by Madeleine Collins

Christians have to change their thinking about ways of doing church, and churches themselves have to evolve into cross-cultural mission arms or risk dying out, warned a leading Church of England church-planting consultant last month.

George Lings, Director of the Sheffield Centre, Britain’s Church Army’s mission and evangelism resource unit, told over 100 delegates in Sydney that parishes, diocesan and provincial boundaries, ordination selection and leadership structures all need to be questioned and potentially overhauled in a changed culture of post Christendom where church is seen as irrelevant and out of touch with the way people live.

Mr Lings is part of the ‘mission-shaped’ church, a growing Christian movement in the UK and co-author of Mission-shaped Church: church planting and fresh expressions of church in a changing context, a report published by the Church of England’s mission arm and launched at its General Synod earlier this year. It has the strong backing of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who is spearheading a church growth campaign.

“Only a mission-shaped church can travel into this changed world,” Mr Lings said. “We’ve been trying to explain this to the Church of England as far back as 1944.”

While the report concedes the local parish system remains an essential part of the church’s mission, it says the church needs to adapt to a society that does not find its identity in ‘neighbourhoods’ as much as in ‘networks’ – work, clubs and groups.

It calls for a variety of mission strategies to be implemented through a ‘mixed economy’ of parish churches and network churches to reach a diverse and changing consumer culture. The ‘come to us’ strategy no longer works; the church must go out and meet people where they are.

“I…began the process thinking, if only we present church in the best possible way to people, people can still come, having to discover you start so much further back with some people,” Mr Lings told Southern Cross.

But he admits the stumbling block will be churches not wanting to embrace change. “The church’s history does show a tendency for protecting what we have, defending what we have, holding onto what we know, and sometimes when people are frightened they’re more likely to do that,” he said.

The concept appears to have struck a chord across diocesan boundaries, with the bishops of Canberra-Goulburn, Grafton and Bathurst and many senior clergy in Sydney Diocese attending. Mr Lings says he is ‘delighted but surprised at how readily people have lapped it up’.

“Because mission-shaped church comes [to Australia] from England [it is] free from the ‘did it come from Sydney, or did it come from other dioceses’,” he said. “The membership of the group that made it up was certainly wider than evangelicals. It included Anglo-Catholics, it includes charismatics and even mission-minded liberals.”

Christianity Today reported that in June the Moot Community, a new form of church modelled on the mission-shaped concept, opened its doors in London. While meeting in St Matthew’s, Westminster, it also has an online congregation that goes beyond a the bounds of a deanery, diocese or province.

The Church in mission mode will be discussed at General Synod following a report that painted a bleak picture of declining attendance. Many General Synod representatives attended the day after a recommendation by the Synod’s Standing Committee.

Mr Lings said he was encouraged by initiatives such as Sydney’s 10 per cent goal, but warned that Sydney Anglicans had to be open to these ‘fresh expressions’ of church.

“I simply do not know, and it’s an open question, if the Sydney psyche is sufficiently open to [it]. If there’s a mentality that ‘we know all the answers’ there may be some surprises. Any church that seriously mixes it with God in mission will find it is changed, however sound it believes its structures and its beliefs are.”