Here is something I originally wrote as part of my application to train for ordination in the Church of England, but tried to do blog-style so I wouldn't get as bored! Hopefully that explains why I keep banging on about 'Marks of Mission', which, for anyone who doesn't know, is an Anglican thing stemming from some conference in 1998. I think I got points for mentioning it. So now you know.
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In my first
week at All Hallows Bow, I got a little confused. I knew this was a challenging
church ‘re-plant’ in a tough inner-city parish with an almost extinct
congregation, so it followed logically that evangelism- ‘to proclaim the good
news of the Kingdom’- would be of primary importance. I also knew that money
was scarce, and figured what little financial resources we had would be
similarly channeled. All this being considered, I was somewhat surprised when
my first tasks on the job included a trip to Ikea to purchase 50 matching mugs for use
after the Sunday service and a simple quest of re-printing every sign in the
building with the new All Hallows logo in the bottom corner.
While not wanting
to undermine the Vicar’s authority, I wondered, as I worked, just how important
or urgent such endeavours really are. Were all these efforts towards ‘corporate
branding’ not simply attempts to make things look good and, really, of much
lesser priority? Wasn’t it really all just worldliness- exactly the kind of
‘McDonaldization’ of which Drane, Ritzer and others warn the contemporary
western Church?[1]
Perplexed, I
approached my new boss (thankfully also an old friend) and queried him with my
concerns. He had a totally different take on it.
‘It’s all about
cultivating community’, he replied. ‘What we’re doing with the logo, corporate
branding, matching mugs etc is all in order to communicate the message to our
people that they are loved; that this church is something precious- something
worth them being a part of; something they can really own.’
The more I have
reflected on this response, the more it seems to make sense. After all, isn’t
it good to subliminally say to people who walk into our church, ‘We love you
enough to make sure all the mugs match’? Or, on the flipside, what would it
communicate if we were to maintain a bunch of old, tacky and varied ones? While
such subtleties are seemingly small and obviously not of utmost ultimate
importance, suddenly, approaching the issue from another angle, it became less
about the undeniable urgency of just ‘getting out there’ as this kind of laying
of foundations shifted emphasis to a broader underpinning of our mission. It
would be of little use to channel all initial energy into the first mark of
mission if those who were to be drawn in would only encounter a substandard
lack of professionalism and a dysfunctional family. Our attempts at the second
mark, to ‘teach, baptize and nurture new disciples’, would be fruitless if we
had not first gone some way to establishing a community of love in which our
people truly treasure the body to which they belong, and a small part of
achieving that is to show them, by efforts towards attaining excellence in
these ‘little things’, that their leaders truly treasure them. Moreover, could it not be said that an
initial focus on the material makeup of our place of ministry such as this is
actually, in some subtle way, a practical outworking of the third mark- ‘To
respond to human need by loving service’? Since one of the most basic of these
human needs is simply to belong, our efforts to cultivate community in this way
(and even to throw a bit of cash at it) do seem entirely appropriate.
Of course, it
isn’t all about just making things look and feel nice. There is a great need
for many other aspects of ministry, and these ran parallel to the efforts in
question, and have subsequently been further prioritized. What I have learned
from this experience, though, is that classy cups and corporate branding are
not merely McDonaldization, but are, in fact, a small piece of the big puzzle
that is our Mission… and, being so subtle but yet so tangible, not a bad place
to start.
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