How did the (modern, western) church get to where we are today, in terms of how we relate to the wider world around us? Have you ever wondered what the back story is - on theology, politics, the “way we do church,” and more? What influences shaped us most over the past few generations?
I’ve been recently working through a number of titles at the intersection of missiology, theology, and culture, and came across one of the most helpful chapters I’ve ever read on this topic.
It’s from Paul S. Williams, Professor at Regent College and CEO of the British Bible Society, in his new book, Exiles on Mission: How Christians Can Thrive in a Post-Christian World (2020).
So, this isn’t fully a book review - it’s a chapter review. But it was that good.
Williams works through, essentially, a high-level progression of the ways that the church has related to society from the beginning, zooming in on the various forms of synthesis and reaction in roughly the last 80 years (the post-war years).
This hit home for me personally, because it seemed to give a map to so many threads of dialogue and interaction that I’ve journeyed through personally - from Barth and Bonhoeffer, to Billy Graham and John Stott and the Lausanne Movement, to the Emergent Church, the Missional Church, the synthesis from Lesslie Newbigin, and more.
I thought it was a masterful chapter, and incredibly helpful as a scaffold and heuristic for understanding the territory of the church’s mission in modern society, so I want to work through a few of his key concepts here (Paul, if you read this, send me an email!)
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1 - Christendom
We know the story - the early church was “on fire” until somehow Constantine caught wind of it, co-opted it for political gain, and messed up the whole project. Ever since then (many would have you believe), the church has essentially been compromised by the state and lost all of its missionary zeal.
Move beyond this hyper-simplification of church history, and you see a complex relationship between church and state, which was often symbiotic. Christianity became the legitimizing force of the state and society, and then formally concentrated itself in Byzantium after the barbarians took over the Western half of the empire.
Christianity in the west, pushed to the margins for a time at the dawn of the dark ages, was stewarded by the monastics and religious communities. Their reverse-movement back to the pagan/barbarian lands was the primary way that Christianity (and classical culture) found its way in to the heart and culture of the Germanic tribes. In any case, Christendom in the Roman age and the emerging Medieval age was primarily, as Williams notes, “a union of political and religious authority,” which led to “established churches powerfully shaping national politics and law” (p.4).
From Charlemagne (800), to the golden age of Aquinas (1250), to the Protestant Reformation (1500s), the underlying framing was essentially the same, which provided for the stability and growth of Europe (not something one might have predicted in the early Dark Ages, as Niall Ferguson masterfully explains), but also the violence of the Crusades, corruption and political compromise, and Church fracture and internal war.
2 - Modernity
The religious wars, of course, led to a society seeking different organizing principles, which led to the forms of “secular reason” that replaced theology, in the age of the Enlightenment.
Williams notes, interestingly, that the mind-set of Christendom was still a primary feature of the European Enlightenment, and manifested in the ways that the church identified mission as the “geographic expansion of faith, enabled by European colonization” (p.5).
But, seen positively, this was also the grounding for many of the great social reformers of the day, like Wilberforce, who developed an Enlightenment optimism grounded by a Christendom ethic.
Modernity finds its “end” in the total war of the early 20th century, which dealt a “death blow to the intellectual credibility of modernity.” (p.6). Because the Enlightenment and Christendom were inter-twined, the end of one meant the end of the other.
This gave rise to the “postmodern consciousness” of the 1960s, as a response to the power abuses of modernity.
3 - Post-War
All of that is prologomena. Many know this story, and many have recounted it in great depth. This is where the chapter gets really good.
Williams outlines the three dominant streams of theological discourse and praxis that emerged after the war, as the church reflected on the new era, and tried to find a way forward.
He highlights the prophetic stream, the evangelistic stream, and the pastoral stream.
Prophetic - This stream was primarily a reflection on the compromise of the German church to the Nazi regime. This lead to the theological reflection of Karl Barth, to the radical discipleship tradition of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to the writings of Jaques Ellul, William Stringfellow, and Stanley Hauerwas. The dominant issue here is the avoidance of compromise, and the purity of Christian witness, through radical discipleship, and radical critique of the ideologies of culture and the temptations toward syncretism with their narratives.
Evangelistic - This stream saw primarily the widespread loss of faith in the world, and opportunity of the new global moment. This is the tradition of the seminal Edinburgh Missionary Conference (1910), and the rise of Billy Graham, channeled primarily through the Lausanne Movement, which was inaugurated as one of the largest global gatherings ever held of evangelical leaders, in 1974. This movement aimed to navigate the church’s responsibility toward evangelism and social action, particularly among the least-and-un-reached people of the world.
