The Ecclesial Context
The
general ecclesial context of the church in western cultures is found in
modernity. The shift to postmodernism has led to an increased non-relevance to
the cultural context the church resides within. The delineation of the Positive
Deviance Approach as progressive force in culture indicates the necessity for
developing a system comparable to Dr. Sternin’s “amplifying positive deviance” for use within the ecclesial context.
Dr. Lesslie Newbigin makes a statement in his book Foolishness to the Greeks that sums up the necessity for developing
an ecclesial concept of Positive Deviance, he writes,
The idea
that one can or could at any time separate out by some process of distillation
a pure gospel unadulterated by any cultural accretion is an illusion. It is, in
fact, an abandonment of the gospel, for the gospel is about the word made
flesh. Every statement of the gospel in words is conditioned by the culture of
which those words are a part, and every style of life that claims to embody the
truth of the gospel is a culturally conditioned style of life. There can never
be a culture-free gospel. Yet the gospel, which is from the beginning to the
end embodied in culturally conditioned forms, calls into question all cultures,
including the one in which it was originally embodied.[1]
Newbigin’s conclusion indicates that culture is
always an influence in the embodiment of the Gospel. This implies that in order
for the Gospel to be effective it must engage and challenge all cultures as God
seeks to bring forth the Kingdom. This implicates the gap that exists
between the traditional church and the emerging churches amid the marginalized.
Leonard Sweet, in his endorsement of Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch’s book, The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation
and Mission for the 21st Century Church, writes,
The current
credibility gap has made it hard to communicate the gospel with clarity and
authenticity. Paradoxically, this is the case even though it is currently a
time of almost unprecedented openness to the issues of God, faith, and meaning.
This is a time when the need for, and relevance of, the gospel has seldom been
greater, but the relevance of the Church has seldom been less.[2]
Challenging traditional
expressions of ecclesiology is not new to Christianity, though it may not be
well know, Jesus Christ himself established the precedent through his
interactions with the religious ruling class of his time. Blomberg tells us in
his book Contagious Holiness that
Jesus’ meals with sinners’ sets forth a theory of Jesus challenging the
traditional forms of ecclesia exercised within first century Palestine. He
writes, “. . . Jesus demonstrated his
acceptance of them without calling them to repentance.”[3] Blomberg develops the cultural and
religious context of the narrative. The narrative reflects the culture
is unfriendly to Jesus’ practices
and strategies of openly engaging
sinners in this manner. He writes,
. . . what stood out was Jesus’
pronouncement of God’s forgiveness of sin to people without requiring of them
the standard Jewish signs of true repentance: the offering of animal sacrifices
in the temple; restitution where crimes, particularly financial ones, against
people could be compensated for; and for a period of penance or probation
during which ones change of heart and behavior could be tested.[4]
The
practices and strategies
of Jesus are in direct conflict with the ecclesia and conventional wisdom of
his time. Blomberg makes this observation concerning Jesus’ practices
and strategies in comparison with
the actions of the religious populace. He writes,
In fact, the overall impression emerging
from the majority of the texts surveyed . . . is that meals helped to draw boundaries. Only those who in some sense belonged were included; the total outsider
was not welcome. We do not find a single example of. . . faithful Israelites
taking the initiative to seek out the ritually or morally stigmatized of their
society for inclusion in table fellowship, as would later characterize Jesus'
practice.[5]
There exists a clear likeness between the
Attractional, Propositional and Colonial ecclesial form represented in the
modernist institutional church and the religious leaders of Jesus’ time. The
difference is those who are challenging the ecclesial model of Attractional,
Propositional and Colonial are approaching ecclesiology from a Jesus way which
engages culture from a Missional, Relational and Incarnational form. Sweet
gives a fuller description in his book So
Beautiful when he writes, “Christianity
is about a design for living as authentic human beings: a trialectical process
of missionalizing, relationalizing, and incarnationalizing your life and
community.”[6] Jesus said, “Follow me.”[7] By becoming a missional movement the
church moves from the institution and becomes the community incarnating Christ
to the world thereby breaking the barrier between sacred and secular.
Every
area of life becomes sacred. Sweets asserts, “We are not here to keep polity or
even to keep our denominational ‘t’ crossed and the ‘i’ dotted. We were put
here for more than keeping principles or following commandments. We were put
here to 'glorify God and enjoy him forever.”[8] Darrell Guder states the challenge “is
to move from a church with mission to a missional church.”[9] Sweet and Guder’s statements inform
Christ followers that the church is the mission of the missio Dei.[10]
Church as mission requires rethinking the churches practices and strategies, of
who the church is and what the church is doing. This requires moving away from the
institutional perspective of the church to new forms of ecclesia. This is
absolutely necessary in the church-as-mission perspective. This is why a semiotic rubric of ecclesia
needs to be developed for the missional church within the construct of the missio Dei.
[1] Newbigin,
Foolishness to The Greeks. 4.
[2] Frost
and Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come.
[3] Blomberg,
Contagious holiness.
[4]
Ibid.
[5]
Ibid, 64.
[6] Sweet,
So Beautiful.
[7]
John 1:43.
[8]
Sweet, 111.
[9] Darrell L. Guder and Lois Barrett, Missional Church: A
Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing, 1998), 11.uder and Barrett, Missional
church, 11.
[10] David Bosch Helps to define the ideology of the missio Dei, “Mission was understood as
being derived from the very nature of God. It was thus put in the context of
the doctrine on the missio Dei as God
the Father sending the Son, and God the Father and the Son sending the Spirit
was expanded to include yet another “movement”: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
sending the church into the world. As far as missionary thinking was concerned,
this linking with the doctrine of the Trinity constituted an important innovation.”
David Jacobus Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm
Shifts in Theology of Mission (Orbis Books, 1998), 390.
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