What is Pioneer Ministry?

I have been drawn into various conversations this past month about pioneer ministry. I want precision about what it is, because otherwise it just becomes a sexy moniker for anything creative, alternative and generally involving young people. Someone's suggested to me, for example, that helping set up a monthly service in a village hall is “pioneer ministry,” or running a youth group, or recruiting a new missional community of 20-somethings and resourcing them for ministry. That last one obviously is — but what about the others? What is pioneer ministry?

Inspired by Vincent Donovan’s book Christianity Rediscovered, I’ve had an idea. Fr Donovan was a 1960’s RC missionary in Kenya who went out to sell the locals his faith, and experienced some degree of honest frustration and discomfort before he realised he could more fruitfully work from the other end. In other words if he got under the skin of Masai Culture, taking its sociology and culture as a gift of God not an obstruction to the gospel, people would find their own way of being authentically Masai Catholic Christians instead of copies of Liverpuddlian RC’s. The result of this was to fulfil his original mission brief, but from the other end to the one he had anticipted, and to produce a new and authentic strand in Catholic faith, to enrich it from a new culture.

So, the essential distinctive for a pioneer minister, I reckon, is:

a willingness and ability to go live in another sociology, listen to it and struggle to understand what it is about and how Christ is reflected in it, then work from within it to develop a community of discipleship that is authentic to it, but also to the Way of Christ.

Imagine I was 95, and discovered that the other residents of my sheltered housing scheme were brought up in a pattern of Christendom Christiantiy which had not worked for them and rendered them deeply unable to access what was good in it because they were so blocked by what had broken down and changes int he context. I work out what, positively their culture is, and what it tells me of Christ who is greater than any culture but reflected in all. I then work out a way of life that does justice to both historic Christianity, as an authentic development, and also their culture. I’m 95, but I’m a pioneer...

So the qualities required of a pioneer minisuter would be profound rootedness in the substance but not necessarily the form of historic Christianity, plus a willingness and activity to live within another sociology, plus discernment, plus the willingness to build community, plus an ability to articulate what has been learnt and interpret it back tot he rest of the Church. It’s a tall order — very much more than just being a real trendy geezer. The joy and strength of Christianity has been its capacity to enculturate and adapt whilst retaining its golden heart. “Stop the World I want to get off” is an expression of fear not faith. We need more than that. As cultures interface, develop and fracture only to re-form, the Church needs real pioneers!

Lambeth: Rabbit in the Hat?

Some people, understandably, look to Lambeth for a magic blueprint. I don’t see this happening:

1. There’s a process for Covenant and another for Windsor follow-up. Both are out for consultation. If Lambeth gazumps those processes, we really will be in a fix. We need to stick to the paths to which we’ve committed.
   
2. Lambeth 1:10, much discussed is not gong to be revisited because it does represent something cebtral to where the vast majority of Anglicans in the world actually are. Some will like this and some won’t but that’s the fact.
   
3. If we produce a toolbox for people to rebuild communion, the law of unintended consequences means it will be used in various ways. Nice Bishops will use the tools to fix the shed. Some touchline lobby groups will use the hammer to smash the windows, and go round poking their enemies in the eye with the screwdriver. These people have already worked merry hell in the communion, by strring up contention, sowing mistrust, and whipping people into their own foreign powergames. Best develop toolboxes slowly and deliberately, not here over the next day or so.

So what is emerging? I’ve spent the morning in a fantastc indaba, freindly, respectful, clearly focussed on the hard stuff, but good humoured. It’s illegal to discriminate against gay people in Los Angeles. It’s illegal not to in places homosexuality is a capital offence. Whatever we say, there are villages in Sub-Saharan Africa where the one generator runs a satelite TV set which will instantly beam the results, chewed about by Western Media, into the homes of the people. Local bishops then have to pick up the consequences, sometimes in the face of violent persecution.

Brian MacLaren challenged us to try and work the issues before us missionally, rather than as problems in machine age dogmatics. A lot of talk so far has been essentially about how the ship is running, rather than where the ship is going.

1. We are the bridgehead of a renewed humanity in Christ, organs of the Body of Christ. Maximus the Confessor speaks of the Church as an enfleshing of Christ in the world. But how?
   
2. African voices here tell me that God’s word is addressed to people through the Sciptures as they are where they are. Therefore, to quote the late Max Warren, “It takes a whole world to know Christ.”
3. Our priority, thus, has to be Christ, whom we have to value and represent more than the cultural wrappings with which we received him. Vincent Donovan’s percetion, as an RC missionary among the Masai in the 1960’s, was that it is futile and non-incarnational to start from the centralised dogmatic end. Rather faith had to be built among people from the other end, with great cultural sensitivity. That’s how Jesus worked; from street level up, not Jerusalem down. We need to work as Jesus worked.
4. How? One great controversy of the 1860’s at Lambeth I was polygamy on the mission field. It took until 1978 for the Lambeth conference to express trust in missionary dioceses to call this one correctly in their own circumstances. Today’s communications and the speed of cultural change among us do not give us 100 years to develop trust among us around our own cultural mandates as we enflesh the Incarnation. We could, of course, simply split. That is the way of the world. Or we can challenge that way of the world, by distinguishing first from second order clearly, and choosing to walk together, different as we are.