CWM Perspective on Missional Congregations as Life-Affirming Communities

Abstract

The Council for World Mission (CWM) describes itself as a partnership of churches in mission. Its 31 member churches around the world work collaboratively, sharing resources of people, money, and ideas, and understanding themselves to be partners together in God's mission. Our common life takes shape around our vision--fullness of life through Christ for all creation--and our mission statement: Called to partnership in Christ to mutually challenge, encourage and equip churches to share in God's mission. Enabling members to develop missional congregations has been identified as the central focus of CWM's current strategy. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The strategy, which is drawn as a diagram to convey the dynamic relationship among the various parts, seeks to promote the idea that all the key elements should both inform and be informed by each other. Furthermore, CWM, as a global partnership of churches in mission, seeks to acknowledge in its strategy the influence of our external environment, and more importantly how we should be seeking to witness to the wider world based on our accumulated experience of working with our members to develop missional congregations, or what we are now describing as life-affirming communities. As such it builds on CWM's theology statement (2010), Mission in the Context of Empire, in which we set out our understanding of our calling today: naming our context as Empire; describing our approach (and alternative paradigm) as partnership; and setting out our vision of fullness of life through Christ for all creation. (1) Our focus on enabling our members to develop missional congregations does not stand apart from the other elements; rather it is the touchstone of all our efforts. If the congregations we all serve and support are not missional, then how can we describe ourselves as partners in God's mission? Our congregations, the local churches to which we all belong, stand at the interface between the celebration and nurturing of our faith and our witness to the world. At the end of worship each Sunday in the benediction, we are commissioned to be apostles, bearers of good news to the communities we call home. So let us go to the world again in confidence; playing our part in God's mission and never losing heart. Let us put our faith in Jesus, our companion traveller, who will match his stride to ours until our journey's end. And the blessing ... So important is this element to our strategy that we have been engaging our members on it from the very outset, developing a programme that is focused on congregations and how they can be assisted to assess what it would mean to be engaged in mission--that is, to be life-affirming in their context--and supported as they develop the capacities and responses that their situation calls for. As part of this we have been drawing on the new WCC statement Together Towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes, as well as our own theology statement, Mission in the Context of Empire (2010). Both speak of the need to understand the nature of mission as embedded and transformative, that is, that mission should proclaim and offer fullness of life that speaks to people's life experiences. This is to go beyond simple contextual understandings of mission, to challenge us to see mission as the practical outworking of our faith, so that it is rooted (takes shape) in our communities and grows from there, engaging and transforming the challenges we face and gradually realizing the fullness of life that God promises. To this end we have developed a working definition of a missional congregation as a life-affirming community, drawing on the work of our members as they have explored this theme over the last couple of years: A life-affirming community-- * Lives a spirituality of engagement, which is reflected in its worship, and in the nurture and support of its members; * Is attuned to the communities in which it is set and alert to the needs of the world, so that it is willing to stand alongside and speak out with those who are suffering or are marginalised; * Does not work alone, being in active partnership with other groups who share similar concerns; * Is a learning community, with its members taking seriously their re-reading of the Bible and their reflection on their experience, both as individuals and as a community. …