Transcript of Keynote address by Archbishop of Canterbury:

Mission Shaped Church Conference – June 23rd 2004

Now one of the great advantages of the mission shaped church agenda is of course that it obliges us to some hard thinking about what the church itself is. And it wouldn’t be too unjust I think to say that over the centuries, a lot of Anglicans have tended to think that the question of what the church is will somehow look after itself or solve itself. As if we have our theology of the church on the National Health. 

Now we have to think harder, now we have to ask more searching questions about why and what the church is, and we have to do harder work on what it is that was distinctive at the very beginnings of the church, about its existence. When I used to teach early Christian theology, I often said to my students that the problem of approaching the history of the early Christian church was that we thought we knew what a church was, but nobody much did in the first century of the Christian era.  You didn’t begin with a cultural concept of going to church; you didn’t begin with a building that immediately flashed up on people’s inner eye when you said the word church - a building with straight lines of seats, a table at the far end, and probably some slightly unfashionable architecture all around the outside. You didn’t begin by knowing the answers, you were responding rather at the very beginnings of the church’s history to something that had happened and working out bit by bit, not very easily, not always very clearly what the kind of difference was that Jesus had made, and what life together expressed that difference. And so I hope you’ll pardon me if I begin by doing a bit of theology about the church, looking at its beginnings, looking at the New Testament concept of church and seeing where that leads us in our thinking today. 

One of the sometimes helpful heritages of Anglicanism is of course the idea that it’s a middle way between two mistakes. So whether that constitutes a third mistake is of course open to endless discussion, but it’s a useful tactic to begin lectures with. So I’ll begin like that with the two mistakes. Did Jesus found a church? is a question which sometimes crops up in discussion doesn’t it, and if you pick up that great doorstop of a book by Hans Kuhn on The Nature of Christianity you’ll notice that one of the things that Hans Kuhn says as a good liberal Roman Catholic is that Jesus did not found a church. And he’s responding of course to the idea that somehow the mission of Jesus finds its culmination and its essence in Jesus laying down principles for an institution, organising a hierarchy, structuring a community which is governed, ruled, organised and structured in certain ways. And the reaction against that, the reaction which says of course Jesus didn’t found a church is in many ways a healthy reaction. It reminds us that if you read the gospels with open eyes and hearts, it’s quite difficult to draw from it a picture of a Jesus who’s main priority is founding an institution. as people found a club or a religious order or a political party or whatever else. 

If I say that in the 20th Century, Saunders Lewis was the founder of the Welsh Nationalist Party in the 1920’s, most of us know pretty much what’s involved in that. Saunders Lewis had a bright idea about Welsh political independence – very bright idea! and he set about creating the structure which would draw people into that, a programme to which people signed up with membership lists and meetings. Now, that’s not quite the impression you get from the gospels I would argue. Jesus is not implementing a programme to which people sign up with regular meetings and structured societies. So the pendulum swings, but it swings as usual, rather too far to the idea that Jesus simply proclaimed the possibility of salvation for persons and that it was quite useful later on for them to get together and compare notes. Jesus told people how they were to become right with God and because of course it helps to hear it from other people as well in due course, something emerged that we call a church which is the assembly of individuals who have beliefs about Jesus. I think that is equally hard to map onto the New Testament and specially onto the gospels. Jesus begins by creating a set of relationships with the 12 apostles and that set of relationships survives the greatest, the most traumatic interruption that could possibly be. The betrayal of which the apostles are guilty and the death of Jesus, a shattering of everything that had been constructed in a long relationship of shared work and prayer and speaking and listening over the years of Jesus’ ministry. And that is the set of relationships that is restored immediately when Jesus rises from the dead and appears not simply to individuals, but to the apostolic company. He brings himself back into that network of relationships which he had created in his ministry and in so doing enables those people to understand the saving reality of his death. And according to St Paul, he also appeared to much larger numbers of people and at the very end of Matthew’s gospel we have what does seem a fairly substantial public meeting in Galilee as Jesus makes his farewells. 

