World-Shaped Mission. Janice Price

of England, it was a call to recover the energy, life and vitality of the gospel that was all too evident in the churches of the South. Though its outcomes were limited it raised questions in the Church of England about its lack of zeal for evangelism and at parish level it encouraged many Christians to engage with and explore their faith through courses such as Alpha, Emmaus and others. The hallmark of the Decade in the Church of England became ‘from maintenance to mission’. The Anglican Communion joined together at the Kanuga Conference in 1995 to mark the Mid-term of the Decade of Evangelism where it affirmed the distinctive contribution of Anglicans to evangelism as respectful listening and proclamation within the context of incarnational presence and pastoral care.35

      2.14 In 2006 the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Mission and Evangelism published its report entitled Communion in Mission.36 In reviewing current trends and developments in Anglican world mission it picks up a number of themes raised in the 1999 report of Missio37 notably questions surrounding the use of the word ‘partnership’. This had been brought into sharp focus by the vastly changed situation where the growing churches in the Communion are in the global South, and were showing a life and vitality quite alien to the churches in the North. It was also recognized that it was all too easy for partnership to fall quickly into old patterns of the colonial mindset. Missio suggests the movement from the use of the word ‘partnership’ to ‘companionship’ as they had noticed a

      ‘significant narrowing of the meaning of the term partnership in the 1990s. The word is increasingly used to describe specific programmes or collaborative activity between agencies or diocese’.38

      Companionship, they advocate, better describes a broader relationship of trust, listening and learning.

      2.15 The 2006 report calls the churches of the Communion to deepen their understanding of partnership and to adopt a new or alternative word for the relationships that go across cultural boundaries. The report also suggests ‘companion’ as well as ‘Brother-Sister’ and ‘friend’. There is also the word ‘hospitality’.

      2.16 This brief historical summary has focused on the development of the idea of partnership in the Ecumenical Councils and the Anglican Communion and how that impacted the Church of England. This part of the story reveals how a movement or weaving of ideas across Councils and Communion has brought the idea of partnership into the workings of the Church of England and how such bodies can assist the churches as a whole to critique and develop their common life as the worldwide Body of Christ. There is interconnectedness as the churches search for unity in their common mission in the world expressed with different emphases but each needing the other. It raises the question ‘whither partnership?’ What is the future for this idea that Warren described as

      ‘an idea whose time has not yet fully come’?39

      Is the Church of England now called to look at partnership in a different way? Can she move from being predominantly the giver to become the receiver as the changing shape of the Anglican Communion shows growth and vitality in the continents of Africa, Asia and Latin America rather than the North and West? How the Church of England receives the gifts of the world church has been a common focus of discussion in mission discourse for many years. Does there need to be an assessment of current practices in world mission concerning the giving of money? When large amounts of money pass from the Church of England to our partners in other parts of the global church whose needs are being met? How do we build relationships of equal partnership or, to use a well-used phrase, ‘mutual responsibility and interdependence’? Does there need to be a change in the way we use language to describe world mission? Or will this merely mask the subtle but significant changes in attitude that need to occur at a deeper level? These, and other questions, will form the basis of this discussion for the development of world mission in the Church of England. The overall aim is to ask how we can deepen our understanding and practice of partnership for the sake of God’s Kingdom in God’s world today.

      Theology of partnership

      Partnership and the missio dei

      2.17 The most significant development in mission theology in the second half of the twentieth century was the emergence of the concept of the missio dei, the mission of God. The missio dei emphasizes that the origin of mission is found in the God the Holy Trinity. This was a significant movement away from the understanding of mission as the task of the church. God the Trinity is the one who sends the church (John 20.21). Mission is the expression of God’s unfolding purposes as they reveal God’s nature and purpose. God’s church is sent following in the way of Christ and as sign and foretaste of the Kingdom. The role of the church is to discern where God is at work and to follow in obedience. Hartenstein as one of the earliest commentators on the missio dei said,

      ‘mission is not just the conversion of the individual, not just obedience to the world of the Lord, nor just the obligation to gather the church. It is the taking part in the sending of the Son, the missio dei, with the holistic aim of establishing Christ’s rule over all redeemed creation.’40

      2.18 The phrase missio dei was first adopted at the 1952 International Missionary Council Conference in Willingen, Germany. With this re-orientation of mission as a movement from God to the world came a re-orientation of the place of the church and the Kingdom of God. The church-centred mission that focused its main strategy on church planting and social provision of education and medicine became a limited understanding. Once the Triune God became the origin, source and primary actor in mission then the world took on a different perspective. The Kingdom of God came to be understood as bigger and beyond the church but which involved the church as sign, instrument and foretaste of the Kingdom.

      2.19 What of the relationship between missio dei and partnership? The emergence of the two concepts so closely together at the 1947 Whitby Conference and at the 1952 Willingen Conference show a convergence of ideas at something of a kairos41 moment in mission history. Wider political changes taking place in the 1950s necessitated the re-thinking of old patterns of working in mission and the articulation of new theory and practice. The expulsion of the missionaries from China, which had been one of the largest of the mission fields, had occurred between 1949 and 1951 and this sent shock waves through the Mission Agencies, the churches and conciliar ecumenism. While partnership was the new articulation of the relationships between sending and receiving churches and other forms of missionary engagement, so missio dei was the articulation of a new theological understanding of the church in mission in relationship with the Trinitarian God and the God’s Kingdom.

      2.20 Theologically the two concepts interweave and interrelate. Ross argues that, ‘partnership is an idea essential to the very nature of God … we see partnership in the Godhead … God is a community of three divine persons. God is also one God’.42 God is not self-contained but has, by God’s nature and love, to express personally and reach beyond itself. Mission is the self-expression of God for God’s creation or, as Bosch describes the Trinity,

      ‘a fountain of sending love’.43

      2.21 John V. Taylor states, ‘Partnership between Churches in mission means also an apostolic concern from one to the other to help one another to present the likeness of Christ more clearly; being in travail for one another until we all are formed in the shape of Christ.’44