April 2, 2001

Church called to rediscover its
'essential character' in missions
___By Ken Camp
___Texas Baptist Communications
___WACO--Rather than focusing primarily on its missions function and missionary organization, the church needs to rediscover its essential nature as missional, according to author and seminary professor Craig Van Gelder.
___"The church ministers out of what it is," he said. "If it is a reconciled community of the living God, then by nature it passes on reconciliation."
___Van Gelder, professor of congregational mission at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minn., and author of "The Essence of the Church," was a seminar leader at the "Light Up Texas" Church Starting Conference sponsored by the Baptist General Convention of Texas March 22-24.
___The term "missionary" is problematic, Van Gelder maintained. "It puts missions into the hands of a few trained persons."
___Instead, he uses the term "missional" to describe the essential character of the church. "The church is a dynamic community that is missional by its very nature," he said.
___Because God is "on mission" in the world, the church's task is to discover where God is at work and join in God's activity, Van Gelder said. "The question we need to ask is 'What is God up to?'"
___Functions and organizational structures change, depending upon the cultural context, he said. "All organization is contextual and provisional."
___But basic theology does not change, he continued. "We need to return to biblical and theological foundations to sort out what to take and what to leave as we shape our ecclesiology and polity."
___Rather than looking to the latest fad or seeking step-by-step methods to meet goals, Van Gelder challenged churches to look back. He urged Christians to "draw deeply from history" and Scriptural foundations.
___Then the church's challenge is to discern unchanging principles from forms that are shaped by cultural contexts, he said.
___Van Gelder traced four phases of the growth of congregations:
___ From about 1790 to mid-1860s, he noted the "Americanization" of the church, characterized by a shift from European Reformed groups to free church denominations.
___ The period from the birth of the Industrial Revolution to the Great Depression was a time of the urbanization of the church.
___ Then in the post-World War II era until the mid-1960s, the suburbanization of the church followed, with a growth of administrative and program-driven denominations.
___ Since the mid-1980s, Van Gelder identified the current phase as the congregationalization of the church. This has been characterized by the growth of market-shaped or market-driven congregations. It also has been a period in which denominations have struggled with identity, determining whether they will be regulatory or consultative in nature.
___During this phase, he said, at least three recent movements of note have emerged--church renewal, church growth and church health and effectiveness. Valuable lessons the church should take from these movements include the importance of context, change, mission and vision.
___The church should leave behind its fascination with "the new and the next," its notions of success and its obsession with managed techniques, he said.
___Many American Christians bow before the altar of success, paying undue homage to problem-solving methods and the latest innovative techniques, he added. "There is an idolatry in North America that worships the pragmatic solution."
___A "made in America" doctrine and practice of the church has emerged, Van Gelder reported. Essential elements include congregations as voluntary organizations, denominations as organizational structures and specialized structures as the means of doing missions.
___While affirming the American principles of church-state separation and the flexible structures of American Christianity, Van Gelder said the church in the United States must leave behind "denominational systems of control and specialized missions structures as defining the mission of God."
___Returning to biblical foundations for doing the mission of God, he asserted that the Scriptures present two primary structures--local missional congregations and mobile missional teams who in turn plant new missional congregations and strengthen the existing churches. He identified 32 individuals in the New Testament other than the 12 apostles who served in this mobile missional role in 15 locations.
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