There's a group of thinkers who have taken a good look at our culture, at our ways of viewing life and thought, and at the Gospel and how we live it out. They're not satisfied with a kind of rehashing of "how church has always been done," especially since that pattern is only recent and proves highly ethnocentric for North Americans, even retrospective of a disappearing mindset. These thinkers yearn for something more: a missional church.

Western Theological Seminary professor George Hunsberger, a founding light in the Gospel and Our Culture Network (GOCN), is one of those thinkers. ReNEWS editors James D. Berkley and Pamela Bowman found an opportunity recently to interview Dr. Hunsberger, chasing him along trails of ideas that stretch us toward new ways of thinking, ourselves, and new patterns of doing church.

Evangelical Christians have always been interested in "missions." But we seem to be picking up a significant difference between "missions" (with an "s") and "mission," as it is being used these days. What's the difference?

Over the last couple of centuries, churches in the West had a heritage that was conceived to be a Christian society. Mission came to be that which is sent out by the church, so the church had a mission to India, China, or to Latin America, and those were collectively the missions of that church.

By the mid-twentieth century, as colonialism was being dismantled and new relationships were evolving in the world, non-Western churches had become their own selves, and that created questions about missions sent out by the Western churches. It's still appropriate for a church anywhere to send some of its own to another people or another place, so missions in that sense has its own rationale. What was being discovered, however, was the more fundamental reality that the church anywhere--the West, or Asia, Latin America, or Africa--not only sends out "missions" or "ventures" to carry the Gospel, but the church itself is a community sent by God to its place. Therefore, the church's very character is missional.

To quote Emile Brunner, "The church exists by mission, just as fire exists by burning." Mission is part of the identity of the church.

Fill us in on some of your history with this kind of thinking.

In the mid 1980s, Lesslie Newbigin came to do lectures at Princeton Seminary about the missionary encounter of the Gospel with Western culture.1 I was impressed with his clear sense of what is at stake when a gospel encounters any human culture. It led me to his other writings, and that became the centerpiece of my dissertation, which was on his work.2

Newbigin and others had formed the Gospel and Our Culture program in the British Conference of Churches. At an ecumenical mission consultation they challenged a small group of us: "We perceive that you Americans love to talk about this, but what are you going to do about it?" We didn't know! We ended up only with the idea that we ought to stay in touch, so I started a newsletter for 35 people; today it goes to 4,500.3

Eventually we formulated an agenda that related to the intersection of culture, Gospel, and church: to provide useful research on the encounter of the Gospel with our Western culture, particularly our North American culture, and to encourage the transformation of the life and witness of the church.

How has that captured people's attention and changed what they do as the church

First you must change thinking, which began through our book, Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America. In that book we identified a fundamental vision and looked at the cultural context in which we live in North America. The Reign of God theme of the Gospels and of all of the scriptures lies right at the center of a sense of being the church. We wanted to bring back a sense of the missionary structure of the church, especially now, when the church is getting beyond the privileged place as chaplain to the society.

In doing so, we touched nerves we never imagined. Today, Missional Church is a textbook in many different denominational seminaries and colleges. It has influenced the "emergent communities," particularly of evangelical, younger church leaders, many of whom are planting new kinds of churches and living out of different instincts than the Boomer generation. They aren't looking at packaging and marketing, so much as they are asking the questions "What does it mean to be a community shaped by the Gospel? What does it mean to be a community that's missional in the sense of its very identity?"

Now those pastors are asking the next question: "How do we help a community learn to think of itself as missional?"

Why is it important to be a missional church? What's the big deal?

If you only see yourself as a Christian church in a Christian society, there's not a lot to mission other than to be good, moral people to supply good, moral officials for public roles. Under Christendom for 1,600 years, we lost our sense of our identity, so that being missional in character really has dropped out of the picture.

Then, when you add to that the sense in which American values have shaped how we live, there is little distinction between church and culture. We're sort of a Kiwanis Club with a religious touch. "The church" is the organizational structure, and the rest of us are the congregation. And what does a congregation do? We're the ones who come and shop for religious stuff at this organization that has something it can do for us. Even if what it does for us is to help us find a way to serve other people, that's still something it's doing for us. We have been shaped as churches to be vendors of religious goods and services. That's consumerism!

Missional thinking is about the shift from being church as vendor of religious services and goods to being church as missiologist David Bosch described it, a body of people sent on a mission.

