href="#litres_trial_promo">Urban Church Project, 1974, pp. 8–11).3
This was a self-limiting model, first, because it discouraged lay mission. If lay people brought in more people than left the church, the church would grow. But the clergy-dominated model made this unlikely. It discouraged lay people from thinking that attracting outsiders was their responsibility, while it allowed clergy – wanting to stay in control – to block lay initiatives. Lay people were disempowered, which reinforced their belief that growth (if they thought about it at all) was the clergy’s job.
Second, extra clergy seemed to produce diminishing returns. A second clergyman typically added 90 Christmas communicants, while a third averaged only 81 (Urban Church Project, 1974, p. 5). Third, there were not enough clergy anyway, especially in the larger parishes. Clergy numbers were actually falling by the 1970s. Fourthly, the amalgamation of parishes to cope with this fall, the Project presciently argued, would force ministers to spend more time on maintaining the institution and less on mission. Attendance would decline further, leaving the church even less sustainable (Urban Church Project, 1974, 1975; Wasdell, 1977).
In short, for centuries the church has been ‘over-capitalized’. That is, nearly all the church’s money has been spent on too many and over large buildings, and on maintaining a clergy-dominated model that has self-limitation built in. Despite some notable mission initiatives, increasingly an institution that supposedly exists for the benefit of non-members has devoted the bulk of its resources to maintaining itself. Why should people outside the church feel it is for them?
A blueprint for change
Can these limitations of relevance, access and organization be overcome by reimagining the church? In 1968, the World Council of Churches published a prescient report, prepared for its Uppsala conference, by a group of West European theologians. The group argued that originally ‘the parish church’ in Europe was a missionary structure. Through it the church reached out to small, comparatively isolated communities. The parish church ‘represented the whole Church face to face with what was, to all intents and purposes, for most people, the whole of life’ (WCC, 1968, p. 29). But people now lead their lives in a variety of arenas. If the church persists in regarding the parish as its normal structure, it will not confront life at its most significant points.
Though the local congregation still has an important role within residential settings, it is failing to connect with people in the mainstream of their existence.
In this situation many local congregations tend to withdraw into themselves; care is directed towards the ‘faithful’, largely by the provision of regular opportunities for worship. The justification for the life of the Church is then found within itself, instead of in its mission in the world. . . . the local congregation is carrying the burden of a divine commission which it is not, in the present state of society, able to bear. (WCC, 1968, pp. 29–30)
The report called for new ‘functional groups’ in different ‘spheres of work and living’ (p. 33). These ‘new congregations’ should be seen as ‘the Church carrying out the original intention of the ‘parish’ church’ alongside it (p. 30). They should be authentic communities ‘in which Christians and non-Christians alike can face the questions which play a determining role in their lives’ (p. 23). These new congregations would seek to discern God’s activity within their contexts and would enable Christians to participate in mission ‘not as an occasional activity but as their very raison d’etre’ (p. 29).
Some congregations would be large, others small; some permanent, others temporary. They would be ready ‘to change and to disband at the right time’ (WCC, 1968, p. 33). They would be ‘fashioned in very diverse shapes’ (p. 29) according to the context, but not at the expense of unity. The different congregations would be in relation with each other. The types and foci of this integration would vary as congregational forms changed in response to changes in society. They would include contacts between groups of the same and different types, encouraged by denominational collaboration. Individuals, whose prime task was to foster integration, would play a key role.
This report, and its companion from a North American Working Group, has usually been criticized for downplaying evangelism and the distinctiveness of the gospel. ‘What else can the churches do than recognize and proclaim what God is doing in the world?’ the European Group asked (WCC, 1968, p. 15). The report’s proposals were placed in a theological framework that emphasized God’s activity in the world, independent of the church.
This brought complaints from those who thought that the missional role of the traditional congregation was being downplayed. John Yoder remarked that instead of the missionary structure of the congregation, ‘we would have asked to see more about the congregational structure of the mission’ (Yoder, 1994, p. 101).4 The call for a missionary church (on structural lines not so different to the ‘temple, synagogues and tents’ described in the last chapter) was widely ignored partly because of its theological clothes.
Even so, as noted in the last chapter, the evangelicals John V. Taylor and Lesslie Newbigin picked up some of the report’s ideas, as did the Urban Church Project. But this reimagining of the church faded in the face of opposition. It re-emerged, however, in the Mission-shaped Church report, which in the very different circumstances of the new millennium returned to many of these earlier themes, but within a different theological framework.
In a sense, Mission-shaped Church (2004) is a hypothesis. The assumed hypothesis is that the secularization thesis is wrong; social change does not make church demise inevitable; the problem has been the church’s failure to adapt; new contextual churches are the Spirit’s means of reversing decline. As yet there is insufficient evidence to confirm this hypothesis, but the new types of church championed by Mission-shaped Church are starting to provide pointers. In time, the fruitfulness or otherwise of these new churches will show whether the hypothesis is right.
If the hypothesis is correct and the church acquires a stronger public presence wherever life takes place, the renaissance of the church would provide support for the notion of ‘post-secularity’. This fairly recent concept can be understood as ‘the renewed visibility of religion in contemporary culture’ (Bretherton, 2010, p. 12). It can be related to David Martin’s understanding of secularization, which is very different to the story of linear decline told by Wilson, Bruce, Voas and others.
Martin argues that ‘instead of regarding secularization as a once-for-all unilateral process, one might rather think in terms of successive Christianizations followed or accompanied by recoils’ (Martin, 2005, p. 3). He describes four Christianizations, each overlapping the others – a Catholic Christianization centred on the conversion of monarchs, followed by a second in which the friars converted the urban masses; and a Protestant Christianization that effectively corralled Christian people in the nation, followed by one that produced evangelical and pietistic subcultures. Each Christianization encountered social realities inimical to the kingdom, adapted to them and was then forced to retreat by them. As one version of Christianity retreated, another gained ground.
Starting in the ‘West’,
