Hard lessons in efe-centric church

This paradox of ad extra and ad intra, with its practical tendency of the former being pulled back into the latter, shapes the many lessons to be learnt from the co-researching practitioners’ experiences of struggling to be missionary, evangelising. However, this is a more complex tension than might be resolved by simply cutting ‘lay’ initiatives off from the structural churches. As we shall see, the experience of being simultaneously ‘held’ by the centred church community and compelled out into God’s bigger world was often painful but also fruitful. It is here that the language of eccentricity comes into play, as my attempt to describe a practical eccle-siology in which church life is simultaneously centred and yet centrifugal in its energies.

One of the places we saw this painful yet fruitful holding of the ad intra-ad extra tension was in the Messy Church research.²⁰ Here, the breaking point of the conversations, leading to significant disclosures around Messy Church as “church lite”, or “a church of the (as yet) unknown God” (D2), lay in the way that the data confronted the Messy Church leadership team with realities which failed to match what they had hoped, worked and prayed for. In fact, the data offered a different account of church, faith and conversion than that commonplace in their ad intra experience. What was evident was not a community clearly centred on Jesus or the Gospel - despite the vibrant and important relationships being built at Messy Church. Indeed, for some respondents the structural links to Christian church were problematic: “In my perfect ideal world there would be an equivalent of this that was not necessarily religious” (D2, Interview Six). For the majority, it seemed that the fact that the organisers “don’t go overboard on religion” (D2, Interview Seven), and that “it’s not really focused on religion” (D2, Interview Eight) was a definite positive. The mothers really appreciated and valued Messy Church - but precisely because it was on the edges of religion, church and explicit faith.

One of the things going on in this Messy Church story is that the leadership in the church - themselves committed Christians and “Sunday church” people - were effectively exercising their instincts around hospitality, welcome and lack of judgment, discussed in chapter 6 above. They know that, culturally and contextually, a certain reserve about faith and church was necessary in order to foster the community of Messy Church as successfully as they had. At the same time, both the Messy Church practices of worship and Gospel-based play and activity, as well as the evangelising hearts of the leadership team, sought to centre Messy Church on those same things which are central to “Sunday church” life. The outreach of Messy Church depended upon the ad intra life and practices of the hosting and facilitating church. At the same time, the difference between these two ecclesial expressions - Sunday church and Messy Church - was initially experienced as worrying, disappointing, challenging by our coresearchers. Ultimately, it led to a ‘stretching’ of the notion of church, for both practitioners and eccleisologists,²¹ in which the ecclesial graces present in Messy Church could be rightly celebrated and fostered as such, whilst - and through - holding them in relationships with the explicit community of faith. The graces ad extra are recognised, named and nurtured from the ad intra life; but in doing so, the ad extra experience reshaped the ad intra understanding of church life, outreach and its purposes.

Coming from quite a different ecclesial tradition, St. Mary’s Battersea’s experience of welcome and outreach nonetheless holds at its heart a similar set of challenges as found in Messy Church, Croydon. Similarly to Messy Church - and a number of other of our practice groups - hospitality, welcome and inclusion, had been highlighted as central to St. Mary’s mission (Cl, C4). Here we see the importance of the ways in which especially lay expressions of the church’s ad extra mission were appropriately instinctive about cultural realities and assumptions.²² However, what became clear, even in the ‘success’ of such generous hospitality (for example, C4, Interview 2), was that there were certain lacks - of being centred on Jesus (C3), of movement from guest to host (Cl), and of a clear sense of what people were being welcomed into. The conversations highlighted the need to accompany welcome and inclusion with an answer to the ‘into what?’ question - a question which, in the context of this chapter’s argument, can be recognised as a practical expression not only of the tension between ad extra and ad intra living of church but also of their mutual dependence.

Similar holding together of the ad extra and ad intra can be glimpsed elsewhere across the projects. Perhaps most vivid was the LJV experience of having the often demanding and even distressing experiences of living faith alongside those on the margins ‘held’ and made life-giving through the return to a community and embodied tradition. Through this ad intra formation it became possible for volunteers to “see Cod present in your life every day” (A5, Outsider Feedback Document, pl). The volunteers at Housing Justice also worked within the tension of ad intra and ad extra church, recognising - even if in complex ways - that both liturgical celebration of the Eucharist and being with the homeless guests were ways of embodying that “you love God” (E3, Richard). Arguably the CAFOD reflection on the difference between the “fig-leaf” of the “pope quote” and the deep appropriation of the flavouring “bay leaf” of Catholic Social Teaching (Gl), also reflects not only the difficulty of relating out-reach to mainstream, organisational church but also the potential in keeping that relationship alive and vibrant. The challenge was, for all practitioners, how to remain true to their missionary, culturally sensitive instincts whilst still enabling their ad extra practices to be vivified by the explicit and organised faith community of church.²³