Whether the Church of England remains the ‘established’ Church of the land or not – and some doubt it -- it must continue to have a concern for the people among whom it is placed, and its mission to the nation as a whole must remain a top priority. But what exactly is that mission? At a time of continuing change, and when influential reports on the Church’s mission have recently been published and debated, it seems to me that we need to take stock.

The first thing to affirm is that we depend wholly on God in our mission. It is his mission, not ours, and it is God who enables us to say and do what we need to say and do. In my experience, I know how God can overrule human weakness and speak directly to people’s hearts and minds.

There are two aspects to mission and evangelism. One has to do with how God has revealed himself and shown us of his will and purposes, supremely in the Holy Scriptures. Such a revelation is not at all arbitrary but concerned profoundly with the nature of the world and its flourishing as well as our well-being. We need, therefore, to bring this revelation into contact with the world as it is. Taking the context seriously is the second aspect of mission which is so important.

The good news which God reveals about himself, specifically in Jesus, has to be translated into the idiom, the thought forms and even the values of any culture or context in which we find ourselves. This task of faithfully interpreting the Gospel in our context, be it local, national or global, is vital to mission and evangelism. It cannot be replaced by anything else and we cannot plead that we have other things to do.

It is important to stress that upholding the uniqueness of Christ in the context of an increasingly and consciously ‘multi-faith’ public ideology is central to our mission. Christ is our point of departure in making sense of the world and our sensitiveness to culture cannot be simply a wholesale endorsement of it.

Elsewhere, I have written about the two ‘poles’ of mission that are ‘embassy’ and ‘hospitality’.

‘Embassy’ is about going out with the good news, both in words and in deeds. One of the things that Christians do with great profit in a society like ours, for example, is to offer people friendship. A very searching book on this subject is called simply Friendship: A Way of Interpreting Christ, written by Liz Carmichael, who is the Chaplain of St John’s College, Oxford.

There is also the remaking of broken lives by providing the material, spiritual and mental necessities of life for people who are ‘on the margins’ and need our help. Not that we should ignore others in need – a need that is sometimes well hidden. Front doors and gated courtyards can conceal a great deal of need and brokenness, and our mission has to involve addressing that need as well.

Our chaplains in the work-place, both ordained and lay, can be excellent ambassadors for mission and, at the latest sessions of General Synod, attention was rightly drawn to the need for the Church’s presence in places of learning. In these and other, similar, circumstances we need to offer a supporting but also, at times, a challenging and transforming presence.

Turning to hospitality, our approach to worship, whatever it is, will fail unless we are hospitable and communicate to those who need some kind of ‘half-way house’ before they come fully into the centre of the church’s worship. If our churches give attention to hospitality -- how people are welcomed and made to feel at home – they will see how much a part of mission it is. Going beyond a warm welcome, there are questions to be asked about accessibility – both physical and in terms of language – about the music and about how naturally people connect with the prayers.

And what about the preaching? How are contemporary burning issues addressed from a biblical perspective? All of those things help us in our mission of making our worship accessible to people.

The Mission-shaped Church report has highlighted new and different ways of Christians assembling. Fresh expressions of being church often recognise that people do not necessarily put geography at the top of the list when they think of their identity. They are more likely to think of themselves in terms of ‘networks’ and so it is right to imagine that such people who have much in common with one another will attempt to come together in that sort of way in terms of Christian faith and life.

I heard recently of a very lively Christian group that meets at a Nando’s chicken restaurant. I have only seen Nando’s from outside but I understand it is quite an experience. A youth group in Bromley meets in a coffee shop because that is somewhere most of its members know well. The home is important as well, and hospitality there is vital for effective outreach and ministry.

These fresh expressions of church, however, need to be put in the wider context of the Church’s mission. They also need to be put at the service of a biblically-ordered Church. The understanding of the Church which we have received from the times of the apostles is not an option which we can take or give away in the interest of fashion.

