The Relevance of the Missional Conversation in Portugal

In the last decade the term ‘missional’ has become a prominent focus among American, Australian and British authors.  The missional conversation is often misunderstood or even dismissed as a new recipe for making struggling churches successful.  But it is much more than a new way to do church.  It invites a deep reflection on who God is, what Scripture is, and, in light of these two foundations, what the nature of the church ought to be.

Having read a sample of these writings, I suspected that the presuppositions and priorities of the missional conversation have value for mission engagement of the Portuguese evangelical community in Portugal.  The aim of my dissertation was to review, critique and summarise the essence of the missional conversation, and test the value of the missional conversation for mission engagement in the Portuguese context by interacting with those occupying strategic roles within mission engagement in Portugal.

The Portuguese context

Murray (2005, p10), argues that the Western European church needs to discover strategies for mission engagement which are better suited to the Church’s less privileged position on the margins of society.  Accepting this premise would suggest that the Portuguese evangelical church’s existence on the margins of Portuguese society places it at an advantage over evangelical churches in other Western European contexts.  In practice, however, this is not the case as Portugal has continued to adopt models from other European and non-European contexts which seek to present the church as more attractive.  Better programs, better preaching, or interesting church-based events are well-founded and important, but reflect a Christendom mindset which assumes that Western European society is still keen to hear what the church has to say, and that going to church is still a normal social activity.

In addition, the mission engagement of the Portuguese evangelical church continues to rely on non-Portuguese missionaries. Given the small size of the Portuguese evangelical community, this is an acceptable necessity provided that the missionaries coming into Portugal from outside of Europe are made aware of the idiosyncrasies of Western European religious expression  (Hay, 2005 p4, Davie, 2006, p147), particularly the implications of mission engagement in a post-Christendom context.

Erwich  (2002, p30) suggests that the solution for mission engagement in Europe is to be found in recapturing biblical concepts that define the relation between church and culture. The missional conversation provides a means to achieve this because, as we have noted, the missional conversation is not about a quick fix, a new program or a new model to be adopted by the Western churches so that they can once more enjoy a dominant position of influence in Western culture.

The missional conversation invites the church of Jesus Christ to return to Scripture, to see afresh the unique story of God’s mission to redeem all creation, and to reconsider the role of the church in relation to the story of this missional God. The first part of the dissertation examined the missional conversation in relation to the nature of Scripture, the nature of God and the nature of the church.  But none of the missional writers referred to in this examination have specific experience of mission engagement in Portugal. 

“An open system approach recognises that the church exists to participate in God’s mission and that God, by his Spirit, is active in the context in which the church exists”

Consequently, in order to test the relevance of the missional conversation to the Portuguese context, and assess the degree to which these priorities may or may not be considered a valuable resource to shape and direct the mission engagement of the Portuguese evangelical Church, it is necessary to draw on the experience of those who minister in Portugal

The research

From an initial contact list of 30 Christians working in church contexts across Portugal, 11 were able to complete each part of the research process.  They included pastors, theological educators and church planters.  Each completed a brief questionnaire to gauge their existing knowledge.  Due to the very limited availability of missional writers translated into Portuguese, the participants were given a 5000 word Portuguese summary of the examination of the missional conversation and were asked to reflect on the content of the summary in relation to: 

a. Validity – is the argument for the missional priorities theologically and biblically valid?

b. Relevance – how relevant are the missional priorities for the specific context of Portugal?

c. Implementation – if it is accepted that most or some of the priorities of the missional conversation have relevance for Portugal, how might these priorities be implemented?

Each participant was then interviewed in relation to the suggested areas of reflection noted above.   The opportunity to interact with others who minister in Portugal was an interesting process and revealed the following:

a. The Portuguese display a vicarious religious attitude to the institutional church characterised by passive participation.

b. The Portuguese evangelical church is perceived as insignificant in Portuguese society. Christendom mission strategies that presume the respect and interest of society  towards them are, therefore, unsuitable for the Portuguese evangelical communities.

c.  Although there is evidence of missional understanding among those interviewed, the lack of missional understanding in the life of the church is attributed to individualism among leaders who are focused on maintaining current church practice, and is compounded by the cultural context of passive participation.

d. The Bible is an underused resource. Implementing a balanced biblical diet of reading, preaching and teaching, in combination with inductive Bible study aimed at active participation, has the potential to enable the Portuguese evangelical church to gain a missional outlook.

e.   A limited understanding of the nature of God among Portuguese Christians issues in a similar limited self-understanding of what it means to be a Christian. For many, to be a Christian means to benefit from the work of Christ and be prepared for heaven.

f.   The laity is an underused resource. This is due to the cultural religious context of passive participation, a limited understanding of what it means to be a Christian, dictatorial leadership style and lack of spiritual maturity.

g. The priorities of the missional conversation are considered relevant to the Portuguese context.

h.  Implementation requires a top-down and bottom-up approach that intentionally promotes missional reading, preaching and teaching.

