“The term `missional’ has become a cliché in an astonishingly short period of time,” the theologian Darrell Guder told a group of Presbyterian leaders on Sept. 28, gathered at the Snowbird Resort outside Salt Lake City.
“I see the term `missional’ everywhere,” but can’t always determine what those using it mean. “It is particularly confusing to see the term used as a noun – `We’re doing missional,’ ” Guder said.
Guder, the dean of academic affairs and Henry Winters Luce Professor of Missional and Ecumenical Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, was invited to speak at Snowbird precisely because of his knowledge about the theology and history of the missional church. He can nudge past the clichés and challenge Presbyterians to think more deeply about how the western church has abandoned an understanding of the centrality of mission as the very essence of what it means to be a church.
This gathering in Utah – part of a two-week series of meetings of Presbyterian leaders, in this case bringing together members of the General Assembly Council and leaders from presbyteries and synods – has adopted a nautical theme: “Learning to Lead Together on the High Seas.”
So Guder, in his opening address Sept. 28, used that as his starting-off point.
He asked these Presbyterians to place the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) into a larger framework of massive cultural change – a paradigm shift over the last century and particularly since the end of World War II. This change involves “all those post words,” Guder said – including post-colonial and post-modern, “whatever that is.”
In the Western world, countries that have considered themselves “Christian” are now filled with secularized people.
Some say we’re wandering in the wilderness, that “the security of Christendom is behind us, and we cannot see where this difficult journey will end,” Guder said. Some might call it “a rough passage on turbulent seas.”
But Guder said the church of today must confront “hard questions, uncomfortable questions, questions we would like to evade” but cannot. Questions, he said, that involve core theological issues, such as, “Who do we think we are as a church of Jesus Christ” and what should be our purpose in the large framework of God’s mission?
From its earliest history, Guder said, the church has used images of the sea – with followers of Jesus being tossed about in a little boat on rough seas, comforted by knowing that “the Lord of the church is in the boat and it will not sink . . . He hears our prayers and he will restore peace and tranquility.”
But the church changed over the centuries, as it grew in wealth and power, Guder said.
The early church had a sense of being “followers of the way” of being in pilgrimage, of being sent sailing out into the world with Jesus, Guder said. But the magnificent church buildings constructed over the centuries testify to the wealth, permanence, prosperity and power of the church. The grand naves of cathedrals do not convey a sense of movement, of travel to a far harbor, but a sense “that Christians are in charge. This is our territory. We should be at the center of things, shaping our public life and culture.”
Over the centuries, the Western church has assumed a place of power, has turned to an inward focus on church members and their needs, he said.
What was for the New Testament church at the center of its calling – a sense of being called by God to be witnesses for the gospel in the world – has been marginalized and reduced over the centuries, Guder said. As a result, “mission is the missing theme in Western theologies of the church.”
In calling and equipping disciples to be sent out as apostles, “their purpose was not just the saving of souls,” but the creating of communities of witnesses whose mandate was to continue the apostolic mission, Guder said. “And they did it where they were. They did not have to cross boundaries to do mission.”
Instead of seeing mission as something Christians did in some other place, or as one activity among many at a church, “mission defines the church,” Guder said. “Because of God’s mission, there is the people of God.”
And God’s chosen people, ever since Abraham, are called to demonstrate in their actions the truth of the gospel, to be a “flesh and blood demonstration in the world of God’s healing love,” to show a watching world what the world experiences because there are Christians in it.
“This is not optional,” Guder said. “This is not something we may or may not do. This is who we are and what we are called to do.”
He knows a congregation is beginning to understand that when people stop talking about picking that church because of what it offers them, and start talking about “this is where God has called me to be.”
Guder’s presentation sparked discussion and many questions.
Some asked about how North American churches can start to change – how Christians can engage with popular culture and yet unmask their own idolatries. As one person put it, “Can we be Christian and treasure The Daily Show?”
Guder responded that “apparently in a lot of us the Holy Spirit is awakening a spirit of repentance,” and that “corporate conversion is possible.”
He encouraged Christians to recognize how captive we are to culture. For example, Guder said, when churches take other churches to court over property disputes, they violate biblical teachings about the unity of Christ – and they affect the witness they give to the watching world. For the more powerful one to stand with the weaker one, to share the wealth, “is really counter-cultural,” he said.
Guder said he’s encouraged by an ecumenical move among some Christians to discernment and alternate forms of decision-making. “It is really, really hard. But voting creates winners and losers,” he said. “Voting divides us.”
And he wants to reclaim the idea of “teaching elder” – the idea of one form of ministry among many – rather than the Presbyterian term “minister of Word and Sacrament.”
The term “Reverend” should be dropped in a post-Christian world, Guder said.
Although Presbyterian ministers earn graduate degrees, “we are not parallel to doctors and lawyers and so on. We are called to be servants of God’s people.” At Princeton, “I see too many seminary students falling in love with their robes and titles and stoles.”
North Americans who work with the global church, Guder said, will inevitably be asked how wealth is diluting the impact of the Christian message. “We are the diminishing part of world Christianity, but we still have most of the money,” Guder said. Christianity will be profoundly shaped, he said, by the voices of the non-Western church.
He told of one student, a pastor from the South Pacific, who worried that his own faith was being watered down by his time at an American seminary – because at seminary, his living expenses were covered.
At home, the pastor said, he never drew enough of a salary to sustain himself and his family – there was not enough money. Every month, he lived in clear and necessary faith that God would provide.
