What’s the point of church?
What’s the point of church?
Are we letting buildings, structures and practices distract from conversation, the lifeblood of community?
by Paul Bradbury,
A few years ago, I was involved in a series of round table discussions, focused on the church and its mission. The room was full of people invited from the wide range of traditions within the Church of England. Our task was to explore what a missional ecclesiology for the future of the church might be.
The day involved facilitated discussion on three themes: mission, kingdom and church. And what was interesting was that, while discussion on mission and kingdom revealed a high degree of common ground, the discussion on church saw a few sparks flying!
Out of that day the idea was developed to publish a book that reflected the spectrum of perspectives and missional practice represented by that conversation. Being the People of God (SCM 2025) continues the conversation and, we hope, widens it by giving people a chance to hear how, in a variety of contexts, the church is responding in mission to our changing cultural context.
Clare Watkins, a Catholic lay theologian and a professor at Durham University, has said that the church might understand itself as “a community of discerning conversation, open to the necessary incomplete and flawed contributions of all who seek what is most true”. But do we see the church and its ongoing life as “a discerning conversation”? I am not sure we do. Most often our attention is drawn to more concrete things like buildings, or to the organisational structures of the church. Or it is drawn so easily to the practices of the church, what we are doing (or not doing), and how we can do it better (or do it at all!).
Yet conversation is the stuff of healthy communities and healthy organisations. Without conversation, through which ideas, information, innovations and ideals flow, are reflected on, adapted and reinforced, organisations ossify into rigid institutions or machines. Good, open conversation is the life of any community. Conversation is also a key locus of discernment, making space and time for that slow work of reflection and evaluation as communities navigate their life and purpose through changing circumstances.
It is in the spirit of that need for discerning conversation that Being the People of God was put together. We recognised that the struggle to find sufficient common ground when talking about the church was not a problem to be fixed. Instead, it simply highlighted the nature of the church. That the church is not a fixed star somehow detached from the world, but an ongoing communal conversation on what it means to live together as disciples of Jesus in the world as it is.
Furthermore, the world as it is undergoing a period of change perhaps unlike any other in human history. We are engaging in this conversation in wildly turbulent days. The strapline for the book therefore reads “Missional ecclesiology in uncertain times”.
I invite you to join in this conversation at the next CMS conversations day on Tuesday 17 March. The day will explore many of the themes of the book. And we will be helped to do this through the contributions of some of those who wrote chapters for it. As you might expect there will be plenty of space for you to engage in conversation! We look forward to seeing you. Book your place now
About Paul Bradbury
Paul is an ordained pioneer minister in the Church of England, based in Poole, Dorset. He is a freelance practical theologian, writer and researcher, and a tutor and lecturer in missional ecclesiology.
