What I would like to do here is to help us think about what the discipline of missiology might say about the topic of reimagining church and how innovation that comes from such reimagining might faithfully express God’s mission. I want to begin with a well-known quote about missiology, the study of God’s mission in the world. Missiology is the
science about the Word of God as the Church in her becoming; the Word as the Church in her borderline situations; the Church as a surprise and a puzzle; the Church in her growth; the Church when her historical appearance is so new that she has to strain herself to recognize her past in the mirror of the present; the Church where she is pregnant of new revelations for a people in which she dawns…Missiology studies the growth of the Church into new peoples, the birth of the Church beyond its social boundaries; beyond the linguistic barriers within which she feels at home; beyond the poetic images in which she taught her children…Missiology therefore is the study of the Church as surprise.1
Let’s talk about the church as surprise. We do not need to look long or hard to find many church surprises today.
Some examples include the following:
Root and Branch Church in Chicago consists of gatherings that include Welcome Tables on the second and fourth weeks of the month. The Welcome Table experience happens in people’s homes, where they share food and pass bread and wine. Face-to-face conversations and relationships take place during such Welcome Tables. Members take part in many practices that members of established churches do, but this community expresses practices in highly creative, contextualized ways. Here, the community is “made up of textures that retain the feel of the local community, not a denominational book of discipline.”
Wild Goose Christian Community in Indian Valley, VA, which immerses its own community life in the culture of Appalachia, involves local forms of storytelling, quilt-making, furniture-making, music, and arts, including monthly square dancing, as parts of the community’s worship.
North Grafton United Methodist Church in Massachusetts, which, when down to its last 5 members, sold its building, resurrected as a new church plant they call Simple Church. Now, they embrace a table-centered fellowship with 30-40 regularly gathering for the Lord’s Supper during their “dinner church.” Their times include simple hymn singing and prayers, holy conversation (basically group discussion of a text after a short sermon) together with corporate work of bread baking that constitutes their new financial model (they sell the bread they make!). They partner with a local nonprofit to train youth to bake bread as a vocation.
Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis, where attendance at the 300-person building had dwindled to 30 and there were no youth or children left. They embraced the practice of Sabbath as a new central focus, where every other week, members gather Saturday evening for contemplative services that draw upon the same Scripture and sermon as the previous Sunday’s worship. This practice reversed the decline and now the church has around 90 members. Young families have joined the church, and the children’s program is back.
Church of the Common Ground, an Episcopal congregation in Atlanta, holds worship outdoors every Sunday for a congregation of people who are homeless. It also engages in unique services, such as Common Soles, a nonmedical foot clinic. Church of the Common Ground focuses on offering unconditional acceptance, theological affirmation, and community to some of the estimated 3,000 homeless people in the city.
Church of the Messiah in Detroit was a church on the verge of shutting down, but now it is a community hub that has more than 300 members, is racially diverse, and is majority young. The church has adopted and runs more than 200 affordable housing units, offers free internet for residents who didn’t have access and offers several incubated businesses with products ranging from tea to deodorant to a clothing line.
Some label fellowships such as these “Divergent Church.”2 Others call these new types of church “Fresh Expressions.”3 Sometimes communities use the image of resurrection to describe their life together as often these stories have a “near death” experience as an important catalyst. Some are not congregations per se but hybrids (e.g., Christian communities that function in or as a part of drop-in centers). Often, such fellowships involve a high degree of risk-taking and creativity. Many times, these changes involve connection with people who would almost certainly not join traditional religious communities. These communities often redefine flourishing as less about “membership growth” or growth of monetary contributions and more about joy and living into a new vision of discipleship and journey into a missional adventure. Frequently these gatherings do not involve buildings but include architectural innovation (e.g., house churches, dinner table churches gathering around tables instead of traditional pews) and non-Sunday a.m. centric gatherings. These innovative communities regularly include nonprofit/congregation hybrids, multicultural communities, coffee shops, pubs, and food-oriented fellowships. Sometimes, they involve businesses combined with churches or focus on a particular social need like homelessness or housing. Sometimes, they include an emphasis on particular groups of people like the homeless, cowboys, or members of the LGBTQ community.
In significant ways, all these different communities innovate but their innovations raise a huge question: Why innovate? Or perhaps a better question is this- What is the vision or motivation behind churches that innovate? Andrew Root, in a significant work, reminds us to interrogate our practices of innovation and entrepreneurship. In particular, he cautions against a type of obsession with innovation that is driven more by a modern view of the self as a religious consumer and an equally modern fixation with the new as an ultimate end. Root calls into question the naïve assumption that any innovative congregation is necessarily missional and faithful to the gospel.4 This type of innovation is faddish, driven by the concerns of the religious consumer who tires of the old and demands newness.
