To Grahame and Craig, who were bold enough to be the first people to make posts on the blog, thanks so much for your thoughts.
As a follow-up to Craig's post, here's a question. Do you think Minatrea is equating mission-minded and maintenance? I'm not sure he was doing that, and I'm not sure I would equate being mission-minded with being focused on maintenance. It seems to me some churches are mission-minded and missional, and some churches are mission-minded and focused on maintenance. I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this.
Another thought I had is that even the most missional-minded person has maintenance thoughts sometimes, and probably many people focused on maintenance sometimes think missionally. So perhaps sometimes we should say, "When I'm thinking along maintenance lines, I find myself worried about . . . " or "When a person is in maintenance mindset, they might say . . ." This would help us from thinking there are two categories of Christians or two categories of churches.
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14 comments:
Regarding "maintenence"
Brenda Suh Said...
I am still thinkng about "maintenence" so far....it seems two side of one coin..
"Maintenence something for which is the things people pray for" the other side is "maintenence something against which is the things people fear about"
Both are one coin which is "to want to live as a Christian".(apologize my poor English though)
From Dellwyn Moylan
What does "maintenance" looks like in congregations. I think it is maintaining the status quo. Maintaining the programmes etc because in some cases people feel obligated to because they have always had the programme so that is what people expect. Some times maintaining the status quo is done in order to survive or because people are not able to explore knew ways of being the church because of their age, their vision or their understanding of the church. . Anne Hadfield[1] says “A certain amount of maintenance is essential and appropriate, but when maintenance becomes the primary focus and consumer of resources and energy in a congregation, then it is unable to fulfil its true function as an agent of mission in the world” I think this is true of many of the churches of my denomination in my local area they are doing what they can to survive but are not and in some case can't look to trying mission and that it a challenge how to help them to do so.
[1] Anne Hadfield, Co-Director of the PCANZ Mission Resource Team May 1992 in From Maintenance to Mission – A Manual for those who journey with the people of God. Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa, New Zealand, Wellington
Fears for maintainers often include, “What will happen to me if new people come in and change things?” “Will it cost more than I am willing to pay?” “What will be left after I am gone?” “Who will care for me and my loved ones if all the effort is put into mission?” “Can we afford to pay the minister?” “I don’t have any energy left. Who is going to do the work?” “What will people think if we try to talk to them about God?” Prayers tend to be very focussed on the church family, on paying the bills, on safety and law and order, on children.
Missional people fear missing God’s call. They fear structure and administration throttling mission, being misunderstood in the wider church, not reaching the people God has placed them among. They pray for insights to help them understand their community and context, for funding, opportunities to share God’s love with the people around them, strong discipleship, more workers, changed lives.
Picking up on Lynne’s comment, surely we all worry about all these things to some extent. The key is in finding the right balance between the two. I wonder too if it is not so much the questions themselves, but the language that is used to express the questions that helps to define whether a particular group of Christians is leaning too far in one direction or another.
Andrew
I think the church, and I will speak specifically about the PCANZ has been given a green light to keep the status quo of ‘Maintenance’ by the Kiwi culture it is surrounded by. One of the things I have noticed recently is the number of groups in our community who are meeting a need that once upon a time was provided by the church. No longer does the church need to do anything, i.e. there are food banks, counselors, budget advisors etc…So maybe our culture has some how allowed us to become apathetic. All we need to do is pray and open our wallets. Therefore a maintenance church knows they don’t need to do anything so spends the money on themselves, while the mission minded church knowing they should do something but who are still not sure what, finance a project or group outside the church.
I think maintenance and missional are identity statements reflecting primary culture and values, rather than functionality ie, a statement of the ontological make-up of the church. In this respect I agree with Craig that it is quite wrong to dichotomize mission and maintenance, for both identities share maintenance and missional functions. I agree with Minatrea however in that they do not share core values, of which the list on p11 exposes. A maintenance church will often value meeting the ‘consumer needs’ (p 7, Minatrea) of its congregation, at the cost of freeing and/or enabling resources for the gospel in the world. Missional churches are hardly new, as Craig states, but they are very difficult to maintain (if you’ll excuse the pun)!
The mission statement in my own church is ‘called to be the pattern and source of God’s reconciled world’. If this mission statement is to mean anything, I need to ensure that I am equipping, encouraging and enabling the congregation to carry out the Missio Dei; a searching question posed by Minatrea on page 15. Does the education we offer enable the congregation to own their faith; to express it in word and deed relevantly to their worldly social/political context? Does our worship and sacramental spaces we offer extol and encourage them for the cost of being God’s source in the world? Does our investment in resources and leadership reflect this worldly-equipping? Do I collect data that helps me measure our missional-effectiveness? These are some questions, I believe, of a missional church that upholds missional core values.
