Like a growing number of writers on mission, Sparks et.al. urge followers of Jesus to follow him into the neighbourhood with fellow followers of Jesus, allowing the
46 Sparks et.al. The New Parish, 39.
47 Simon Carey Holt, God Next Door: Spirituality & Mission in the Neighbourhood (Brunswick East: Acorn, 2007), 59. 48 Michael Frost, Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2006), 141. 49 Sparks et.al. The New Parish, 29.
50 Holt, God Next Door, 92. 51 Frost, Exiles, 55.
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incarnation of God to form our imagination for faithful presence.52 Just as Jesus
“became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighbourhood” so also the people of God are meant to be a tangible expression of God’s love in the real life of the neighbourhood.53 Paul’s words in the first letter to the Corinthians “let all that you do
be done in love” calls us to live out our faith as a community in such a way that the world can see in your life together the transforming power of God’s love.54
One way of being that tangible expression of God’s love in the neighbourhood is through hospitality. There is probably no greater admonition to the people of Israel than the frequently repeated law of hospitality.55 Again and again the prophets and
lawgivers, including Jesus, exhorted their people to exercise hospitality toward the stranger. Paul seemed to regard hospitality as a qualification for leadership in early Christian communities.56
Whilst many people today might regard hospitality as entertaining family and friends, hospitality as practiced by ancient civilisations was about welcoming strangers into a home and offering them food, shelter and protection. For most of the Christian church’s history, hospitality required not only responding to the stranger’s physical need, but also a recognition of their worth and common humanity.57 In our individualised and
privatised world, this fuller expression of hospitality is subversive and counter cultural. Because of that, the practice of hospitality in our neighbourhoods can transform lives, not by imposing a false religiosity, not by demanding that certain rules be kept, but by allowing love experienced to flow through their lives and the lives of those around them, in the ordinariness of life.
Like all key biblical concepts, hospitality is relational. It is about relating to the other, not in an attempt to “get them to come to church”, nor “in order to absorb them into one’s own pre-determined worldview, but in order to achieve a real relationship with them.”58
52 Sparks et.al., The New Parish, 46. 53 Sparks et.al., The New Parish, 26.
54 Guder, The Incarnation and the Church’s Witness, 43. 55 Hall, Why Christian?, 148.
56 Christine D Pohl, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 5.
57 Pohl, Making Room, 6. 58 Hall, Why Christian?, 148.
WE ARE PILGRIMS: MISSION FROM, IN AND WITH THE MARGINS OF OUR DIVERSE WORLD
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This is the way the Eaton/Millbridge Community Project expresses itself as the people of God in its neighbourhood. In these suburbs where it is common for people not to know their neighbours at all, creating events where people gather as community is subversive and counter cultural. These events create opportunities for neighbours to meet, and for us all to make connections with people in our neighbourhood. Over time, some of these connections have become relationships of trust.
That we offer these community events as a gift is also counter cultural in our overwhelmingly consumer culture. It is our practice to always provide food and drink at our events because, as Frost reminds us, within the practice of hospitality is potential for transformation – sharing a table can be a sacred act.59 Jesus’ many
meals, shared with friends and strangers alike, are never just symbolic: they represent friendship, community and welcome.60They represent a new world, a new outlook,
and they point to God’s new realm.
Not only does the EMCP offer events to people in the neighbourhood at low or no cost, it offers them without strings attached. As Hall notes Christian mission is not about serving in order to lure others into the church. Instead, real hospitality, worked out in ways that are demanded by our changing context, and imaginatively and faithfully lived out is a sufficient implementation of mission. What is important, he argues, is that the people of God should live and teach real hospitality toward others: a hospitality that loves and serves others, a stewardly hospitality, that does not have strings attached and does not offer itself only on the condition that the others acknowledge the Christian sources of this hospitality.61
In addition to running events, the Project provides breakfast to students at the local primary school. We were thrilled recently to receive a State Foodbank award recognising this work - thrilled because the citation, composed by the school, reads in part:
The Eaton/Millbridge Project have (sic) worked tirelessly over the last couple of years to remind us and teach us all about community. (Breakfast Club) is a time for all our children to meet together as equals. Thankyou for teaching and nurturing our students.
59 Michael Frost, Exiles, 158-176.
60 Tim Chester, A Meal with Jesus: Discovering Grace, Community & Mission around the Table (Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 2011), 15.
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Already, intentionally living out of the gospel has made a noticeable difference.
The principal of the primary school was initially if not hostile, certainly wary and suspicious. But simply as a result of being an incarnational presence in the school community over a period of almost two years, that principal not only welcomes the EMCP into the school but has twice requested our assistance when a school family has faced a crisis.
In everything the EMCP does, whether it is running an event, providing breakfast, holding a BBQ or meeting people in their everyday lives, the aim is to proclaim the gospel: not verbally but through incarnational presence and acts of loving service.
Conclusion
Returning to the original question “But is it church?” the answer must be “yes”! The EMCP may not gather in a church building for worship, or dispense God’s presence through a particular form of words or acts. It may not celebrate communion in a form deemed acceptable by traditionalists, but it is most certainly church! It is a visible sacrament through which it offers a glimpse of God’s realm.62 It understands worship
as being to do with all of life, taking “your everyday ordinary life and (placing) it before God as an offering” (Romans 12:1, The Message). This holistic understanding of worship is enacted in an everyday posture of faithful presence. Finally, the EMCP is most certainly missional. It has been established for our changing culture and for the benefit of people who are not yet, and may never be, members of any traditional church.
Bosch reminds us that, “a church without mission or a mission without church are both contradictions.”63 Perhaps instead of keeping the EMCP and other new
expressions of church at the margins of the church, and questioning their veracity as church, it is time for the inherited church to ask that question of itself. Why is it that the inherited church, so often focused inwardly, where many churchgoers seem to be content with the status quo and are uncomfortable with their much loved practices being challenged, is held up as the measure of what constitutes the church?64
62 Bosch, Transforming Mission, 374. 63 Bosch, Transforming Mission, 372.
64 Diana Butler Bass, Christianity after Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening (New York: HarperOne, 2012) 22. Other books that I have found especially helpful on the themes of this chapter include: Guder (ed.), Missional Church; Eddie Gibbs, Churchmorph: How Megatrends are Reshaping Christian Commu- nities (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009); Holt, God Next Door; Ann Morisy, Journeying Out: A New Approach to Christian Mission (London: Morehouse, 2004); Alan J Roxburgh, Missional: Joining God in the Neighbourhood (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2011); Sparks, et. al., New Parish.