Help us understand the intersection between this scholarly study and the day-to-day life of a parish church today. What help can you give First Presbyterian Church as it tries to break out of the 1950s?

Let me answer by starting with the Gospel and Our Culture Network. Our research has scholarly grounding, but we're moving increasingly to communicate with broader accessibility, such as our just-finished book Treasure in Clay Jars: Patterns in Missional Faithfulness. We visited a range of churches, fifteen in all, exploring what a missional church looks like. How does it draw a congregation in new directions or shape the way it lives? None of them is the church that everyone should copy, but we wanted to show through stories of actual congregations, the kinds of things churches are doing to move in a missional direction, or the way in which a church expresses its missional identity. This book helps folks begin to imagine what it can look like.

Currently GOCN is working on discovery tools for congregations--a questionnaire, an interview, and a group Bible study that help a congregation discover how it thinks and sees itself. We are field-testing it, and a year from now, we expect the tools to be available.

We're just developing "the catechesis of the community." The church has used the idea of catechesis with regard to individuals; this project will apply it to a whole congregation. How does a whole congrega-tion establish for itself the practice of what it means to be a Christian, the ways of hearing and living the Gospel in a new way?

Finally, we are starting to look at how to develop Bible study materials to help people ask questions, first, about the context in that time, and how that is similar or different from our own. Second, what is God doing in this text, and how is God doing that kind of thing today? And third, how was God sending the people of God, and how is God sending us? It poses a new kind of question to help us hear things in the text that we haven't always looked for.

When people deal with the context and culture of a biblical passage, I've run into a couple of different phenomena: One is where people better understand what the text means, and then can better apply it to our time. That seems good. The other phenomenon, which I find distressing, is that people say, "Well, that was another time, another culture, another context. Therefore that passage no longer applies to us today."

This was one of Newbigin's critical lines of thought. Such thinking betrays a modern, Enlightenment-produced sense of competence and human rationality that can look at such things, size them up, make judgments about what was intended in that time, make judgments about what can or cannot be applied to our own time, and so forth.

Newbigin pointed out that that means we hold judgment regarding what those texts mean. But we're trying to help communities reverse the whole thing and say, "It's not us engaging the Bible; it's the Bible engaging us." How does it read us? How does it call us to conversion? How does it make us think differently than our culture allows. How does it then shape us as a people God sends?

But doesn't the logical meaning of the text still need to be discovered? If the Bible is going to shape me, I need to know which direction it intends to shape me.

There is an attentiveness to what we are hearing. It's not done in some lifted-out place apart from the text, but by indwelling the text.

Come again?

In our gatherings we may focus on a particular text three, four, or five times. When we come back and review the same questions again in the same text, we live in it. We let it wash over us, and we want to be responsive to how the Spirit wants our minds to grasp what it is saying. The primary agent in this process is the Spirit. That's the shift--to say we're not the primary agent in determining the meaning of the text, as though we can do this dispassionately or objectively.

One of the insights I've appreciated from Jin S. Kim, former president of PFR, is that we are all products of the way we have been taught to think. Jin leads a multicultural church, and he has excellent insight on how, for instance, the Korean church typically thinks with a Confucian mindset--not religiously Confucian, but logically Confucian--whereas the typical North American Protestant church seems to be more Socratic or Greek in its logical orientation. Thus, I can grant how the mindset we bring affects the way we interpret.

At the same time, I get concerned about a Deconstructionist way of looking at things, which basically says there is no shared meaning in the text, and your experience of it is more important than what the writer intended, which we could never discern anyway. That's not what you're saying about missional thinking, is it, but rather that we need to be highly aware of how our own culture is affecting our interpretation of the text?

Missional thinking does have affinity with Deconstructionism, in the sense that it deconstructs our supposition that we can determine truth rationally, objectively, dispassionately. But it is more a "particularism" than a Deconstructionism.

Let me explain: In Newbigin's Foolishness to the Greeks, he lays out the dynamic that the Gospel and culture are not identical, to the chagrin of Western missionary agents, who had imagined that our way of grasping and doing things is obviously "the right way." The Gospel is heard from the Scriptures, but we have had blinders that haven't allowed us to see the influence of our own cultural shaping.

