Communal maturation and missional discipleship

Abstract

Individualization exercises pervasive power in the modern western church, generating an isolated and privatized approach to discipleship and mis­sion that has been attended to extensively over the years in attempts to foster “whole-life” discipleship. My doctoral field work in 2015–17 was with a single Church of England congregation that had adopted an outward-looking mis­sional process which disrupted this individualization and challenged people to a personal and communal journey of change in which the public life that they began to share with people in their wider community shaped both their per­sonal and communal maturation. This journey was fuelled by shared commu­nal practices which in turn generated new forms of communal life to express the congregation’s developing public Christian identity. This research demon­strates both the challenges and the potential of forming communal identity in an individualized culture. Moreover, when mission is undertaken with open­ness to the other, a profound interdependence between communal maturation and missional discipleship is revealed.