But the point is simply that the church may not be an institution founded by Jesus in the simple sense, but neither is it an afterthought concocted by individual believers who happened to like each others company. The church would be in a very sad state if it was dependant on that! Jesus creates relationships because of course that is what the God of Israel has always done. Not giving a message from on high only, but creating a people. And by his presence and work among that people, shaping their relations with each other through law and prophecy, Jesus is the living presence of Israel’s God, the Word made flesh does what God habitually does, creates relationships, shapes them by his will and his love and his presence. And so from the start, where Jesus is, there is the church; the church as the assembly of those who are finding their relationships, their lives transfigured by the presence of Jesus; the assembly of those who are finding their lives transfigured by the presence of Jesus. Church is the event of Jesus’ presence with its characteristic effect of gathering people around him and making them see one another differently as they see Him. The church is the immediate effect of Jesus being there. And hence St Paul can write about the new creation which happens when people are drawn into fellowship, into relationship with the risen Jesus and encourages us therefore to think that the church itself is the beginning of the new creation. Not an institution designed to further a programme, not an association of people who happen to have the same ideas, but the beginning of God’s reclaiming of the territory of human life and not just human life either, God’s reclaiming of creation as his own and God’s pouring into creation of his saving and transfiguring power so that the world, human and non human will once again show radiantly who and what he is as God. 

So I think if I were to try and identify the first principle of a real mission theology, it might be somewhere in that area - the event of the new creation. The church is the name we give to those networks, those places, those relationships which embody the event of the new creation. The church is what happens when Jesus is there, there received and recognised. I begin with that theological picture because I do think its important that we get back to the fundamentals of the church in its earliest days and try from time to time quite seriously to imagine what that beginning of the church was like in terms of the recreation of the world. The apprehension of new creation, new relationships. The sense that the presence of Jesus transfigured an environment, human and non human. Only as we see the church in that event light do we see I think what the principle is against which we have to try and test all our attempts to be the church. 

So let me move on from that to the churches structures. In any community, any institution, any society, good structures are those which serve the essence of the community which help it to be faithful to what it really is and so when we ask about the structures of the church, we must surely ask if these are structures which allow that fundamental reality I’ve been talking about to be visible and real. Is the church organised in such a way that it looks as if the new creation is happening? Do the ways in which people behave, relate, make rules, worship in the church, do all those things speak of the new creation? Do they let the event of encounter with Jesus happen afresh? Well that’s one way of looking at criteria for the structures of the church. Are they structures and patterns which let that basic event of encounter happen again and again? Because if not, the church has become something very different from where it started. It’s become a community which says once there was an encounter with Jesus and we like to remember that or in the terrible words of a well known hymn, “and still the Holy Church is here although her Lord has gone!” Now I think the very opposite of that is asking how we have structures that allow the basic event to go on happening. And neither individual conversion alone nor institutional extension alone deals with that. We have to ask much more radically, how do we structure a society in which it goes on being possible, even likely that people will meet Jesus and in meeting Jesus will want more people to meet Jesus? 

But before we too hastily move that into an agenda for reform, it is worth remembering that of course Jesus is met, Jesus is encountered in more than just one way. In the regular life of a Christian community, we ought to be encountering Jesus again and again. The transforming encounter with Jesus that transforms our encounter with each other ought to be a possibility daily renewed. And therefore the regular worshipping life of the church. The prosaic, dare I say it, worshipping life of the church is not just some boring bit of detail we can leave behind. The point of preaching the word and celebrating the sacraments is of course precisely that living and transforming encounter with Jesus goes on happening. The point of celebrating Holy Communion is not to remember an encounter with Jesus that happened to somebody else long ago, it is to be contemporary with Jesus, to share his table and to share his life. And when theologians of Catholic and orthodox backgrounds say the Eucharist makes the church, that I think is what they mean. If the church really is transforming encounter, well where else, where better, where more fully than where we sit at a table with the risen Jesus and take his risen life to ourselves, breath in the Spirit as we take the bread and the wine that have been given over to the hands of Jesus. 

So what I’m talking about is not some anti-sacramental picture of the church, quite the contrary, it’s nudging us, driving us to rediscover what the sacraments are about and to say that one mode of encounter with Jesus is quite simply that recurrent, that regular, yes if you like, prosaic renewal, again and again. As we read the bible as we hear the word preached, as we receive the sacraments, as we initiate people into fellowship, all of that is encounter. Internally then, the structures of the church are bound to be structures which take seriously the need for stability and continuity. They are bound to be in a very important sense, conservative structures, by which I mean that if somebody comes up tomorrow with a bright new idea about encountering Jesus which involves us in leaving behind holy communion, I have some very unfriendly questions to ask and I hope others have too. They are conservative these structures simply in the sense that Jesus said this is what we were going to do in order to encounter Him. And it’s always worth taking Jesus seriously! So the conservatism of structures, which put sacrament and word at the heart of things, that’s the conservatism if you like of Jesus our contemporary. But externally, the encounter has to happen as well and outside that regular and prosaic internal life of the church, we have to ask, what are the structures that enable encounter for the first time, that enable encounter that cuts across people’s expectations and loyalties, encounter that really creates new community. And that of course is where the challenges lie for us. We’re not too bad at the conservative structures of word and sacrament, we are learning rather slowly about the structures that enable utterly fresh encounter, utterly unexpected transforming creative encounter. And what has been so extraordinary, so life giving and wonderful in the last decade or so in this context is more and more stories coming in of how those fresh encounters happen. 

