Church for Every Context. Michael Moynagh

asks what constitutes the essence of the church and discusses what mature church involves.

      What is the purpose of the church?

      As God’s visible people, the church has its purpose in relation to the kingdom of God, which was a central theme in Jesus’ ministry. In Luke 4.17–9, for instance, Jesus identified himself with Isaiah’s vision of the kingdom. The vision included peace for the entire earth (Isa. 2.4), light where there has been darkness (9.2), harmony in the whole of creation (11.6) and a world of health, justice and abundance (65.17–24). Jesus taught the values of the kingdom, challenged the assumptions of his society from a kingdom perspective and demonstrated the power of the kingdom through his miracles. His life, death and resurrection inaugurated the kingdom, which will be established in full when he returns. In the ‘between time’ church bears witness to the kingdom. But what does bearing witness involve?

      Church-shaped kingdom?

      There is a spectrum in how theologians understand the relationship between church and kingdom. At one end are those who say the church is where the kingdom is made real in the present (Higton, 2008, p. 335). This ‘church-shaped kingdom’ view was assumed in the church-centred approach to mission common in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the mid nineteenth century, Henry Venn and others in the Anglo-Saxon tradition argued that church planting should be considered a goal of missionary endeavours, alongside personal conversion. Mission came to be seen as church extension overseas (Scherer, 1993, pp. 82–4). The kingdom of God was not discussed in connection with church and mission till the 1930s.

      J. C. Hoekendijk, whose solution was not without problems, summarized the prevailing view in 1952:

      The world has almost ceased to be the world and is now conceived of as a sort of ecclesiastical training-ground. The kingdom is either confined within the bounds of the Church or else it has become something like an eschatological lightning on the far horizon. (1952, p. 324)

      Although theologians have brought the relationship between church and kingdom more sharply into focus since World War Two, the assumption that mission was mainly about church left a legacy. Many Christians today still define the world in church categories, distinguishing – in Hoekendijk’s words – ‘not-yet-church, already-church, still-church and no-longer church’ (1952, p. 324). They see mission primarily in terms of evangelism, of working with God to draw people into his family. The church follows the Spirit into the world to rescue it from sin and bring people into the kingdom. Individuals enter the kingdom when they are born again and become members of the church. Church and kingdom are virtually collapsed into one.

      On this view, through the Spirit the church imperfectly embodies the kingdom in its life, not least by explicitly acknowledging the Lord’s reign. In some perspectives the kingdom is spiritualized – by entering the church you enter a spiritual kingdom. But increasingly the kingdom is seen in physical terms, as God’s rescue of the whole of creation. The church then becomes God’s agent and foretaste of a holistic kingdom. It joins the Spirit in pushing back forces that threaten creation’s well-being, and conversion includes being converted to this task. The underlying assumption, however, remains the same: the church is the gateway to and the vehicle of the kingdom.

      Is this the perspective of Mission-shaped Church (2004), which kick-started fresh expressions of church in the UK? John Hull lambasts the report for leaning too heavily in this direction. The lineage of church planting, in which mission was closely identified with church extension, encouraged the working party to become too church centred in its theology. ‘We looked for a mission-shaped church but what we found was a church-shaped mission’ (Hull, 2006