But there is another vision that can drive innovation and experimentation. Such can emerge from a keen sense of missional calling and attention to context/culture. That is, what the term “innovation” can do is call us to consider the gospel vis-à-vis culture and context. The innovation we see happening all around us calls us to think missiologically.
Missiology reminds us that as the church extends into ever-new contexts, we let go of our cultural imagination and familiarity and seek to discern God’s missional calling into ever-expanding new cultural contexts.
We humans typically grow comfortable in our surroundings. When certain forms become livable and, therefore, comfortable, we often gradually assume that such are also normative. But this need not be the case. We can be open to fresh expressions while staying theologically centered. Innovation is not the enemy, rather thoughtless, consumer-driven innovation is! Tradition is not the enemy, rather thoughtless traditionalism that fails to grasp culture is.5 Root suggests that as we think about innovation, the church, most importantly, needs “to be taken into practices of letting go.”6
Let go of what?
Our misconception that numerical growth is the primary marker of God’s kingdom on earth.
Our attractional posture forged in North American Christendom culture, where expectations were that people attend worship and be members of congregations.
Our infatuation with the new and boredom with all things traditional.
Our attachments to our current, culturally shaped forms, which have grown comfortable and routine, which we sometimes carelessly associate with the eternal gospel rather than recognizing what they are—culturally expressed responses to the eternal gospel.
Our security, which might prevent us from hearing God’s missional call that could lead us to change.
Our traditionalism that does not remember that everything we think of as church was done for a first time.
Root reminds us that letting go leads us to find our most basic and true identity—that of being “in Christ,” both as individuals and as communities. It is when we come to this place of radical identity that we are best poised to discern God’s missional calling.
By letting go and finding our identity neither in contemporary culture nor the past but in Christ, we can be genuinely open to key insights from missiology. Missiology typically has emphasized a dual focus rooted in the doctrine of the Incarnation. That is, as missiologist Lesslie Newbigin has pressed us to understand, God’s mission always involves a message of challenging relevance. Or, as missions historian Andrew Walls calls us to remember, the gospel involves both an indigenous (feeling at home in our local cultural contexts, a fitting in) and a pilgrim impulse (that our life and home are rooted elsewhere, outside our local cultural contexts, in the eternal). Our articulation of the gospel message and the shape of our communal life and worship (how we do church), are always simultaneously rooted in God and expressed in ever-changing cultural shape. God’s great missional act of Incarnation teaches us that innovation must emerge from and live in the tension of both relevance to contextual realities and the challenge that comes from being connected with things that are eternal.
Missiology challenges traditionalists who need to embrace the church as surprise, and who need to be reminded that everything was once an innovation. Missiology also challenges those who might thrive on novelty to consider more than “consumer impulses” as they consider innovation. The gospel and the communities that indwell that good news must embody challenging relevance. The church must live into both the pilgrim and the indigenous. There is no perfect balance here. The problem comes when we are attached to one part of this dual dynamic and fail to hold the other dynamic in creative tension.
The idea of innovation leads us to think about what is occurring, namely, the foundational missiological commitment to contextualization. Far too often, as these innovative communities remind us, we neglect or become numb to our contexts and cultures and find ourselves excessively attached to our inherited cultural forms. Missiology reminds us that as the church extends into ever-new contexts, we let go of our cultural imagination and familiarity and seek to discern God’s missional calling into ever-expanding new cultural contexts.
Back to Ivan Illich, who reminds us that the “mission of the Church is the social continuation of the Incarnation.”7 Church innovations must never be merely a growth strategy or reaction to “consumer demands.” Instead, fresh expressions of church must represent a faithful response to God’s call to Incarnation and gospel, to the dual principle of pilgrim/indigenous, and living life as challenging relevance. Missiology reminds us how the church has existed for two thousand years not by staying the same but by finding genuine contextualization among peoples, cultures, and places throughout the world. As much as this has been true historically and is currently true globally, this needs to be true in our current moment in North America.
Chris Flanders was born and raised in the Midwest. He worked in Thailand as a missionary and church planter for a total of eleven years. He received a Ph.D. in Intercultural Studies from Fuller Theological Seminary and has been a professor of mission and intercultural studies at Abilene Christian University since 2005.
Ivan Illich, The Church, Change and Development (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), 85-87.
Tim Shapiro and Kara Faris, Divergent Church: The Bright Promise of Alternative Faith Communities (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2017).
For challenging examples that come out of the Anglican fellowship, see their website: https://freshexpressions.org.uk/what-is-fx/examples-of-fresh-expressions.
Andrew Root, The Church after Innovation (Downers Grove, IL: Baker Academic, 2020), 6.
This contrast between healthy tradition and destructive traditionalism comes from church historian Jaroslav Pelikan. “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time.” Joseph Carey. “Christianity as an Enfolding Circle.” U.S. News & World Report, July 26, 1989, 57.
Root, The Church after Innovation, 222.
Illich, The Church, Change and Development, 85.