What is church? Sign, instrument and foretaste
Insights from Lesslie Newbigin
Peter Carruthers
This is the second in a planned series of articles asking, ‘What is church?’, aimed at shedding some light on our path as we seek to remain faithful to Jesus and practise authentic church in 21C post-Christian Britain.
The first article introduced US theologian Stanley Hauerwas and his understanding of the church as a ‘disciplined community’. This short article introduces us to Bishop Lesslie Newbigin's thought and his understanding of church as a 'sign, instrument, and foretaste' of God's redeeming grace for the whole life of society.
The argument running through these articles, and indeed much of my writing, is that both our immediate sense of ‘turbulence’ and ‘foreboding’ in the churches, nation and world, and our longer-term historical context, ie the seismic shift from Christendom to post-Christendom, from public life founded on a Christian consensus to a post-Christian, secular, pluralist society, urge us to renew the way we understand what is church is and revisit how we 'do church'.
The late Lesslie Newbigin provides a prophetic voice here. Newbigin spent much of his time in India, where he developed much of his thinking. When he returned to Britain in the 1970s, he was shocked at what had happened to both church and society in the years of his absence.
“When Newbigin went back home, he experienced a greater shock than anything he’d confronted in India. The churches in his own country—the churches that had sent him to the mission field in the first place—had succumbed to a false story about the world, and no one seemed to notice…. [A] secular mindset had infiltrated the thought and practice of his fellow church members. Many of them agreed with their unbelieving neighbours that religion is a personal and private reality, not a message true and powerful for the whole world”
Newbigin saw the damage this myth of progress did to the church’s witness. After all, at the heart of the gospel is the claim that something has happened: Jesus Christ, the crucified Messiah, got up from the grave! In light of the resurrection, the question cannot be “What is my truth?” or “What is your truth?” but “What is the real truth about the world?” (Wax).
This concern for the relationship between the gospel and public life was at the centre of Newbigin’s response to the church’s situation in late 20C Britain. It is vital, he said, to understand that the gospel is ‘public truth’. And he saw the key as the local congregation.
“If the gospel is to challenge the public life of our society, if Christians are to occupy the ‘high ground’ which they vacated in the new time of ‘modernity’, it will not be by forming a Christian political party, or by aggressive propaganda campaigns.
Once again it has to be said that there can be no going back to the ‘Constantinian’ era. It would only be by movements that begin with the local congregation in which the reality of the new creation is present, known, and experienced, and from which men and women will go into every sector of public life to claim it for Christ, to unmask the illusions which remained hidden than to expose all areas of public life to the illumination of the gospel.
That will only happen as and when local congregations renounce an introverted concern for their own life, and recognise that they exist for the sake of those who are not members, as sign, instrument, and foretaste of God’s redeeming grace for the whole life of society.”1
For Newbigin, “the only hermeneutic of the Gospel is congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it” (Wax).
What does this congregation, this faithful community, look like? Quoting Michael Goheen’s summary of Newbigin’s missionary ecclesiology, Wax lists the following characteristics.
It will be a community of praise in a world of doubt and skepticism.
It will be a community of truth in a pluralist society that overwhelms and produces relativism.
It will be a selfless community that does not live for itself but is deeply involved in the concerns of its neighbourhood in a selfish world.
It will be a community prepared to live out the gospel in public life in a world that privatises all religious claims.
It will be a community of mutual responsibility in a world of individualism.
It will be a community of hope in a world of pessimism and despair about the future.
Newbigin, L. 1989. The Gospel in a pluralist society. London: SPCK.
Both these articles are excellent, and strike at the heart of what is meant by a Gospel Church. Writing as I do from Franschhoek in the western Cape, I sense the challenge laid down by Newbigin, to be out there among the wine farms and the tourist attractions, as well as the struggling community in the nearby township, with its daily challenges of unemployment, alcoholism, drugs and much grinding poverty. I am encouraged! We, as a church community at Shofar, are currently engaged in evangelism training, with practical outreach sessions on the streets of the village. We feel a burden to interact with the influencers in the community, that once they are caught for Christ, they might be a catalyst for others to join them.