In honesty, I sometimes respond yes to some of these statements, and other times a resounding no. A simple measurement I use is ‘are we finding our identity in the most vulnerable’. It is a statement made by Walter Wink that has remained with me. Are the most poor and vulnerable in our community amongst us, integrated and enabled in mission themselves? Do we embrace them, knowing we would be the poorer without them? A fifth of our congregation is mental health consumers, recovering or recovered drug and alcohol addicts, or people with physical disabilities. These folk regularly inoculate the community from ‘bourgeois Christianity’ (Riddell, p59), but it comes at the cost of irregular behaviour, intense and irregular pastoral care needs, dollops of love and embracement of risk. This is where I feel Minetrea’s core values come into their own; if the community does not embrace mission to its heart, then these people will often be excluded, or perhaps served but rarely incorporated.
I’m very interested in Stuart’s comment about PCANZ. He’s noticed: “the number of groups in our community who are meeting a need that once upon a time was provided by the church. No longer does the church need to do anything, i.e. there are food banks, counsellors, budget advisors etc”
I’d argue, after more than 20 years involvement in volunteer helping agencies, both secular and Christian-based (for want of better describing words) that the Church generally is heavily involved in those agencies. A very significant proportion of volunteers are Christians – I can’t quantify how many but my gut says 75% or so.
Many churches aren’t structured to minister in their communities. They don’t have the resources or whatever to do ministry under their own umbrella. And some have no interested in having ‘their people’ working under someone else’s umbrella. I found, when I was working for our Diocese helping churches with social service and community-facing ministry, that the church is much better at supporting people who are involved in ministry from their own church. Many people who volunteer (ie do missional work) outside their churches ministry get absolutely no support or recognition for that.
So how does this relate to being missional? Sometimes missional is a trendy word or even worse, a church-growth strategy. We do mission to get bums on seats. If there is little possibility of that end result, then our churches are not interested. It seems our motive for mission is very important. I believe evangelism is important and we have to be very careful we do not love people so Jesus can save their souls, in other words we use the people we supposedly love. Mission is important and we don’t want to be missional only in order to maintain our sacred structures.
Jan Clark writes:
I have been reading Alan Hirsch’s book “The Forgotten Ways – reactivating the missional church.” From an examination of two apostolic movements ( the early church and China) he proposes a model to describe Apostolic Genius and the elements that make a movement missional. The central component of the model is the faith statement, “Jesus is Lord”, the elements surrounding this central belief are ; disciple making, missional-incarnational impulse, apostolic environment, organic systems and communitas not community.
I am only half way through the book but have found his phrase Missional Incarnational impulse (M-I) helpful in both understanding the maintenance / missional issue and how I would define church. Hirsch talks of missional as the “outgoing thrust of the Jesus movements, like the scattering of seeds or the dispersion of bacteria in a sneeze.” There is an intrinsic link to the missio Dei, the Son is sent and we therefore are sent people. The incarnational aspect describes “the embedding and deepening of the gospel and church into host cultures.” He draws a contrast between this movement (M-I) and the Christendom template which he describes as Evangelistic – Attractional Impulse, that is a church that evangelises expecting the outcome to be measured in bums on pews ie we reproduce the shape and style of ministry we already have. This expectation stifles the seed sown in the wind or sneeze spreading into the culture by the missional impulse because the shape of the outcome is determined by the established institution rather than the mission. Now I wonder if this is the beginning of the slide to Minatrea’s maintenance mentality as the church effectively isolates from society.
At its best, church derives its heart from Christ is shaped by mission and expressed in a form that makes sense in the culture in which it is embedded (this order is vital – Christ – Mission – Church). This is somewhat uncomfortable when I am called to work within the institutional church, however we don’t often start with a clean slate. A model such as Hirsch’s which articulates elements key to a missional movement might be a good tool in understanding the call of God on our lives and how we live as disciple forming communities willing to go where Christ sends. Reading Riddell’s critique of the Western Church and his hallmarks of Christian community (page 69) it could be easy to despair about the possibility of working with the church. Yet if we talk about Passion, with it dual meaning of commitment to life and suffering, each disciple is on journey of self discovery as they seek to grow into and express the love of Christ this is messy imperfect stuff and therefore I think any expression of church is going to be marked by the highest ideals and the fallibility of humankind. The factor we should remember is that this is God’s mission and (I think Andrew expressed it on Monday night) the reason for our hope.
