From the ACoC:
A missional Primate?
What is the Primate’s role in the Anglican Church of Canada? Over the past three years, the Primatial Role Task Force explored this question through historical research and consultation with active Anglicans.
What does “missional primate” mean? It’s hard to tell, but the ever helpful Wikipedia advises us that:
“Missional living” is a Christian term that describes a missionary lifestyle; adopting the posture, thinking, behaviors, and practices of a missionary in order to engage others with the gospel message. The use of the term missional has gained popularity at the end of the 20th Century due to Tim Keller, Ed Stetzer, Alan Hirsch, the Gospel and Our Culture Network, Allelon, and the Emerging church movement, as well as others to contrast the concept of a select group of “professional” missionaries with the understanding that all Christians should be involved in the Great Commission/mission of Jesus Christ.
This seems to imply that to be a “missional primate”, Fred Hiltz would have to cease being a professional clergyman, give up his salary and become a normal Christian – good news indeed.
Christianity Today, thinks that:
A missional theology is not content with mission being a church-based work. Rather, it applies to the whole life of every believer. Every disciple is to be an agent of the kingdom of God, and every disciple is to carry the mission of God into every sphere of life. We are all missionaries sent into a non-Christian culture.
Missional represents a significant shift in the way we think about the church. As the people of a missionary God, we ought to engage the world the same way he does—by going out rather than just reaching out. To obstruct this movement is to block God’s purposes in and through his people. When the church is in mission, it is the true church.
This is written by Alan Hirsch, who goes by the nails-on-a-blackboard title of “missional activist”. Here we are told to go out, not just reach out – although I am unsure of the distinction.
It is instructive to enter “what is missional” into google; from the results, it seems that the term is sufficiently slippery to appeal to just about anyone who is not allergic to trendy words.
In spite of the fact that I am all for taking the Gospel – the real Gospel – outside the church walls, my unease with what appears to be yet another fruitless attempt to build the Kingdom of God on earth before God is ready to participate is not assuaged by things like this:
More and more evangelical and missional leaders have begun to characterize the gospel of justification by faith alone, penal substitution, and the salvation of souls as a “small gospel.”
Why is that a “small gospel”? What could be larger than the salvation of even a single soul, over which the angels of heaven rejoice?