However Christians assemble, and there can be many different ways, we must ask if this is recognisably a continuation of what we find in the New Testament. And so there we find people who are like one another coming together for worship, for teaching and for fellowship. It should not surprise us, then, that it happens today but it should concern us if that is the only thing that happens.

People also need to come together with Christians who are unlike them, whether in terms of age or ethnicity, culture, or whatever it may be. So while it is right to assemble with those who are like you as the so-called household church, it is also important to assemble with those who are unlike you. That was the case with the Church in Corinth, in Rome and in Ephesus.

Poor and rich, old and young -- here we see people of many different kinds coming together.

It is also important not to reduce our notion of the Church to the local church or even the congregation. In the New Testament, Christians have a great concern for other Christians who are near and around them. For us, that must mean paying attention to other Christian believers in this nation and our relationships with them.

Then, of course, there is the worldwide Church and its demands on us, and I mean worldwide Church not only in the sense of the Church scattered throughout the nations today but also the Church down the ages. Such a vision of a Church cannot be sacrificed to one kind of fashion or another.

Another aspect of the Church’s mission is the national mission. While we value the present rôle of the Church of England, if it is disestablished tomorrow that will not mean that we can escape our obligation to commit ourselves in terms of mission to the nation. That will continue, and we have to ask how.

Some are talking about a new concordat with the State and I think that must be right in terms of how we deal with historic buildings and the assistance we receive in maintaining a very large part of the nation’s built heritage. It will concern itself with the terms of service of clergy and lay people in the Church who are serving full time or part time. It will also have to do with the Church’s discipline and the need for the Church to be in control, and it will have to do with how Church appointments are made.

Even if such a concordat with the State is not possible, the Church has to continue to define and to redefine its national mission.

No mission can be successful if the Church does not have a flourishing ministry and we need, as a Church, to give further thought to the means of discerning vocation. The spread of groups encouraging vocations is a welcome one but vocation is not solely to ordained ministry. Each baptised person needs to discover his or her vocation not only in the Church but also in the world, at their place of work, in their leisure activities and within their family.

There are specific gifts that lead to public ministry but not all do. The gift of friendship, for instance, may not lead to any kind of authorised ministry. Where authorised ministry is concerned I, for one, am happy, in the spirit of Ephesians 4, to acknowledge and celebrate a diversity.

The question of the ordained ministry has to be put in the context of this wider discernment of gift and vocation. I continue to believe that in the New Testament and in the Church immediately following the period of the New Testament there was, first of all, a local ministry of leadership. It largely arose in the community and was for that community. We need more and more to recover that sense of vocation of ministry to and for our local Christian community.

There was also, however, a wider itinerant, teaching, prophetic and apostolic ministry that was given for the ‘enabling’ of the local Church and of local ministry. We need to recover that sense of the apostolic in the ministry of the Church.

It is in the flourishing of ministry, both ordained and lay, that we will find the means to fulfil our mission locally, nationally and also in partnership with the rest of the worldwide Church, globally. In the years to come we need to maintain a mission of presence in every community in our land. We need a mission of prayer for a needy world. We need a mission of practical involvement in the struggle for justice and in the exercise of compassion. We need a mission of intelligent and intelligible proclamation to remind people of their God-given worth, to bring them to repentance, to a fulfilment of their authentic spiritual aspirations and to an assurance based on trust.

BY The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali

[Source: The Church of England Newspaper]

The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali was appointed as the Bishop of Rochester since 1994. He entered the House of Lords in 1999. He has a continuing interest in mission and development issues and also in inter-faith dialogue. He is currently chairing the Church of England’s Working Party on women in the episcopate and is President of the Anglican Communion’s Network on Inter-Faith Concerns (NIFCON). He is a long-standing member of ARCIC (The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission) and IARCCUM (The Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission on Unity and Mission). He is Chair of the House of Bishops’ Theological Group.

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