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Overview
Using the image of the traditional practice of “beating the bounds” of the parish, this book contrasts the desire to mark boundaries with God’s call to explore boundaries in order to open them. Building on visits to nine Episcopal and Church of England congregations, Spicer explores how they are opening the boundaries between inherited expressions of church and the unique contexts in which they find themselves. He argues that to beat the boundaries around their current expressions of church, congregations should (1) name a missional identity common to both their past expressions of congregational life and the church they hear God calling them to become; (2) identify whom they’re seeking to reach in the community and how they intend to do so; (3) identify what sort of new church expression God is calling them to create; (4) empower a missional leader and plan for governance issues their work may raise; and (5) collaboratively identify how to define success and how to understand what might be seen as failure in terms of common church metrics.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819232946 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Morehouse Publishing |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 390 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Beating the Boundaries
The Church God Is Calling Us to Be
By John Spicer
Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2016 John SpicerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-3294-6
CHAPTER 1
Beating the Bounds, Beating the Boundaries
"O LORD, you are my portion and my cup; it is you who uphold my lot. My boundaries enclose a pleasant land; indeed, I have a goodly heritage." — Psalm 16:5–6 (Book of Common Prayer)
IN THIS AGE OF DIGITAL EVERYTHING, one of the most seemingly out-of-touch observances on the Episcopal liturgical calendar must be the Rogation Days — the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday before Ascension Day. On these days, we ask (rogare in Latin) God's blessing on agriculture and, more recently, on wider expressions of commerce and industry. The practice comes from imperial Rome, when citizens would walk to a grove outside the city to pray to the god Robigus to protect their crops. As Christianity syncretized Roman practices, the Christian God took Robigus's place in the ritual. In the fifth century, the bishop of Vienne in Gaul introduced a three-day rite seeking God's protection after a series of earthquakes. The priest would lead his people into the fields to beg God's blessing on the land and their crops. The observance spread in Europe, taking place on the three days before Ascension Day. Pope Gregory the Great formalized the observance and fixed a date of April 25; and in 707, the Council of Cloveshoo introduced the Rogation Days into English liturgical life. After prayers at the parish church, the priest led the people through their village and literally around the geographic parish, singing hymns and offering Scripture readings and homilies. Crosses, banners, and standards led the people in procession (Stilgoe 49).
In England, the festival morphed from a liturgical to a geographic exercise as well, combining supplication and thanksgiving with the practicalities of marking parish boundaries in a day before surveying. During the processions, people would literally beat the bounds, striking trees, rocks, and pathways to remind themselves, and those in neighboring parishes, where the boundaries lay (di Bonaventura 117). Participants in the festivities would also bump children against significant boundary-marking trees, hit them on the head, or dunk them head first into rivers as aids to memory; and villagers would play tug-of-war with people from neighboring parishes across boundary streams. Clerical instruction included not just God's sovereignty over the land but the sin of moving human boundary markers, illustrated through passages like Deuteronomy 27:17. Each parish vicar had a stake in the process: Defining the parish boundaries, and preventing encroachment by other parishes, made clear which tithes he would be entitled to receive (Stilgoe 50). By the seventeenth century, with increasing population and common land being threatened by the enclosure movement, careful boundary definitions became even more important. As landscape historian John R. Stilgoe notes, "Religion, law, and folk custom all served to define the village outline and secure the community landscape from old and new forms of external disruption. ... Rogation perambulations ensured every villager of his particular location within the kingdom; they defined his community space and sanctified his personal property" (Stilgoe 51).
Today, beating the bounds in a Rogation procession carries theological weight as a sign of our enduring connection with, and responsibility for, the good earth God has given us. It's also a great opportunity for some quaint reveling in Anglican tradition — what longtime Episcopalian or Anglican doesn't love a good procession? And it's even more fun outside. Churches in England and the United States have renewed the practice and shared it with the world on social media. (Search for "beating the bounds" and "rogation procession" on YouTube.) Like our English spiritual forebears, perhaps we value knowing where our boundaries lie as God's people in a given place, with our space clearly defined and pleasingly sanctified. Of course, the shadow side of well-defined boundaries is the temptation to remain within them, seemingly safe (or at least shielded) from forces that threaten the church from outside.
Despite the rural heritage of western Missouri, where I serve, the Rogation Days aren't a highlight on most churches' liturgical calendars. In my first congregation — Church of the Good Shepherd, a small mission in Springfield, Missouri — I decided we'd try it. I donned a cassock and surplice, took up the processional cross, and led several intrepid members around the church grounds. We stopped along the way to hear Scripture, thank God for the abundance of creation, and pray for seasonable weather and the fruits of the earth. What I remember most was feeling exceptionally self-conscious as we pretended to be a quaint English country church marking its parish boundaries. Our neighbors, in this buckle on the Bible Belt, probably thought we were crazy. Or, more likely, they never noticed at all.