Catherine Thorne writes:
The Trojan horse image has remained with me. I’m wondering whether Riddell’s image of Trojan horse is not just about ‘culture dressed up as Christianity’ but also about the means by which we protect ourselves from the costliness of the “passion transplant”. It seems to me it is impossible for us to know or express ourselves outside of a cultural context. That we express our faith through culture is not of itself an issue, simply the inevitable fact of being human. Perhaps the challenge is to avoid making an idol of culture but recognise it for what it is - a means by which we communicate and understand ourselves, not the end by which we are defined and valued. Of course because so much of our identity is formed by and dependent on our culture, this leaves us vulnerable. The challenge of faith, the cost of “passion transplant,” is perhaps to remain rather than retreat from that place of vulnerability outside the Trojan horse. Here resides that far less tangible promise that our identity is located in and comes to life in Christ.
Kingsley Ponniah writes:
If I could add to the discussion on the church’s maintenance mentality and its mission imperative, I wonder if there is a need for a church, desiring to be missional, to deal with the reality that the members have a price to pay if they want that to happen. And that price, more often than not, will be that ‘church’ may look quite different to what their members are familiar or comfortable with. Having the church remain familiar and comfortable is important for people because many of them deal with rapid changes taking place in almost every sphere of their lives – their work place, family and communities they belong to – and these changes can be quite challenging and disconcerting. Hence the church for them is a “safe haven”, a secure place they can retreat to. There they can relax in the familiar and comfortable. So, if changes occur there as well, then, in their minds, there is no place else to retreat to? I wonder then if this is one reason why parishioners, while affirming that the church ought to be missional, want that to happen with little or no impact on them or their church life. And you cannot have it both ways. Perhaps in the process of becoming missional, one of the tasks for the church is helping people focus on and find their security in their relationship with God, not the church, so that they can find the courage, strength and motivation to embrace the reality that changes are inevitable if the church is serious about being missional.
Tim Pettengell writes:
In the audio-conference, the word “church” was used a lot. Yet we never agreed on a common definition and understanding for this word, which has multiple definitions and conveys a variety of complex notions, depending on ones starting point. It seems that either by osmosis or by assumption or complicity of silence, we all understood what one another was referring to, was referencing and ‘embraced’, when they used this word “church”.
Yet, the reality is, that we use the word “church” as we do the word “love”. Here is one word that conveys a diversity of meanings, understandings and significance. For when we speak of “church”, we are referring to, making reference to, and implying a meaning and usage, of at least one or more of the following generic uses of the word “church”. These are (in no particular order):
Church as Property – land and buildings
Church as Congregation/Community – the group of people who gather in
or proclaim the property as being “home”
Church as activity – the ‘things’ that congregation/community do - such as
worship, group study, community out reach, and so on
Church as Institution
Church as Theology
Church as History
Church as embodying our personal convictions and beliefs
The metaphor that comes to mind is a co-axial cable. A co-axial cable such as the television aerial cable has a solid core, surrounded by an insulator, which in turn is covered with a woven sheath which then has an outer protective layer. What makes co-axial cable an interesting metaphor, is that power or a signal passes down the core to the receiver - from God to human beings? Or from person to person! The feed back signal or electrical grounding is conveyed by the woven sheath. Again, human beings to God or human to human – i.e. love of neighbour as self.
My guess is that the core is our personal convictions and beliefs, which we surround and insulate with our theology, which we then wrap in a sheath comprising of our notions of congregation/community, activity, history, and property, that is given a protective layer by the institution.
However one perceives and expresses this notion called “church”, its existence and validity, is I believe, largely an assumed and unquestioned assumption that results in a priority, supremacy, and sanctity being given to the notion of “church” that is not warranted or justified. This assertion is based on two facts – that Jesus never intended that there be a “church”, and secondly, that the “church” has a history as Karen Armstrong would say. Thus the reality of the “church” is that it is and always will be a human construct, vested with human self-interest, for self serving purposes. That is the reality of our humanness! So if humans created the “church”, humans can “un-create” the “church” and then re-create the “church”.
