The ad intra pull
Ecclesiologically, the focus on mission might be most properly understood as referring us to the church ad extra - that is, the church understood in terms of its life and work toward its ‘outside’, in ‘the world’. The motivation and espoused theologies of all the co-researchers in the ARCS project reflected a passion for looking outward, all be it in their varied ways and organisational situations. It was therefore striking to see just how difficult it was in practice for many of these groups to resist a pull back into more ecclesiastical, or ad intra, concerns, even whilst maintaining that these very concerns were, nonetheless, a kind of mission. As our reflections developed, we began to refer to this as the ad intra pull - the centripetal realities of
Church in mission 123 structural church life which exerted a particular power over the practices of mission and outreach.
As one might expect, this phenomenon was most clearly seen in those practices closely related to diocesan church structures. Indeed, this can be seen as the dominant theme across all the learning points identified by the Westminster Agency for Evangelisation research. As a clerically led team, at the heart of diocesan structures, this Agency demonstrated a vivid living with a “tension”16 between their evangelistic motivation and the largely catechetical and educational burden of their actual work. The strongly held sense of the Agency as having to understand its purpose in terms of “the bishop’s work no matter what we think individually” (B2, Director) effectively limited the flourishing of any personally espoused sense of mission. The exchange between Agency Team 3 and the Director set out in B2 is a striking example of how the tentative struggle to name something like a missio Dei theology - “something bigger than us” - is met with a strong affirmation of the episcopal mandate, almost as if this is the “something bigger”. At the same time, as described in chapter 6, this evangelisation team was constantly feeling frustrated by the assumptions from parishes (laity and clergy) that their work was really about sacramental catechesis - the resourcing of sacramental preparation largely for children and young people.
In this case, the practice group worked hard to read their real (catechetical) practices in terms of their evangelising sense of purpose. The pedagogical practices of both catechesis and adult education were construed as ways of “facilitating evangelisation at a local level” (B4, Agency Team 2), equipping people for the works of mission in their own contexts. Shared scriptural reflection by the Agency Team on the Road to Emmaus story (Luke 24:13-35) enabled a constructive sense of their work as simultaneously pedagogical and evangelising, as they sought to “meet people where they are” (B4). Especially intriguing is the team’s suggestion of a possible reading of the Emmaus disciples’ return to Jerusalem as a proper ad intra “return to church” which had its own missionary necessity and purpose (B4). Here, we glimpse a dynamic of ‘in-and-out’, coming-and-going, with regards to church and outreach, which goes some way to mitigating any unhelpful polarisation or division of the work of mission in relation to church structures.
That being said, the Westminster Agency’s experience highlights the difficulty, particularly for ecclesiastically structured initiatives, in breaking open practices of church maintenance to more radical practices of mission ‘in the world’. This can be sharply identified in the Portsmouth diocesan stewardship process, where, from the beginning, the internal concerns of the Pastoral Plan around falling numbers of clergy and anticipated parish closures were in some tension with the more missionary extensive vision of church expressed through the adopted stewardship process (Fl). The espoused intentions of stewardship - to renew the life of laity in theworld of work, family and the ‘ordinary’ - were consistently felt as something for which neither clergy nor lay people themselves were equipped (F3). Indeed, many of the parish audits of “gifts and talents” shared with the ARCS team fell into the familiar patterns of asking what gifts people might bring to parish life, rather than encouraging the naming of graced living “Monday to Saturday”,17 and the gifts exercised in the home, workplace and the day-to-day patterns of life.