Pastoral - This stream is identified by Williams as “pastoral,” in that is was primarily concerned with shaping the worldview and discipleship of ordinary believers - less out of reaction to the war, but more as an attempt to safeguard the Gospel in a new generation. They recovered the “every square inch” thinking of Abraham Kuyper, and spent their energy on “worldview formation,” following writers like Sire and Wolters. This aimed to integrate the sacred-secular divide and create a biblical narrative framework for public theology.
4 - Newbigin Synthesis
This is important, because each made positive contributions to the church through the second half of the 20th century.
It was in Lesslie Newbigin, the missionary to India, turned Indian Bishop, who returned to England after a 40 year missionary career, to then shape the thinking of the Western church on how to re-imagine a new form of “missionary encounter,” - highlighting that England wasn’t so much a Secular society with no gods, but a Pagan society with “many gods” (the hermeneutic which gives us the eyes to see and describe “cultural idols,” which is now such a popular way of thinking, at least in my experience).
Newbigin was prophetic in how he emphasized the missional witness of the church against the dominant cultural narratives of the day. He confronts the prophetic tendency toward idealism and their tendency to avoid mission as dialogue and reconciliation.
Newbigin was evangelistic in how he emphasized the proclamation of the gospel as “public truth,” not simply private values, but confronts their aversion of the mission field in their own back yard, and their narrowing of the gospel to private-salvation.
Newbigin was pastoral in his embrace of the story of the cross and resurrection as the “story of the whole cosmos,” anchoring the biblical narrative as central to understanding the church’s mission, but challenged their tendency to avoid anything beyond personal discipleship, and to move toward true public missionary encounter.
5 - Recent Approaches
These three approaches - prophetic, evangelistic, and pastoral - have interacted with each other now for the better part of 40 or 50 years. This has led to the other fascinating part of William’s analysis - the modern forms of response and synthesis.
He highlights these as retrenchment, ecclesial mission, and “lay” ministry.
Retrenchment. This is essentially the “take back the culture” mentality, which wants to hold on the historic mindset of Christendom. It overlooks the massive changes in the cultural structure of western society, and is primarily activist in nature. It seeks to “try harder” and “shout louder” to save a broken culture - whether through activist evangelism, or prayer movement, or more often through political posturing and lobbying.
Ecclesial Mission. This has been the long standing project to “rethink how we do church.” You’ve probably heard of a number of these, but Williams categorizes them primarily as the “emerging church” and the “missional church.” The emerging church (McLaren, Pagitt, Seay, and the like) is primarily in dialogue with postmodernity, and runs the spectrum of emphasizing “relevance” emphasizing theological “revision.” The missional church (Hirsch, Frost, Roxburgh, etc) is slightly less focused on the postmodern, and more on missional contextualization into whatever culture it sits in. This has led to a number of scalable training networks for leaders and church planters (from Acts 29, to City to City, to the Forge Training Network, to the Missio Alliance, and more).
Lay Ministry. This is primarily the rediscovery and development of the “faith and work” movement. These theologies emerged in the 1950’s, with a desire to (1) help people connect faith with daily life, (2) show the relevance of Christian faith to all spheres of society, and (3) help the church be missional by supporting the every day work of its members in society. This has had its ups and downs, and is often at odds with the core incentives and tendencies of local churches, which Williams highlights (p.17), but it has led to the Faith-At-Work movement, manifested by the many faith, vocation, and work initiatives we see today, from Redeemer’s Center for Faith and Work, to Praxis Labs, and more.
Williams highlights how there is often little cross-pollination between these responses, which I absolutely agree with and acknowledge.
This is also the implicit divide between “the church is the mission,” and “the church equips people for everyday mission.”
Williams finishes this incredible chapter with “8 hard truths about the contemporary church,” which I’m going to write about in another post (I found it an incredibly insightful summary, but a little disjointed in this chapter).
6 - Modern Analysis
Name a church, christian non-profit, or missional organization in modern society, and you can likely trace their origin through these streams. That’s the power of this chapter.
That’s why I found this so helpful - if you’ve ever struggled to reconcile how your church or your favorite missional organization integrates with the Christian voices you read on Twitter, or the authors you’ve heard about from previous generation, this chapter will help.