What I missed at Good Shepherd was the opportunity to teach about our little liturgical procession. Beyond naming our role as stewards of creation and celebrating "all good gifts around us," we were living out DNA we didn't even know we had. That mission congregation had been founded eleven years before I arrived. Its initial energy had been about using praise music, charismatic worship, and the Alpha course to attract people who didn't know the Episcopal tradition. Unfortunately, by the time I arrived, that energy had dissipated into a small circle of comfort where most of the congregation was happy to receive the blessings of healing and community without much interest in reaching anyone else. We tried to attract new members to worship and special events, and the parishioners were very welcoming when outsiders arrived. But they were content to open their doors rather than moving outside them. The mindset mirrored our quaint little Rogation procession: Our "boundaries enclose[d] a pleasant land" (Psalm 16:6, BCP), and the congregation was happy staying within them. Not surprisingly, Good Shepherd closed a couple of years later.
It's a mindset common in liturgical sacramental congregations, Episcopal and otherwise. We do what we do; we're happy when others come by; and we're proud when we do a good job of welcoming them on a Sunday morning. That's absolutely vital, and hard, work — and it's only a good start. We can't just open the doors to let people in; we have to see our boundaries — physical and emotional — as starting lines for moving out to engage the people around us. And the mission field is ripe. The end of American Christendom has left a remarkable percentage of the population at work, in bed, or at soccer on Sunday mornings. The "churchless" comprise 43 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Barna Group. That breaks down into 33 percent of the population being de-churched (having left a church at some point) and 10 percent being unchurched (having never been part of a faith community) (Barna and Kinnaman 6).
As the saying goes, God's church doesn't have a mission; God's mission has a church. In Matthew's gospel, Jesus brings the story to a close by sending the first apostles out beyond their circle: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations ..." (28:19). The apostolic church took up that call and turned a Jewish sect into a world religion. The apostolic church today is still "sent to carry out Christ's mission to all people," a mission of "restor[ing] all people to unity with God and each other in Christ" (BCP 854–55). Beyond words in the Bible and the prayer book, Episcopalians and Anglicans are living and speaking the call. The Rev. Stephanie Spellers, founder of the emerging community the Crossing in Boston (see p. 16) and now canon to the Presiding Bishop for evangelism and reconciliation, says a missional church goes about its work using a missionary's tools in its own context: "listening, being present, building relationships, and becoming companions within a community, especially across boundaries of difference." This "means stepping across a boundary in order to partner with whatever is emerging in your context, even — and especially — when it entails moving into a place that your ministry has rarely ventured into before" (Spellers, "Monocultural Church in a Hybrid World" 20).
That call for The Episcopal Church to engage the world is not exactly news. Just in my merely fifty years as a cradle Episcopalian, I can remember ventures in mission and decades of evangelism. Congregations have tried visitor Sundays and renewal weekends and praise services. Our best efforts haven't exactly borne bountiful fruit. You don't have to be a statistician to understand the numbers from our own research office — decades of decreasing membership and worship attendance, resulting in an Episcopal Church that reports about 1.96 million members and 1.5 million communicants in good standing (Office of General Convention), down 43 percent from its peak of 3.43 million members in 1966 (Episcopal Church). So, for many Episcopal congregations, the functional mission is survival. Firmly rooted in American Christendom, and given a false sense of security by the Baby Boom and social expectations of church membership of the mid-twentieth century, Episcopal congregations now see traditional patterns of membership, attendance, and financial support going the way of the landline phone.
None of that is news either. But after a while, the litanies of decline begin to feel like indictments of apathy or incompetence. If we — especially ordained leaders — just "did it right," we could see the growth they're seeing at some of our competitor churches down the street. Church-growth strategies sometimes leave Episcopalians feeling like they're being asked to crash a party wearing someone else's clothes: If we'd just learn the secrets of the "successful" churches and imitate them, we could imitate their growth, too. If we just advertised more, or welcomed people better, or offered more "singable" music, or projected the lyrics on screens, or preached more sermon series, or had more small groups, or served better coffee, or ... Everyone has a solution the priest and vestry should try.
Expecting a congregation to turn itself into something it's not doesn't seem like a great strategy for success. But what about becoming more of what we already are? God is calling us to claim a bigger sense of "church," to see church not as an institution but a movement — "the Episcopal branch of the Jesus movement," as Presiding Bishop Michael Curry likes to say (Curry). God is calling us once again to explore the boundaries of our parishes but with a new intention. Though many congregations define boundaries that offer security and comfort, God is asking us to beat the bounds in a new way — pressing our boundaries to open passageways of permeability that can help our religious institutions remember who we are by engaging with the neighbors and networks around us. In one local congregation after another, The Episcopal Church can express missional DNA in ways we know and in ways we're just beginning to know, following the Holy Spirit's lead in being relational, sacramental, Trinitarian communities, both as God has gifted us to be and as God is gifting us to become. Doing so, we follow Jesus's lead, embodying God's kingdom "like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old" (Matt. 13:52).