The Portsmouth practitioners were, perhaps, more ready than their Westminster colleagues to surface this tension as a real difficulty for them. As a result, their responses shed a little more light on the underlying dynamics of this ad intra pull. In part, it was seen as related to differences in ecclesiology.18 The stridently expressed account of the diocesan Head of Finance and Property (F3) witnesses to there actually being quite distinct understandings of church operative in the diocese, which read the question of ordained and lay participation in mission rather differently. If, like him, we adopt an ecclesiology which is predominantly about the mission of lay people in the world (ad extra) served by a few clergy, the tendency toward any ad intra pull can be quickly recognised as improper and responded to as such. However, another ecclesiological position is identified, counter to this, which is typified here as Jesus wanting the church “to run like a well-oiled machine”. This - often implicit - ecclesiology will tend to valorise the organisational work and life of churches, suggesting that lay people are called to serve these realities as the number of ordained men diminish. Here, the ad intra pull can be seen as something to be welcomed - often at the expense of mission energy and activity. A fundamental ecclesiological question is identified: how, in practice, does the community and organisational life of the church, with all its demands, relate to the ends of mission? As theological action researchers committed to serving Christians in their living of an evangelising faith, we must face the concomitant challenge as to what might be learnt from practice-engaged theology about how the churches might resist any ad intra pull which militates against their stated aims of mission and evangelisation.
Something like this question is raised in the Portsmouth practitioners’ reflections on the formation needed for an ad extra way of being church. The question of formation for both laity and clergy is raised in F3 as the diocesan pastoral team identified through the research process this central question for their work:
How to shift focus of stewardship away from over emphasis on ‘churchy’ things towards a 24/7 living out of discipleship?
The difficulty in responding to this question can be acutely felt in the pastoral team’s accompanying recognition that “we have not equipped people.... we have been inward looking, not outward looking” (F3). The kind of formative resources and practices that enabled laity to expand their notions of stewardship (F3, Questionnaire), and freed ordained men to rediscover and celebrate their own gifts and talents (F2, Parish Priest Interview) appear as important, if elusive, keys to any resistance to the ad intra pull. Yet, as the experience of the Westminster Agency showed, this could not simply be a matter of putting on more courses; rather, it requires an appropriation of an ecclesiological shift, a change in church culture, which enables a formation-in-ordinary of laity and clergy such that ‘the worldly’ is truly lived as the place of grace, and the work of the Spirit. It is this, the Portsmouth data suggests, that freed people up to live evangelistically (F3 Questionnaire; F2, Parish Priest Interview).
To make these observations is not simply - or even - a criticism of these diocesan agencies whose work was clearly effective and enabling of many groups in their areas. Rather, we refer to the experiences of these two as explicit examples of a wider, we might even say all-pervasive tendency to collapse evangelisation into the ad intra work of the church. The parish priest’s desire to make the Housing Justice initiative “more religious” (El, Clergy Interview 1), and the tensions around what belonging to church might look like for the Messy Church mothers (D2), indicate that this centripetal ccclesial understanding was at work, in varying degrees, for many, if not all, of these outreach practices. The data makes clear that the immediacy and familiarity of the more ‘maintenance’ focussed work almost inevitably dominates the practical day-to-day activities of those involved. The Westminster Agency team was aware of a certain anxiety as to whether what they were doing was really evangelisation. The “usual context” was one where “people present themselves for sacraments” (B4, Agency Team 4), eliciting a catechetical response from the Agency. The sacramental routine - whilst in some sense evangelising itself - can also be recognised as a deflection of energies away from bringing Christ into people’s lives who have not known him before - a major part of the self-understanding of the Agency’s purpose. The risk is that ‘sacramentalising’ takes the place of evangelising, and a theology of the routinisation of God’s grace becomes operant - all be it unwittingly.
There is, in all this, an outstanding learning point, drawn from the experiences of the (even unsuccessful) struggle to be ad extra in our living of church. Both the Westminster Agency’s re-visioning of their work as “facilitators of evangelisation”, and the Portsmouth diocesan team’s growing emphasis on stewardship as extra-ecclesial, and characteristically lay, suggest a first ecclesiological insight: that mission as such is most effectively carried out from the ad extra places of church, the places of lay living, of Christian discipleship in the world. Diocesan bodies’ very nature as structurally ad intra seems to limit their effectiveness as primary evangelising agencies, This work is more fully embodied and worked out from the world, where the church lives its lay apostolate.19 The ecclesiological paradox is that, in practice, this apostolate in and for the world both depends upon and is hampered by the structural, organisational life and demands of the churches.
