The Southgate Fellowship: Conceptualising Our Priorities

TSF engages with the thorny issue of how to define and delineate the mission of the church. Rightly, they emphasise the need for people to put their faith in Christ:

67a) We affirm that people have needs of all kinds, but that every person’s greatest need is for faith in Christ and repentance from sin to the glory of God in Christ Jesus.

So proclamation of the gospel is paramount.

But mercy ministry is also important. Many have tried to conceptualize the relationship of mercy ministry with the ministry of proclamation.

TSF’s position is thus:

74a) We affirm that to separate mercy ministry and ministry of the Word is to be out of accord with Christ’s commission. 

74b) We deny that either form of ministry is an isolated or exclusive priority. 

74c) We affirm that in the church’s mission to the world, it is biblically informed wisdom which will recommend the order and leading priority of Word or deed for each occasion.

That encapsulates well my own view which has been argued best by Tim Chester in Good News to the Poor.

What place does the incarnation have in the theology of ministry to the poor?

TSF includes a good set of affirmations and denials on the incarnation of Christ (§§40-42). I think their prime concern here is that a maximal doctrine of incarnation has often been used to underpin various forms of liberation theology.

It seems to me, however, that the statement goes too far in this denial:

42c) We deny that the sui generis incarnation of the eternal Son of God offers a proper analogy for construing contextualisation as ‘incarnational’.

They argue, rightly of course, that it is logically impossible for those who already have flesh to be enfleshed and go on to argue that the “use of 'incarnational' to describe Jesus as a model effectively undermines the sui generis character of God becoming flesh in Christ.”

But that ain't necessarily so.

The incarnation of the eternal Son of God is indeed sui generis (of its own kind).

However, if we accept and preach that, which we must, then any comparison of his incarnation and that of the intercultural communicator is, by definition, understood analogically. So, when Paul instructs the Corinthian believers to “Follow my example as I follow the example of Christ” (1 Cor 11:1) surely no one argues that Paul was hoping to give his life a sacrifice of atonement. Rather, he could follow Christ’s example by having “the same mindset as Christ” in his humility (Phil 2:5-11).

So, an incarnational approach to intercultural ministry is one of foregoing one’s rights, of clothing oneself with humility.

Far too much cross-cultural ministry goes on without any serious attempt to identify with the host community; more so today than ever before because of the ease of travel. I have a sneaking suspicion that people who argue against the incarnation of the Son of God having any bearing on contextualization do so because they do not want to spend the long time necessary to embody the gospel in that host community. I hope that is not the case, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it is.

Perhaps, in God’s providence, the coronavirus pandemic will deter short-term, low-commitment, shallow ministry among underserved communities.

My prayer is that it doesn’t also deter long-term, high-commitment, in-depth ministry. Because it is chiefly through such gospel communicators, sharing their lives and not just their words, that people come to see the beauty of Jesus. I don’t really care if the word incarnational is used for this sort of ministry or not, so long as it happens.

God-centred, Integrative and Expansive: Book Review of Tim Chester's Mission Matters: Love Says Go

Tim Chester's new book is an excellent introduction to mission. Tim has the gift of writing theology that is both thoroughly biblical and winsomely engaging.

God-centred

Mission Matters is God-centred because it is biblical and theological. Tim draws his missiology from the Bible by expounding the Bible's grand storyline and showing how mission is first and foremost God's project. "The starting point is this," he writes: "God the Father loves his Son" (p. 17). Mission, then, is at the heart of who God is, in the relationships of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is not first of all what we are to do but what God already does. And because the Son sends us (John 20:21) we share in his mission. Few mission books are as carefully theological but this one is so without being obtuse in its language. It is a great example of writing that is thoroughly Bible-centred and readable.

Integrative

Tim has written before on the important topic of the relationship of evangelism and social action (Good News for the Poor). He follows the same track here arguing for a broad definition of mission while giving gospel proclamation a central position in that paradigm. Tim's later work (e.g. Total Church) comes through too with an emphasis on the role of the gospel community in mission: "Sustainable Christian evangelism or discipleship or development or social action all require sustainable Christian communities. Without a local church, whatever you do will end when you go" (p. 90). Amen to that.

Expansive 

There is a major problem with a lot of mission writing these days. With the collapse of Christendom there has been a much-needed rethinking about mission resulting in a renewed appreciation that the West is also a mission-field. So mission is from everywhere to everywhere. Churches in the West, then, need to be mission-minded in their posture to the ambient society. In short, they need to be 'missional'. All well and good. But some writers have been so taken with this new paradigm that they have all but abandoned the needs of vast numbers of people who inhabit far less spiritually salubrious locations than, say, the UK. After all, we have neighbours who need the gospel. Indeed, but that is only part of the ongoing story. Tim doesn't fall into this pitfall and argues that mission must be 'Everywhere with the unreached as the priority' (chapter 8). I would have liked to see a bit more on what this means on the ground but the task is clearly stated nonetheless.

