CAPÍTULO II: MARCO TEÓRICO
3.3. Operacionalización de variables
One of the challenges we face whenever we try to explore what is essential to our understanding of the church is the multiplicity of meanings attached to the word “church.” At times in the church’s history “church” has been equated with clergy, with people speaking of “entering the church”, with a building, an institution or its organisation, and doctrine.4 “Going to church” most often means attending a Sunday
morning service of worship. All of these meanings carry some truth about what we understand by church and undoubtedly church exists in relation to them all.5 However
they also convey something of the challenge faced in ascertaining what church really is. As much as possible I will concentrate on what theologians have asserted the essence of church as being, and how that might be expressed in the context of the Eaton/Millbridge community.
As we begin to explore what might constitute the essence of the church, it is crucial to remember that “the church never exists in a vacuum” but is always “developed within a particular cultural context.”6 As Kung noted:
There is not and never was an essence of the Church by itself, separate, chemically pure, distilled from the stream of historical forms, and no form of the church, not even that in the New Testament, mirrors the Church’s essence perfectly and exhaustively.7
2 Paul Sparks, Tim Soerens and Dwight Friesen, The New Parish: How Neighbourhood Churches are Transforming Mission, Discipleship and Community (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2014), 30.
3 Ross Langmead, “Contextual Mission: An Australian Perspective,” Paper presented to ANZAMS mini-confer- ence, Auckland (30-31 October, 2009).
4 Harvey Cox, The Future of Faith (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 97.
5 Craig Van Gelder, The Essence of the Church: A Community Created by the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2000), 14.
6 Van Gelder, Essence of the Church, 41. 7 Hans Kung, The Church (London: Search, 1968).
129
With this important proviso in mind, it can be said that theologians have long disagreed on what comprises the essence of the church.8 Resulting from efforts to
apply biblical understandings about the church to specific historical settings, different churches have stressed different issues or come to different conclusions about the same issue, with the result that there exists a wide range of ecclesiologies.9 A full critique of
these ecclesiologies would require a book in itself, so I will focus briefly on some of the most significant.
Within decades of the birth of Christianity, church leaders began formulating orientation programs for new recruits who had not known Jesus or his disciples personally, replacing faith in him with tenets about him. Prior to this, to be a Christian meant to live in Jesus’ spirit, embrace his hope and to follow him in the world that he had begun.10
After the legitimising of the church, and as a result of the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople, the bishops named four attributes as representing what they believed to be the essential characteristics of the church in the world: one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. When the Apostles Creed came into final form in the eighth century a fifth characteristic was added: the communion of saints. These five attributes came to be the common way of describing the church for many centuries. Echoing biblical language, the church is to be one and holy as it displays the presence of God in the world. The characteristic of catholic, or universal, was therefore self-evident. Describing the church as apostolic meant that the church was founded on the work of the apostles and prophets and it confirmed that the church’s authority and teaching were based on the work of the original founders of the church.11The communion of saints alludes to
the church being a community of people across the ages.
A significant shift occurred in the late medieval period, when the Protestant Reformation began to see these characteristics as exclusive properties which the Roman Catholic Church alone possessed, and no longer seen as characteristics that were to be consistently demonstrated. While not actually rejecting the Nicene attributes, the reformers downplayed them in favour of two or three marks of the church to ensure that pure preaching of the Word and the proper administration of the sacraments were maintained. With this focus on preaching and the sacraments,
8 Michael Moynagh, Church for Every Context: An Introduction to Theology and Practice (Norwich: SCM, 2012), 104. 9 Van Gelder, Essence of the Church, 47.
