Mission and the Future of The Friends Church

Mennonite Scholar Harold Bender gave the keynote address at the American Society of Church History back in 1943. This address was published and became known as The Anabaptist Vision; It's well worth the read. This essay gained a widespread audience and sought to recapture the essence of Anabaptism for a new generation. In many ways it did just that! Up until the late 19th and early 20th century, mainstream theology paid very little attention to groups like Quakers and Anabaptists. The thinking behind this was: because they were such small groups and marginalized, they could not be significant. But finally, the work of theologian Ernst Troeltsch helped to show the sociological significance of these groups; movements he called, for better or worse, "sectarian." Bender built on this point and took the project further by pointing out the key features he saw in the Anabaptist Vision of the Church.

Those three features are:

• Discipleship - The essential characteristic that brings together ecclesiology. What kind of community will this church be, how will we act and live? This spells out an agenda that all members of the church ought to follow. This is an attempt to say no to mass or nominal Christianity and have authentic disciples.
• Voluntary Membership - Voluntary membership went against the grain of Christendom Christianity in the time of the Anabaptists. Without this you can't have #1.
• Nonviolence - The basic ethics that underlies all human interactions, rooted in the ethic of Jesus. This gets worked out in the life of the Anabaptist movement.

There is little doubt in my mind that these three things were important to the early Anabaptists and to the present day ones as well. Many since Bender have followed in his foot-steps trying to make this list more robust, more historically and theologically accurate, but it still stands as a new starting point for Anabaptists

Follow up:

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However, something essential is missing from this vision that cannot be overlooked: mission. Missiologist and Anabaptist Wilbert Shenk has argued that early Anabaptists were motivated by the great commission:

“And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”” (Matthew 28:18-20 NRSV)

Shenk points out historical research that has been done to show that Matthew 28:18-20 and Mark 16:15-18 were favorite and some of the most often repeated verses of the early Anabaptists. Mission was a key factor for what shaped this early peace church, and while Bender's three points cannot be (and should not be) denied, Bender overlooked the very core that these three practices emerged out of: the context of living out the good news of Jesus Christ.

If one looks at the list above, there's nothing to suggest that the church ought to extend itself out into the world. In fact, those three practices could potentially describe any completely sectarian (and here I mean purposefully isolated and withdrawn) group. It's always a temptation of the church to surrender to the world by withdrawing from it (or giving into its logic)! What keeps the church from withdrawing from the world is the mission of God. This is why missiologists continue to press the point that, "Mission precedes the church" and "God doesn't have a mission for his church, God has a church for his mission."

I think all of this is instructive for Friends. We, too, have book after book that seeks to recapture the essence of the Quaker faith for a new generation, (aren't there many of us who really love our distinctives!?). Ironically enough, that which most often gets overlooked, mission/missions, is the very thing necessary to do what these projects set out to accomplish. I am not opposed to making these lists, so long as they are not reductionistic and miss the very essence of the church!

Mission(s) is the interface between the church, the world and the Spirit of the living God; it is an embodied witness to the reality of the kingdom of God in response to particular contexts; it is a proclamation that Jesus Christ has come to make all things new. Without mission there is nothing driving us into the future, there is nothing propelling us forward. Mission-less, the church becomes "a stale expression" of God's love to the world. As I argued in last month's essay, I think tradition and history are essentials to knowing how to innovate and renew. This tells us where we're going, and, like Bender, what the key practices and distinctives of our tradition are. But it cannot stop with tradition. This all has to be done within the context of the church as the heralding ones, witnessing to the reality of the Kingdom of God in our midst, gentle as lambs and as courageous as lions.

My question is: how could this view help us to rethink our church practice within the particular contexts you're located in?