If church is what happens when Jesus is around, if it is the event of new creation, then we have vast numbers at the moment, thank God, of worked examples of this living encounter, of this new creation. God is showing us examples of what the church is in startling new ways, because we are seeing what corporate forms of life actually happen when people meet Jesus. One of the great books of mission theology in the last couple of decades known to many here I’m sure is Vincent Donovan’s great work “Rediscovering Christianity” about his experience in East Africa as a primary evangelist. There is much in that that’s of great help, but one of the interesting principles on which he works or worked in East Africa was that he would go, he would tell the story, he would sow the seed and leave some suggestions, and go away somewhere else and come back and see what had happened. What had actually been created as a result of that encounter? And of course, what he found, not wholly surprisingly was that it was the sort of thing that you might very well call a church. It was a community which struggled to keep itself open all the time to the action of God in hearing the stories and breaking the bread. It was a community that struggled to show in its neutral relations what kind of God it was who was believed to have acted to bring this about. And I think it’s that kind of model, that kind of principle that we are more and more being driven to. Here is God doing something, here is God in Christ drawing people together in a certain shape of community of common life. 

What are we going to make of it? And the challenge as you all know, the challenge that’s been put to us in the last decade very specially is, do we approach this with a kind of protective or of self protected nervousness, or do we approach it first with gratitude. I like to think that we’re learning gratitude. But the self protected nervousness means approaching these new things and saying well, is it Anglican? Prod prod, does it move?! Does it correspond with what we think really matters? Is it co-opted into our culture and it’s that last question which I think is the most fishy of all. Is it co-opted into our culture? Do these people know the right words and moves to make? Do they know the rather curious technical language that we use? Can they apply it fluently and confidently? And frequently of course the answer is, no they can’t. And it does interest me that if I can be a little bit polemical for a bit. It does interest me that even some very very bold and imaginative mission ventures have still not quite understood that the way they talk takes masses of stuff for granted. We do not know how strange our words are. A few years ago I was writing a little book of family prayers with a priest friend and set myself as part of the preparation for that to see if you could put things like the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis into plain English and really plain English, you know plain English that didn’t require you to make any footnotes at all. It is vastly difficult, it really is, and my versions are not particularly successful but it’s worth trying. What am I really trying to say in words that don’t need footnotes. For a professional academic, this is torture! But it’s back to this question. How do we approach? Do we first ask do they know the dialect, or do we say, here are people learning the language of Jesus. And what they say is bound to be at some point very importantly, very significantly meshing in how we talk about Jesus, but it will take a little while to get the languages if you like working together, fully to understand each other. And so the second great mission principle here, if the first one is the recognition of the event of a new creation, the second I think is patience. In the activity of mission, I would say there is a proper patience and a proper impatience. 

There is or there ought to be a huge impatience about mission because we really want in the words of the chorus “to see Jesus lifted high”. We really want the encounter to happen because it is the most significant and the most life-giving and transfiguring reality that there could conceivably be in this world or the world to come. Absolutely central, an impatience about getting people to share that joy and that vision is a perfectly proper impatience. We ought to be boiling with that impatience. But it has to be balanced by the patience as the work begins with the extraordinarily complex ways in which people move into this and discover this and test the words on their tongue and find their way into a conversation with each other and with their living God which is real and authentic. And to be personal I like many of you I guess sometimes find this very hard. I am an Anglo Catholic by upbringing and part of my upbringing was welsh non-conformist so I have a very rich mixture of conservatisms in my being - a conservatism of the welsh revival and the hymnody of welsh Protestantism (this is a very deep and important thing and is the thing that stirs my centre more than anything else) and a conservatism of a pattern of liturgy, and contemplation and theology which enriched my imagination both verbal and visual throughout my formative years. Naturally, I would quite like everybody that calls themselves Christian to be an Anglo-catholic who likes welsh revivalist hymns and I will accept subscriptions to my new movement later…