Graeme Flett wrote:
Lynn you raise a very important question in asking; “what is the church?” I wonder if one was to survey the language of congregants, (weaving in and out of the clichés and references), whether one’s findings would uncover a definition of Church that is perhaps deficient and inadequate for our time. The default key for many is; The Church is an institution which arranges programs and oversees its polity and structures so we the people can be spirituality nourished. The voices of; “the church should be doing this” … or “the church should be looking after congregants needs, .. or reaching out to the surrounding community”, disguise a frustration that is elusive and seldom named. Could the source of this frustration and angst be that our definition of church has been skewed by modernity itself? That we most often default to what the Church does rather than what is? It’s like putting the cart before the horse except the horse is no longer part of the rig. Riddell comments that “somewhere along the way, a movement which was vital, dangerous and exciting has lost its way, and been domesticated.” Riddell’s definition of church is not what it does but rather what it is. It is a mystery. And this mystery is found in the very nature of God as three persons in relationship. In other words the church is relational and communitarian. Such a definition, I would argue, reconfigures how we might speak of the church. How we might view mission. How we might see ourselves as an intricate part of what God is doing and wants to do. Is there a need for congregations to revisit this question and for a fresh perspective to emerge in conversation with itself on why it exists in its’ given locality instead of assuming the same old?
Catherine Thorne writes:
I minister in what I would describe as a maintenance church. Much of the ministry exercised is in maintaining the plant. The fear spoken of is that there is not a next generation to continue such maintenance. Even the slightly younger members have a preoccupation with responsibility for maintaining the buildings. Church is the comfortable place they like to come, although a younger generation is desired there seems no acknowledgement that this will engender or require them to change. How do people ‘do’ other than maintenance church that resists change if they have never known another model of church? Many here are from an older generation that did not question authority. The Vicar, the church was an authority that ‘knew’ and they were obedient. I wonder whether this has led to a lack of confidence – in their capacity to do mission, or in recognising the mission they already ‘do’ in their lives. Would naming it as such lend strength, confidence, direction and shift focus, and change be a natural outflow?
Tim Pettengell’s comments (March 6th) are well worth responding to; ‘Jesus never intended there to be a church’ and/or the church is essentially a human construct. If this is the case, then maintenance vs missional paradigms become mute arguments if the church is not constituted in Christ.
For me, the constitution of the church rests on the bible being a theological account of history and God’s telos (end goal). Some foundation stones of this are: God created the world; God providentially cares for creation; God invests history with telos and value (which therefore gives human history value and telos); and God entrusts, to some degree, stewardship of His invested creation and history to human beings. It is on these (and other) foundation stones that Israel pins its constitution in God, and its history as shaped by God’s actions, both of which are carried into the Christian faith.
In Christianity, Jesus casts light on the true telos of history and creation (of which John 1:1-18 so beautifully describes). As humans, we are not left to our own devices to suffer the consequences of human sin, but God plunges into history; incarnate, died and risen, and ‘sets [it] again on its trajectory to fulfillment in reconciled relation to God’ . Paul captures this eschatology through his letters eg, Gal 4:4-7, Col 1:15-27, Rom 5 or 2 Cor 5:18-21. So continues God’s transformational eschatology and the eschatological tension that comes with this; God enlisting human beings to bring creation and history, midst suffering (but never abandoned), to its telos.
The church then is human participation in God’s purpose in creation and history, enabled by the empowerment of God’s Spirit; who alone gives us fullness of life. Anything less than this understanding, within a christological account, promotes a Deist understanding of God which nullifies the incarnation of Christ.
Which begs the question which I’ll take back to Tim: If God is not in the church, where is your God?
1 Murray A Rae, History and Hermeneutics (London: T&T Clark, 2005), 53.
Ruth Johnston writes:
1) has anyone else been struck by the similarity betwen the comfortable church from the first reading - in an avowedly Christian country, and the mainline denominations in our avowedly secular country? my question is - do we actually look at the past - a Settler church which worked in opposition to the missionary church already in existence and which existed, at the beginning to provide something of "home" and a meeting/social place in a scattered population - do we do anything to lift this burden from the past from our shoulders?
2) how much do we focus on what God requires of each individual congregation - this spins off from the story Lynne told us of the Seattle church. Do we look out at our communities and feel overwhelmed - it's much easier to look overseas at a particular need than here at home, especially as "they" now do much of what the church used to.
3) the weariness of the church - couldn't help thinking of the age group of many congregations- my own included - but this needn't mean that all of us are unable to re-learn or undo the many different 'ologies" we have been subjected to - most of which put the burden of "doing" on our shoulders and disempowered God!
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