The idea that one can separate out a pure Gospel, unadulterated by any culture, is an illusion. In fact, it is an abandonment of the Gospel, for the Gospel is about the Word made flesh. When we say "the Gospel and Our Culture," it's a way to say we who are Christians, who have been drawn to this Gospel, acknowledge we also are the people of this culture. We require a continuing conversion, as the Gospel keeps addressing us, keeps reading us, keeps calling us to be converted.4

The other side of the coin is that when that Gospel is making us a new kind of community, we are the interpretive lens through which people will see and know what that Gospel is.

Then at many points as the Gospel shapes us, we probably become counter-cultural.

Yes, but let's use the language "alter-native community." We represent an alternative story line about what the world is all about and where it's going. For example, the story of Jesus announcing "The Reign of God is at hand," and putting on our lips the prayer "Your kingdom come," tells us what human life is and what its intended destiny is in the light of God.

That's a different way of living; it alters us. However, we don't want to speak as a church that is off to the side and setting itself outside the pulse of the society. Instead, we want to show how as a church we are called to be distinctly shaped by a different story than the culture we live in. We're not just a pale reflection of any other civic club.

What are some "best practices" you've seen in how a congregation can become missional?

GOCN has been concerned about who we are as a church matching what we do, about being a group that is genuinely shaped by the Gospel, that speaks about the Gospel to others, and that acts in public life in terms of that Gospel. It's a matter of identity, as much as it is activity. It's a matter of embodying the Gospel as much as it is proclaiming it. It's a matter of being community as much as it is our personal faith and life. It's a matter of being sent as much as it is being saved.

It takes time to rid ourselves of old church-as-vendor patterns. The American thing is to make it pragmatic--immediately doable. The "best practice" is to patiently ask God to show us. God may have some very different forms of being church in mind for us.

Okay, humor me. Aren't there at least some good things to begin doing?

Some features of a missional church can be articulated:

* The missional church responds to the Gospel as its charter story. The Cross has to be a part of the image, and suffering, too. That cuts against the grain of a church that thinks our story has to be a success story.

* A missional church is always being formed as a disciple together, not just a collection of disciples. The pastor's number one calling is to be working at forming a community.

* For a missional church, worship is the gathering of our collective worship, not something offered to us when we come on Sunday. It is something we bring together. How a community offers its collective worship is more important than how it hires somebody to provide a good worship experience.

* A missional church considers its gathered and scattered moments a seamless garment. We are as much a community on Tuesday morning as on Sunday morning. The workworlds we inhabit are the locations of our missional presence.

* A missional church's mission is to do the kind of deeds in the world that God cares about and intends for our destiny, deeds of justice, peace, care for the creation. It's not that we are going to establish the Reign of God, but we know that reign has touched us and it is coming, so we act in a way that corresponds to that in all the public ways we touch life.

* A missional church deliberately listens to those who are not Christians--why they aren't, what they have experienced before of the life of the church, what their hungers are, and so forth. We discover new things about the Gospel ourselves by listening to those who have rejected it. And humbly we risk saying it among them in ways that respond to their concerns and hungers.

Now we're getting there!

I hear you pushing toward how to do it. It might be the wrong idea to get those answers stated in a here's-how-to-do-it manual. It just may be that in the discovery of those answers in our local place, the work of God is most profound.

We've been accustomed to thinking one way for a very long time. But we're not just tinkering or fine-tuning here; we're being called to a pretty significant paradigm shift. Being missional is about the Gospel. It's about God and what God is up to, what God is doing with, through, and for this world, and what God has called us into. There isn't a one-size-fits-all answer. People don't think their way into practice, as much as they practice their way into new thinking.

Well said. But this sounds complex. What if we goof up?

A church lives always knowing that its current vision of where it's going is unfinished. That's why we have hope for the future, because God will finish it.

George Hunsberger is professor of Congregational Mission and Dean of the Center for the Continuing Education of the Church at Western Theological Seminary, where he coordinates the Gospel and Our Culture Network in North America.

Notes

1. _{Foolishness to the Greeks (Eerdmans).}
2. _{Bearing the Witness of the Spirit: Lesslie Newbigin's Theology of Cultural Plurality, by George Hunsberger (Eerdmans).}
3. _{See www.gocn.org for newsletters and other information, including books published by the Gospel and Our Culture Network.}
4. _{See Darrell Guder's The Continuing Conversion of the Church (Eerdmans).}