Two small criticisms:

1. it is odd that the publishers chose to use a title that was already used recently by Kieran Beville (see my review here);
2. the frequent references to stories of missionaries who have been associated with the Keswick Convention got a bit tiresome to me, but then the book was written as part of a series for the Keswick movement so what would one expect?

Review of Chester on the Unreached

 

Review of Tim Chester's Unreached: Growing Churches in Working Class and Deprived Areas (Nottingham: Inter-Varsity, 2012).

This book by Tim Chester of The Crowded House in Sheffield (and now also of WEST), is an analysis of both the author’s own reading and experience and the experiences of a number of other gospel workers who are seeking to reach out to working class and deprived neighbourhoods in the UK. These workers, sharing in the Reaching the Unreached network, have been seeking to help one another in the very challenging task of church planting and nurturing in some of the most difficult estates of the UK. Chester’s book borrows heavily from the experiences of these folk and seeks to draw together significant themes and lessons to be learned.

Roy Joslin published his important book, Urban Harvest in 1982. The social character of Britain has changed hugely since then but, as Chester points out, nothing comparable has been written in the intervening years. So this book is really significant if for this reason alone. Chester seeks to lay the foundation by clarifying a Christian view of culture. Contextualization in working-class areas means that, as all cultures contain elements that are good, bad, and indifferent, so we should neither make a blanket condemnation of working-class culture nor offer a blanket affirmation. So Chester argues that gospel workers will want to affirm what is good and seek to change what is bad.

While the whole book is useful, I especially appreciated chapters 2 and 3, “The culture of working-class and deprived areas” and “Key gospel themes for working-class and deprived areas,” which are full of helpful insight and suggestions for appropriate gospel communication.

Chester recognizes the phenomenon of social lift, of people becoming Christians from deprived backgrounds and acquiring new attitudes and behaviours that lead to social mobility. “To some extent,” he says, “this reflects an aspiration by new Christians towards middle-class values, which, in turn, reflects the church culture into which they are socialized” (14). Chester is walking a tightrope here, as I think he knows, but perhaps doesn’t express. He is at pains to point out that some working-class values are good and need to be affirmed, and some middle-class values are bad and need to be changed. Considering the vast majority of the readers of this book will be middle-class he is making is a good and necessary point. But I struggle with the argument here. Chester does say that social lift reflects the aspiration to middle-class values “to some extent” (my emphasis) but doesn’t tell us to what extent it doesn’t. In a book of this size and character it is impossible to cover all the issues but I think that the social analysis of the book is at times simplistic and over-generalized. The phrases “middle-class culture” and “working-class culture” are used throughout the book in such a way that an alien might be forgiven for believing that the two cultures are the products of two completely distinct communities, like a multi-ethnic society, living side-by-side but hardly interacting, and sharing very little. It may feel like that at times but the reality is that the categories of middle-class and working-class, as Chester acknowledges (43), are not as bounded as one might think. Moreover, British society has some cohesion such that interaction between different groups is constant and inevitable.

Furthermore, the recent Great British Class Survey (http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/0/21970879) resulted in a different construction of the class system such that Britain, according to the researchers, Mike Savage from the London School of Economics and Fiona Devine from the University of Manchester, is now better described by a new model with seven classes ranging from the Elite at the top to a 'Precariat' at the bottom. Unreached was published before this so doesn’t go into the recent diffraction of the working class into a much less cohesive agglomeration than it used to be (although this is acknowledged).

Whether a two or three class system or a seven class system is best to characterize British society is not the point. They are all models of the social reality, not the reality itself. The point I am trying to make is that I am not sure that it is valid to talk in such concrete terms about middle-class values and working-class values. Since they are not distinct concrete social groups, but rather societal categories, their representatives do in fact share an awful lot—that’s what we might call British culture. While wanting to affirm, as Chester does, so much that is good and noble in the life of working-class people it is also right, I think, to acknowledge that some elements of British society, as any society, are more corrupt than others. New disciples from such backgrounds will have further to travel than others. Thankfully, much of the book covers the great needs of working class and deprived neighbourhoods and offers a feast of practical advice to those involved in gospel ministry among them. I hope a second edition would interact with the findings of the Great British Class Survey. This book should be read and prayed over by anyone seeking to reach out to those in working-class and deprived communities and should sound a challenge to a church that largely appeals to those it is like.