But the experience of the real church is one in which of course you can’t impose. You have to listen and you have to be enormously patient and the conservatism that says “well this is where I met Christ” becomes (immensely important) only one element in responding to another person’s encounter with Christ. In the church we neither say well you go your way and I’ll go mine. Nor do we say there is one way of worshipping the Lord and its mine and you have to learn it. In the church, we are always uncomfortably watching and listening to each another worshipping, encountering and we ought to be doing it, not just with discomfort but with that hopefulness that says when you encounter Jesus Christ, there will be something that I wouldn’t have known for myself. I think that is the most wonderful thing about the church, that we are all listening to one another’s encounters, saying, “ I couldn’t possibly take it in the riches of Christ, it is unthinkable therefore I need as many people around to listen to as I can find”. And in that, I won’t master the whole thing. I’m not there to master Jesus Christ but to let him master me. Therefore I need to hear about him, again, again, again and afresh, afresh and afresh. So patience (what I provocatively call “passionate patience” in something I wrote a little while ago) becomes a mission principle. And its that balance of the eternal renewal of encounter with Jesus in yes the discipline, the regular life of the community and the external encounter that first generates the excitement and the muddle sometimes, of the new community. The balance of those is where the life and health of the church lies. 

Some years ago in Wales, when we were discussing all this, I coined the phrase “mixed economy”. As with any phrase you coin, you live to regret it but I still think it has some meaning, if what it means is that the church is always a mixture of the disciplend regularities of the prose and the unpredictable encounters, the new creation beginning to happen afresh somewhere, the poetry. There is no point in either looking down at the other. We need to learn what a church would look like in which both were taken absolutely seriously. 

That takes us right back to the question of structures. How does the church organise itself in such a way that it doesn’t simply send out the message that new expressions, new encounters are a kind of tolerable eccentricity on the edge but neither does it send out the message that everything people are doing as the moment is wrong and they need to forget it. We need a huge amount of discernment, above all, about the nature of Christian maturity.  We need to have in our minds, healthy, vivid pictures of what Christ-like holiness is like so we can recognize across the different styles, emphases and priorities around in the church, we can recognise the kingship of those who have met Christ.

Structures won’t do a lot for that but they can at least take away some of the obstacles. They can help the (what might think of itself as the) mainstream church to understand that it is not just threatened or annihilated by fresh expressions. They can help those struggling with new stories, new encounters to realise they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. In other words, they are structures of communication and perhaps that is the challenge before us today, not only structures that enable fresh things to happen but good structures of communication between the old and the new, the conventional and the not so conventional. It is odd, isn’t it that the church is meant to be a communion, that is a place where sharing happens, and yet it is so uncertain or bad at communication. Some kinds of communication in and about the church of course spread like wildfire and that is usually the communication about what bad Christians, some Christians are. Other kinds of communication spread much more uncertainly. So we need to ask “how do we keep those channels alive?”. 

And it is at this point that I want to touch one further matter that preoccupies me quite a lot and that has to do with the training of ministers, not just ordained but the training of ministers in general - those who are given some responsibility for servicing the health and communication systems of the church. The good minister, emphatically the good ordained minister in this context, is one who can make communication, contact and communion a reality, one who can interpret people and communities to each other, one who can sustain a relational unity rather than just a legal or formal one, someone who can hold the ring, who can say “hang on, we need to listen to that” or “we need to stay with that.” Someone who can sometimes say “we need to move on”, but who will always be saying “listen to that”, “have we heard this?” and himself or herself absorbing and listening a great deal. That as I say is true emphatically of the ordained ministry and I would say it is the rationale for having an ordained minister at all, that there should be people in the church whose jobs is virtually nothing but facilitating, through worship above all, that sort of communication. But everyone who ministers in the church needs those skills of listening and interpreting. Also, because this is part of the listening and interpreting, they need more than ever that particular kind of entrepreneurial skill and gift which allows them to do new things, to learn new languages and (if you understand this expression) to “baptise” new languages and cultures into the fellowship. 

For me as a Bishop and a teacher of the faith that becomes a very serious question of how we form ministry and not all our structures of ministerial training are orientated very effectively toward that, I guess a lot of us will recognise. That’s not to say that our training structures are useless or misguided. We need again to avoid the silly mistake of saying we are doing it all wrong, we need to start afresh and start with nothing but there is of course a culture of training for ministry including ordained ministry which can get bogged down with the servicing of the community full stop rather than animating of relation in the community and therefore the animating of relation beyond the community and if we are testing structures against the kind of criteria mentioned, that is the sort of test we have to apply I would say to ministerial training.

So moving towards some sort of conclusion about all this, I think that what I am suggesting is that in the future of a mission-shaped church we need first of all that powerful and clearly biblical sense that church is an event before it is an institution. The “spirituality” (if you’ll excuse the word. It is not one I really like but let it stand) of a mission shaped church will be one primary grounded in that recognition and that recognition is simply a way of saying we are renewed, restored, redeemed not by the absorption of ideas but by becoming members of Christ, that is, by coming in a fresh relation with the living Jesus and thus, a fresh relation with each other - event before institution.

