his little book, The Other Side of 1984: Questions for the Churches, the church that embodies the gospel

must necessarily clash with contemporary culture. It must challenge the whole 'fiduciary framework' within which our culture operates. It must call unequivocally for radical conversion, a conversion of the mind so that things are seen differently, and a conversion of the will so that things are done differently. It must decline altogether the futile attempt to commend the biblical vision of how things are by seeking to adjust it to the assumptions of our culture (53).

The fact that Newbigin would say something this provocative in the context he did was significant, for he was speaking about a culture that, to some degree, still believed it was a Christian culture, much like America today. But Newbigin understands that just because a certain percentage of a culture's population professes belief in God or attends church regularly does not mean its underlying worldview is shaped by the gospel.

Further, he rightly recognizes that the worldviews that give shape to a culture are religious in nature. Religion, in Newbigin's view, is not just a cultural form, and "it is more than an institution that embodies beliefs and practices concerning God and the destiny of the soul. It is a set of ultimate commitments about the nature of the world that gives shape, direction, and meaning to life and demands final loyalty" (Goheen, 367).

And here, then, is the reason the gospel needs to challenge the foundational beliefs of a culture—because all of life is religion, and everything we think, say, and do is either in service to God or an idol. Christ is Lord over all of life, and the church is called to proclaim and embody this truth. As witnesses to Jesus and the presence of his kingdom and rule, we cannot be satisfied to accept a sacred/secular divide and leave our culture to let its presuppositions inform certain areas while challenging its assumptions in other areas. All of life belongs to the Lord and our calling as the church is to unapologetically call to the world to recognize that truth.

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Lesslie Newbigin, the renowned missionary theologian, writes the following in his 1989 book, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society:

The logic of mission is this: the true meaning of the human story has been disclosed. Because it is the truth, it must be shared universally. It cannot be private opinion. When we share it with all peoples, we give them the opportunity to know the truth about themselves, to know who they are because they can know the true story of which their lives are a part. Wherever the gospel is preached the question of the meaning of the human story—the universal and the personal story of each human being—is posed. Thereafter the situation can never be the same. It can never revert to the old harmonies, the old securities, the old static or cyclical patterns of the past. Now decisions have to be made for or against Christ, for Christ as the clue to history or for some other clue. There will always be the temptation, even for those within the Christian community, to find the clue in the success of some project of our own, to see our program (whether of church growth or of human development) as the success story which is going to give meaning to our lives. The gospel calls us back again and again to the real clue, the crucified and risen Jesus, so that we learn that the meaning of history is not immanent in history itself, that history cannot find its meaning at the end of a process of development, but that history is given its meaning by what God has done in Jesus Christ and by what he has promised to do; and that the true horizon is not at the successful end of our projects but in his coming to reign…

We believe that the truth about the human story has been disclosed in the events which form the substance of the gospel. We believe, therefore, that these events are the real clue to the story of every person, for every human life is part of the whole human story and cannot be understood apart from that story. It follows then that the test of our real belief is our readiness to share it with all peoples (125-126).

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Emil Brunner once made this incisive statement: "The church exists for mission as a fire exists in burning."

The doctrine of the church is intimately connected with the notion that Christianity is a missionary religion. The two cannot be separated. Gary Badcock makes some significant observations regarding the mission of the church in his book, The House Where God Lives (some of which I noted earlier), and in the following paragraph, calls us to remember that mission is absolutely central to the church's identity, reflective of the insights of missiologists such as Lesslie Newbigin and David Bosch. This will be the last portion I take from his book for now, and so I leave the final word to him:

Much of this biblical insight [on the church's mission] is also present in the doctrine of the Trinity, according to which, through the sending of the Son into the world, and through the gift of the Spirit, the Father shows himself to be open to the creation, inviting it into his life. The work of the Son and the Spirit, the 'two hands of the Father' (Irenaeus), reveals that God takes a 'hands-on' approach to the world, an approach that is directed to our becoming 'participants of the divine nature' (2 Pet. 1:4). This theme has had an impact on recent missiological thought: it appears in the concept of the missio Dei movement, which was developed in the context of the ecumenical work of the International Missionary Council in the mid-twentieth century...According to one of the documents issued in connection with its 1952 conference in Willingen, Germany:

The mission is not only obedience to a word of the Lord, it is not only the commitment to the gathering of the congregation; it is participation in the sending of the Son, in the missio Dei, with the inclusive aim of establishing the lordship of Christ over the whole redeemed creation. The missionary movement of which we are a part has its source in the Triune God Himself.