Recognising the need for change

Van Gelder (2007, pp 126, 127) notes two ways in which the relationship between church and context operates.

Firstly, there is a closed system approach, in which the church is assumed to act as a closed internal system that is separate from, and uninfluenced by contact with the context. Secondly, and in contrast to the first approach, the church can adopt an open system approach which recognises the dynamic relationship between church and context.

In a situation in which there is a high degree of congruity between church culture and the culture of the context, the choice between adopting a closed system or an open system approach is not insignificant. For instance, in the Christendom era, the values, hopes and attitudes of the context were predominantly Christian providing a high degree of congruity between the church culture and the culture of the context.

As a result, churches were able to function as closed systems with little loss of impact on the surrounding context. However, the contemporary Portuguese Post-Christendom context is, as has been noted, vastly different. It is an environment in which there is little or no congruity between the church culture and the culture of the context. Consequently, the choice between adopting a closed system approach or an open system approach is crucial and will have a significant effect on the Portuguese church’s ability to impact the surrounding context.

Choosing to adopt a closed system approach results in two reactions: Firstly, a church can become inward focused seeking to protect itself from what is going on outside (Roxburgh and Boren , 126), perhaps even looking for a pastor “who can bring back the days of glory and success” (Van Gelder, 2007, p126) . Secondly, a church attempts to develop and improve the way in which it functions, seeking to be more attractive to the surrounding context. In the immediate term this can lead to growth as disenfranchised members of other churches are attracted (Roxburgh and Boren 127), but ultimately fails to recognise the degree of incongruity between the culture of the church and the culture of the context.

An open system approach recognises that the church exists to participate in God’s mission and that God, by his Spirit, is active in the context in which the church exists. Consequently, the primary way of dealing with changing contexts is not through the development of new internal strategies to improve what the church does. Rather, it is by facing up to and embracing the changing context, confident that God intends to use the changing context to “move a congregation in new directions of meaningful ministry under the leading of the Spirit. (Roxburgh and Boren, 2009, p48)

Robinson (2012, n.p) notes that churches engaging in mission ‘are meeting an increasingly receptive audience’ but recognises ‘we are not yet at the tipping point within the church whereby the missional imperative cannot be resisted’.

Clearly, the Portuguese evangelical community is not at this tipping point but, given the positive reaction of colleagues ministering in Portugal, it continues to be my conviction that the promotion of the presuppositions and priorities of the missional conversation could move the Portuguese evangelical community towards this tipping point.

James Cochrane is a Presbyterian Minister with experience church planting in northeast Brazil and pastoral ministry in Northern Ireland.  He taught at the Portuguese Bible institute for five years then moved with his family to Porto, where he is church planting project with the Christian Presbyterian Church of Portugal (ICPP). James completed his MA in Aspects and Implications of Biblical Interpretation by distance learning at the London School of Theology in June 2013

Bibliography

Davie, G, (2006) Europe: The Exceptional Case, London: Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd, 2010.

Erwich, R. (2002) ‘IDENTITY AND MISSION: The return to the redemptive tension between church and culture,’ Journal of European Baptist Studies, 2:2 29-42.

Hay, R. (2005), ‘Re-evangelizing Europe: More of the same or something new?,’ Encounters Mission Ezine 7 1-4 available at website (10 December 2012, http://www.redcliffe.org/mission)

Murray, S (2005), Post-Christendom. Church and Mission in a Strange New World, Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press.

Robinson, Martin (2012), ‘Differently Religious,’ article at website (12 December, 2012,)http://eurochurch.net/articles/differently-religious.php).

Roxburgh, Alan, J., & Boren, M. Scott (2009), Introducing the Missional Church: What It Is, Why It Matters, How to Become One, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books.

Van Gelder, Craig (2007), The Ministry of the Missional Church, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 2007