Over the past ten to fifteen years in The Episcopal Church and especially in the Church of England, some pioneers have been exploring this path — not a new path exactly because it draws on who Anglicans have been as much as imagining who Anglicans may become. The path has carried different names in different contexts: mission-shaped church, emerging church, emergent church, fresh expressions. No label has captured this movement of the Holy Spirit fully, and each term has picked up baggage while losing power through overuse. But these new expressions of church tap deeply into the Anglican ethos — embracing embodied, participatory worship; being open to the treasures of the liturgical tradition; putting relationship ahead of doctrinal unity; creating authentic community that starts with belonging, not believing; and building people's capacity to live faithfully in ambiguity and wrestle with hard questions, rather than teaching them the "right" answers.
Mission-Shaped Church and Fresh Expressions in the UK
In 2004, the Church of England — Anglicanism's great bastion of tradition and centralized authority — charted a new course in mission by arguing for a rich diversity of church expressions. The Mission-Shaped Church report was a wake-up call to the declining role of the Anglican Church in British life, as well as the need for new strategies to engage the de-churched and the unchurched. Then-Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams called for intentional development of a "mixed economy" of Anglican ecclesial practice, "fresh expressions and 'inherited' forms of church existing alongside each other, within the same denomination, in relationships of mutual respect and support" ("What Is the Mixed Economy?"). The Church of England defines fresh expressions as "form[s] of church for our changing culture, established primarily for the benefit of people who are not yet members of any church. [They] will come into being through principles of listening, service, contextual mission and making disciples" ("What Is a Fresh Expression of Church?"). According to the Mission-Shaped Church report, the term "fresh expressions" includes both existing churches that are renewing or redirecting their ministry, as well as other efforts to go out and "discover what will emerge when the gospel is immersed in the mission context." The report also acknowledges that the term is problematic because it "does not easily differentiate between the[se] two realities" (Archbishop's Council on Mission and Public Affairs 34).
A key mark of fresh expressions in the British context is the direction of missional engagement. The Church of England's Fresh Expressions website argues that inherited forms of church expect people to take the initiative to come to them, which establishes the church's worldview as normative. "Fresh expressions have a 'we'll come to you' mindset instead," the website explains. "They start not with an invitation ('Come to us on our terms'), but with an offer ('We're willing to come to you, serve you and stay with you. If you want, we'll also help you to be church in a way that suits you — in your style, not ours')" ("What Is a Fresh Expression of Church?"). So, fresh expressions take the church out of its known and comfortable contexts to "make the love of God known in an increasingly secular society," according to pioneer-ministry trainers David Goodhew, Andrew Roberts, and Michael Volland. "They have a deep sense of being sent, of apostolicity" (Goodhew, Roberts, and Volland 76).
That missional offer is being extended in a wide variety of settings in the UK. Pioneer ministers (as those leading these communities are known) are raising up new expressions of church in cafés and workplaces; among mothers' groups, young adults, and older people; among the poor and in neomonastic communities; in urban centers and small villages; and even online ("Examples"). Ministers pioneering these efforts would claim all points on the theological spectrum, and they come from catholic, charismatic, broad-church, and monastic backgrounds. In that great range, some see the hand and heart of God reaching out to God's children. "It is this diversity in particular that suggests we may be truly seeing something of the missio dei unfold" (Goodhew, Roberts, and Volland 73).
A mixed-economy church doesn't intend to replace inherited forms of worship and community, but the older forms are being held to a renewed standard of outward-directedness. "The challenge is not to force everything into the familiar mold; but neither is it to tear up the rulebook and start from scratch (as if that were ever possible or realistic)," Williams writes. "What makes the situation interesting is that we are going to have to live with variety" (Archbishop's Council on Mission and Public Affairs v). Writer Brian McLaren takes it one step further, seeing the benefits of competition in the mixed economy where churches "create new wineskins while the existing wineskins [are] still in use [and] compete with themselves (in a non-competitive way)" (McLaren 19). That process strengthens both kinds of expressions, says British theologian Lincoln Harvey, with "pioneering practitioners drawing lessons from both past and present" and "new ideas for mission ... being folded back into inherited models of Church, thereby establishing new and dynamic enterprises within the context of the local parish" (Harvey 95).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Beating the Boundaries by John Spicer. Copyright © 2016 John Spicer. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Introduction,
1. Beating the Bounds, Beating the Boundaries,
2. Nine Stories of Beating the Boundaries,
3. Where's the Mission in Your DNA?,
4. Whom Are You Trying to Reach — and How?,
5. What Expression of Ministry Is God Trying to Create?,
6. How Will You Empower Strong Leadership and Plan for Governance?,
7. How Will You Identify Success and Failure?,
8. Beating the Bounds with Every Step,
9. People Are the New Program,