Sermon: Focusing on Mission

Today's sermon stands as one of three in which I am exploring aspects of our diocesan development plan which is organised under five headings.  Having looked a little at ‘developing leadership' and ‘acting collaboratively' it is now time to think about ‘focusing on mission'.  

Four years ago I was able to spend the month of October in New York.  My ‘mission' was to get a sense of how Anglicans were or were not trying to forge some reconciliation with Muslims after 9/11.  On arrival I sat down with Dr Lucinda Mosher,who had agreed to help me make contact with key thinkers and activists in this area. She said that in a couple of day's time she way going to Yale to speak to the annual gathering of the Seminary Commission on Mission - those who ‘teach mission' in the seminaries of the Episcopal Church. She was sure that I would be welcome. I was not entirely convinced that this was a good way to spend my first Saturday in New York. To start with, it meant a pre-dawn encounter with the Subway. And then there was the prospect of sitting in a room full of professors of mission or ‘missiologists'. An unbidden picture of sinewy, sunburnt, Bible-carrying men in pith helmets presented itself to me. I was having my second thoughts first. But in a spirit of adventure, I said, ‘I'd love to come'.

It was a very early start but we were in Yale in time to help the missiologists finish their breakfast. Certainly the Seminary Commission on Mission was a room full of more mature men but they seemed on the whole the indoor type and they were swapping curricula and bibliographies rather than stories of the mission field. I was warmly welcomed and asked to introduce myself. They were very nice to me and the chair of the group, Professor Ian Douglas said, ‘why don't you come up to the Episcopal Divinity School (at Harvard) for a couple of days so we can talk some more.

Before going to see Ian Douglas I thought I should read his book, Fling Out the Banner: The National Church Ideal and the Foreign Mission of the Episcopal Church. In it, he sketches out a history of modern mission that suggests three phases. First, in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century there were many ‘missions'. These were invariably projects of the northern churches working in the global south. It is this concept of ‘missions' that prompted that image of the sunburnt western men in pith helmets and holding Bibles. The next phase came after the Second World War when, basically, mission became singular. No longer did the church focus on missions as discrete projects in distant places. Rather, mission was seen as the central calling of the church to grow and multiply. The third phase began with a critique of this, saying that there are serious problems with the idea that it is the role of the church to make more churches. Rather than having as its primary task the ‘churchification' of the world the church should seek the transformation of the world by acting as God's agency, by prosecuting God's mission. 

This understanding of mission as essentially ‘God's mission', missio Dei, has taken over the central ground in the church today. It lies behind the oft-repeated phrase that ‘it's not the church of God that has a mission but the mission of God that has a church'. It is mission as purpose.

But what exactly is this purpose?  What is God's mission?  And what might it mean to focus on it?

Earlier this week I spent a day interviewing candidates for the post of vicar of one of the cathedral livings.  One of my questions was about mission.  ‘What, in a nutshell, is your understanding of mission?'

I have to confess that none of the answers lodged themselves indelibly in my mind; which is a pity but also very understandable.  Mission in the abstract is much more difficult to talk about coherently than people usually think. 

After the interviews were over the bishop present asked me to answer my own question.  Fair cop, I thought. ‘It is, to share God's love'. I said.  The bishop did not seem very moved by my answer but I stand by it.  That, in a nutshell, is what I think that the church is for and what I am for. To share God's love. Moreover as a statement of mission, a 'mission statement' it meets the key criteria - that is, it is short, memorable and comprehensible to a 12 year old child.

But it remains something of an abstract, generalised statement.  It is about ‘mission' rather than my mission or our mission. 

In a book which has sold well across the English speaking world (The Path Hyperion 1998) Laurie Beth Jones invites people to formulate, through a series of imaginative exercises, their own personal mission statement.  Jesus had one, she says, 'to give life, in all its fullness'. 

I had a go at this a couple of years ago.  Not long before I came here, in fact.  I found the task very difficult and had to spend quite a lot of time working with the exercises in the book, thinking imaginatively, praying, and trying things out before I could come up with my own personal mission statement.  This was, I suppose, one way of ‘focusing on mission', or at least ‘focusing on my mission' - trying to work it out. 