10 Cox, The Future of Faith, 5. 11 Van Gelder, Essence of the Church, 50.
WE ARE PILGRIMS: MISSION FROM, IN AND WITH THE MARGINS OF OUR DIVERSE WORLD
130
worship came to be viewed as the primary ministry of the church the legacy of which remains in Protestant churches today.12 While it was not intended, the church came
to be conceived as “the place where certain things happen” rather than the people or presence.13 It also became essential to establish who would be authorised to
carry out these tasks, which led to an emphasis on defining, developing, organising and governing the work of the church. Any notion of a ministry of believers was overshadowed by the rise of a professional clergy14 and the main task of many small
congregations became understood as “keeping the doors open on Sunday morning.”15
In his important work on the foundational document of the Uniting Church in Australia, the Basis of Union, Dutney answers the question “How do we know (the church) is the church?” by outlining the classic Reformation marks of the church: the word truly preached, the sacraments rightly administered, and godly discipline.16
But, he says that these marks are used in such a way (in the Basis) that a fourth mark, “mission” underlies the others.17The writers “suggested that the measure of preaching,
sacramental celebration, and disciple-making is the extent to which these activities equip the participants for mission in the world.”18
The emphasis on mission in the Basis of Union coincided with the articulation of a new vision of mission. At a missionary conference in Germany in 1932 Barth commented that in the early church, the term missio Dei did not have to do with sending missionaries to other countries but was an expression of the divine sending forth of self.19 In other words mission was not a human activity but the action of God.
In practical terms this resulted in a shift from understanding missions as just one of the tasks of the church, a marginal task at that, to an understanding of mission as an inherent aspect of the nature of the church.20 In this re-emerging ecclesiology, the
church is seen as essentially missionary – it is not the sender but the one sent. Mission,
12 Van Gelder, Essence of the Church, 52-53, 57.
13 Darrell L Guder (ed), Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 79-80.
14 Van Gelder, Essence of the Church, 58
15 From conversations with small rural congregations in the Presbyteries of Central Queensland and Mary Burnett while the writer was Rural Ministry Coordinator 2008-2012.
16 Andrew Dutney, Where Did the Joy Come From? Revisiting the Basis of Union (Melbourne: Uniting Church Press, 2001), 21.
17 Andrew Dutney, Manifesto for Renewal (Melbourne: Joint Board of Christian Education, 1986), 32-35. 18 Dutney, Where did the joy come from?, 21.
19 Alan Kreider & Eleanor Kreider, Worship & Mission after Christendom (Harrisonburg: Herald, 2011), 44. 20 Kreider & Kreider, Worship & Mission, 44.
131
therefore, is not secondary to the church’s being. Instead the church exists in being sent and building itself up for the sake of mission.21 Put bluntly, “mission is the most
basic reason for the existence of the church.”22
The task of the Joint Commission on Church Union, initiated in 1957 to work towards the union of the Congregational, Methodist and Presbyterian Churches in Australia was not simply concerned with the mechanical problems of how to merge three denominational institutions “but with the existential question of what it means to be the church” in the new, post war Australia. The question of “the Faith of the Church” had already been on the agenda of the international ecumenical movement for at least thirty years. But with the new impetus and hope brought on by the 1952 Lund World Conference on Faith and Order, the Joint Commission went beyond confessionalism and comparative ecclesiology as it listened for God’s contemporary call: “There was no question of dispensing with the traditional creeds and confessions, but the Commission sought to emphasise that their true value could only be appreciated when due consideration was paid to their limitations.”23 Firstly, a confession only has
authority in so far as it points to, and ‘puts itself under’ the witness of Scripture.24
Secondly, a confession made in a certain time and place is always subject to “eschatological correction”, speaking as it does of something of which it knows wholly but not in its particularity, and always remaining open to the possibility of correction by the Word of God.25 To the surprise of “many European observers” the Commission
took two lessons from the Barmen Declaration26: first, the affirmation of the centrality
of Jesus Christ as the Word of God, and second, the call to go beyond confessionalism to enunciate the faith appropriate to the historical occasion.27 In his preface to the
1978 edition of the Commission’s first report Davis McCaughey reminded members of the three Churches that “Faith comes by hearing, and we asked men and women to listen again.”
21 David J Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (New York: Orbis Books, 2008), 372-373.
22 Douglas John Hall, Why Christian: For Those on the Edges of Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 138. 23 Dutney, Manifesto for Renewal, 13-15, 17.
24 O S Tomkins (Ed), The Third World Conference on Faith and Order in Dutney, Manifesto for Renewal, 11. 25 “The Faith of the Church” The First Report of the Joint Commission on Church Union (1959) (Melbourne, 1978) 19.
26 The 1934 Theological Declaration of Barmen emerged out of an effort by the German confessing churches to mount ecumenical opposition to the totalising claims of Nazism, and the Declaration is now considered an important step forward in the history of the European ecumenical movement. Theological Declaration of Barmen, Cited May 31, 2001, http://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/.
WE ARE PILGRIMS: MISSION FROM, IN AND WITH THE MARGINS OF OUR DIVERSE WORLD
132