According to this...view, mission is not simply something the church does, as it were, among its several other tasks and duties. Nor would it be strictly accurate as a matter of theological principle to say that the task of mission belongs to the church. Rather, since the mission is fundamentally God's, and since the church merely participates in it, the church belongs to the missio Dei rather than the missio to the church. Therefore, mission precedes the church and is utterly fundamental: it is effectively the womb from which the church is called into being. Or, to put it another way, it is only by virtue of the church's participation in the divine mission that it actually comes into existence. In this strictly theological sense, then, mission is nothing less than the source and content of all ecclesiology.

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A short time ago, I mentioned and quoted from Gary Badcock's book on ecclesiology, The House Where God Lives, and as I read through his discussion of the mission of the church the other day, I found myself increasingly tempted to purchase the book, even with its $27 pricetag.

There is much worth thinking about in this section, a lot of it echoing the insights of missiologists such as David Bosch and Lesslie Newbigin. I found the following, in which Badcock links the mission of the church with the resurrection, to be very significant:

In the New Testament, indeed, the mission of the church is closely connected with the pivotal event of the resurrection of Jesus. It is in the Gospel of John that the link between the resurrection and the mission is clearest, for that is where Jesus' central appearance to his disciples, following his rising from the dead, brings both the bestowal of the Spirit and the ultimate commissioning for the missionary expansion that followed: 'As the Father has sent me, so I send you' (John 20:21). This statement picks up on themes scattered elsewhere in John's Gospel (e.g., John 17:1-3, 18, 23); and particularly when it is coupled with the teaching of Paul, it helps us understand what the character of the resurrection appearances might have been. The emphasis falls less on epiphany than on commissioning, or, to put the real point more precisely, it falls on sharing Christ's mission. The implication of all of this would be that where there is little appreciation of the importance of the Christian mission, there is a limited grasp of the resurrection faith. Therefore, whatever the cultural difficulties implicit in embracing mission as central to the doctrine of the church, the theological theme can scarcely be avoided.

There is a lot packed into this paragraph worth thinking about, not least of which is how our view of the mission of the church is linked to our understanding (or lack thereof) of the resurrection.

Another recently published book on ecclesiology, coming from the standpoint of biblical theology, is written by Graham Twelftree, entitled, People of the Spirit: Exploring Luke's View of the Church. Using insights from the books of Luke and Acts, he draws out the implications of the church's mission being centered on the living Christ, and in doing so, reflects and expands on what Badcock is saying. Consider this:

Perhaps, above all else, Luke would say that the Church is the present and ongoing embodiment of Jesus and his mission. It is not that the Church is simply Christ-like or is to mirror and maintain the ministry of Jesus through emulating his activities and message. Rather, through receiving the empowerment and direction of the Spirit, the Church embodies and expresses that same powerful presence of God apparent in Jesus and his ministry...Not only does the life of the Church begin in Jesus' ministry, but also the life of Jesus continues in the ministry of the Church...

[Luke's] positive conclusion that the Church is fundamentally Christo-centric also stands as a critique of some contemporary understandings of the Church. For example, the Church is sometimes seen as essentially a community. But, for Luke, the Church is not fundamentally a community, though it is, in part, communal. In that Jesus is said to appoint a group (note Acts 1:21), Luke signals that he understood the Church was not a collection of individuals related to him but a community of his followers. Yet, for its identity, the Church depended on the call of Jesus not its collecting or being together. Also, the Church is sometimes seen as those gathered around the cross. However, for Luke, the community of the Church is not determined by gathering around or under the cross, it is gathered around the living Jesus...the Church is called into existence by Jesus and has its raison d'être in its ongoing embodiment of his life and mission.

That the church is gathered around the living Jesus is a significant point; in the book of Acts, for example, most the recorded sermons are centered on proclaiming that Jesus had risen from the dead and continues to live. It is this living Christ who gave the apostles the commission to go to all the nations and preach the good news. And it is this same living and resurrected Jesus who needs to continue to be the focal point of the church's mission today.

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