Secondly, our spirituality in this new age of the church has to be one which repeated, gently, persistently questions, whether and how the way we do things is somehow enabling that encounter. As I said early because structures themselves can’t deliver that encounter only God do that, often we are asking what gets in the way. What structures we are setting up or not will be structures guaranteed to produce this series of results but quite light structures which will allow things to happen - more permissive and prescriptive.

It is this second thing which is often more difficult for the church because I suspect that quite often a lot of us work with an unspoken models or ideals of the church which take for granted that a real church is one in which authority and control are simply and effectively exercised. If that were the case, of course, there have not been many real churches throughout history of the Christian enterprise and I’m not here talking about the exercise of discipline in a local congregation but simply about that pervasive, seductive idea that the church, the real church, is one where the lines go clearly downwards. I think God is saying to us, as I think He has been saying to us for the last 2000 years, beware of that. 

Authority happens in the church and is real but as soon as you try to link it with a structure without asking the question “does it serve encounter with Christ?” just beware. A church like the Church of England which is in many ways quite tightly wedded to legal provision and regulation, has got some giving away and giving up to do and learning about permission rather than prescription. The deeply encouraging thing I find in the present climate is that I see a lot of this actually happening. The message has been heard and we are not simply struggling against an uncritical control mentality. As I’ve said on another occasions, I think it is an enormous gift of providence, that the report on Mission-shaped Church came before the Church of England came at the same time as proposals for loosening up some of the administrative structure and I think there is plenty more work to be done there. 

A spirituality then rooted in the sense of an event, the event of a new creation. A spirituality which is not too afraid of giving away, of permitting. A spirituality which therefore involves the gift of listening and gift of thanksgiving because to be able to give thanks is, I think, a gift of God and to give thanks for new expressions of the body of Christ on the grounds that they are part of what you need to be the Christian God wants you to be, that I think is one of the graces we need to pray for in our new setting.

I began by trying to steer my way through two errors - Jesus founding the church as the kind of institution that we would found if we were founding a church and, on the other hand, a church as an afterthought. I hope I can draw to a close by similarly suggesting we need some kind of breakthrough in the standoff between conservative and radical here. What I think I’m proposing seems to me to be deeply conservative in some ways with the conservatism of Jesus Christ, that is the conviction that what Jesus was in Galilee and Jerusalem and is what Jesus is today, yesterday, today and forever. We need therefore encounter with Jesus is always encounter with that highly specific cluster of events – a life, a death and a resurrection - not just a generalised spirituality and I think that is important. We are not out to make people feel better, to make people feel spiritual, to give people a set of experiences that will enable them to do their daily jobs less stressfully. All that would be very nice but that is not actually what the gospel says. The gospel says that you are, we are, profoundly at odds with ourselves because of what the gospel says we are meant to be and that only by listening and absorbing into our very being the love of God in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit and the forgiveness and absolution it involves. Only by that do we overcome the enmity of ourselves and to our maker. That is not guaranteed to make you feel better overnight but it is guaranteed to transform you. 

So that is where our spirituality has its heart but it enables us I would say to break through that deadlock, that standoff. Is that version of the gospel conservative or radical? I hope neither or both. I think the future of the church must always be a future that is faithful to that hardcore of conviction about Jesus and in its way faithful to those histories, all those various people who have absorbed and learnt that across the centuries. We don’t tear up the history books. Radical also though yes because we have to look to our roots in scripture and we have to look at criteria against which developments can be tested. That again may not make us feel better instantly but it will, please God, open the door to transformation. So lets try and get away from the idea that taking about church planting or fresh expressions of church is a massive sustained assault against everything Christians have ever done just as we have to ask some in the church to get away from the idea that fresh expressions is just that and therefore the bastions have to be manned and the position defended. No. We are trying to rediscover that reality that in fact is at the very centre of what the church has always done, the event of Jesus in word, sacrament, proclamation. Wherever we put ourselves on the map, whatever particular calling we have in the body of Christ to service that reality, which remains the one central thing. The church happens where the living Jesus is. Everything we say and everything we do has to point to that centre and be tested by it. And because that is where it all points, because it is the act of Jesus where is matters here, we have every reason to be confident, not in ourselves or the Church of England or in the establishment institutionally or in new churches or old, emerging or retracting churches but to be confident in the love of God in Jesus Christ.

Copyright Rowan Williams, 2004

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