In the end I came up with a phrase and was happy with it: ‘to enable others to grow in faith'. 

I have found that this little statement has given me permission and encouragement, in a strange sort of way, to do all sorts of things - but that it also provides a discipline which calls me back from time to time.  I ask myself, is this project, or this priority or this comment I am about to make or this method I am being urged to use, likely to promote the growth in faith of others?  If I feel that it is, then I will be inclined to go for it - and with real commitment. If I am not convinced, things begin to take a different turn. 

And whenever I do that I am, of course, ‘focusing on mission' not in the abstract but in a very real, personal, practical sense.  And this it seems to me might offer a way of approaching the admittedly difficult subject of ‘mission' today. For two common options are to me unhelpful.  To say that mission only properly refers to God's grace-fuelled initiative of bringing in God's kingdom at the end of time is, I feel, too grand and overwhelming.  But on the other hand, to label such and such a project or initiative or effort as mission while others are maligned as maintenance is often a not very carefully disguised form of church politics. 

‘Mission' is, of course, a very closely related concept to ‘ministry'.  I want to suggest that ‘mission' is our way of talking about priorities and ‘ministry' the way we talk about methods of working towards them.  But there are often subtleties in the way in which these words are heard in the church.  If I had more time I would explore the idea forming in my mind that while mission is a rather masculine word, ministry is a feminine one.  Mission connects with words like leadership and pioneering.  It suggests going out, being brave, venturing forth and so on.  Ministry, on the other hand, speaks in a more pastoral way, is connected with words like care and service.  The church as an organisation is really struggling with this dichotomy.  A few years ago everyone was calling vicars ‘pastors' and bishops ‘chief pastors'.  Now the talk is all of ‘leaders in mission'.  I wonder whether I am the only one to find it odd that 13 years after the ordination of women, when we are living through a numerical feminisation of the ordained ministry, we are experiencing exactly the opposite in our rhetoric about the church.  It is as if now that the reality is feminine the ideal must be masculine.  As if now that we have absorbed maternal values into our practice of ministry (in for instance, shared or local ministry) we are longing for a church that is more testosterone driven. 

The ministry/mission tension or dialectic is a significant one today.  The diocesan development plan bids us not to focus on ministry but mission.  And yet look at what is celebrated at the great cathedral services and where we invest most of our resources.  It is ministry which remains in the limelight.  Why?  Because ministry is the Christian way of doing mission.  If you want to focus on mission in a literal sense, that is, ‘look at it' you must investigate what is happening under the heading of ministry. Indeed the real question to ask is not how much mission are we doing?  There is no answer to that. Mission is not what you do but why you do it. The real question is: ‘how authentically does the ministry of the church reflect its discerned mission?'  Its discerned mission. Mission in the abstract often does not add up to anything at all.

But it seems to me that the tension between mission and ministry might be eased if we bring another word into play, one that is often associated with ministry but which is perhaps more closely connected with the way we hear and use the word mission today. That word is vocation. 

A good mission statement strengthens integrity and purpose, gives a life a shape and while it limits options also expands what you might call ‘perfect freedom'.  It is of course a statement of calling as much as of sending. When you utter your mission statement, you articulate your vocation.

My suggestion, then is that the phrase ‘focusing on mission' in the diocesan development plan is not an invitation to think grand thoughts about what God is doing in the world rather it is a prompt to think humble thoughts about what I am for, what we are for.  ‘Focusing on mission' means calling ourselves to account against our carefully discerned sense of vocation.  If each member of our diocese, each church, each school, each cathedral (oops there is only one) each board and council had a one line mission statement, comprehensible by a twelve year old child, and to which it was repeatedly called to account, the life of the diocese could be utterly transformed.  And so would the world.  For such reform of the church would not be in the interests of detached purity or fashionable fad-following but in pursuit of integrity and influence.  If the church wants to grow in integrity and influence for God it must be clear about mission, humble about vocation and active in ministry.