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’, might this historic pattern repeat itself? Might the evangelical/pietistic version of Christianity, still strong in Pentecostalism around the world, slowly give way to a new, yet faithful expression of the gospel, based on Christian communities in every part of society? Might God be calling a reshaped church, fruitfully adapting to social change, to help embody a trend not to secularization but to post-secularity?5
The ecclesial turn
The church is being pushed to the edge of society.
This largely reflects the church’s failure to adapt to social changes.
The church has become self-limiting in its relevance, availability and organization.
Mission-shaped Church can be seen as a hypothesis – that God will use new contextual churches to help the church be more relevant and available, as it takes shape within all the settings of life.
An ethical turn
A second turn is influencing society. This is ‘a turn away from life lived in terms of external or “objective” roles, duties and obligations, and a turn towards life lived by reference to one’s own subjective experiences’ – a life that may be relational as much as individualistic (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005, p. 2). Individuals pay less attention to divine authority and more attention to their subjective states. Their own needs, desires, capabilities and relationships have become their prime frame of reference.
Charles Taylor has described how following the late eighteenth-century Romantics, the ethic of personal fulfilment was restricted to the intellectual and artistic elites. For most people, personal fulfilment was constrained by the demands of sexual morality and the values of work and productivity. During the 1960s, however, this ethic leapt out of these constraints and became an overriding goal. ‘What is new is that this kind of self-orientation seems to have become a mass phenomenon’ (Taylor, 2007, p. 473).
This represents more than an intensified search for pleasure. It is a new understanding of the good: people have their own ways of realizing their humanity. Each person must live out what is true to them. Rather than having to conform to a model imposed by society, the previous generation, religion or political authority, individuals must be given the opportunity to express their authentic selves, provided they do not harm anyone else.
Ronald Inglehart has spent a lifetime arguing that when economies advance, ‘materialist’ values based on meeting physical security, sustenance, shelter and other needs give way to ‘post-materialist’, quality-of-life values. Recently, however, he has argued that post-materialist values ‘are just one indicator of a much broader cultural shift from survival values to self-expression values’. The latter are changing attitudes to gender roles, sexual orientation, work, religion and child-rearing (Inglehart, 2008, p. 142). This represents a profound ethical turn: the expressive rather than dutiful self dominates society – and increasingly the church.
What lies behind this change?
First, the expressive self reflects post-industrialization, in which subjective opinions are valued more highly (Inglehart and Welzel, 2005, p. 29). This is partly because the post-industrial economy produces unprecedented levels of prosperity, which enhance existential security. Most people now take food, clothing, education and other essentials for granted to an extent never possible before. The proportion of earnings required to secure these necessities has steadily fallen, allowing people to spend more on goals beyond immediate survival. These goals express their subjective selves.
Second, the expressive self is a reaction against an increasingly regulated world. The reaction burst to surface in the 1960s and 1970s. Young people rebelled against the conformity and discipline required by the mass production