Identifying church: edginess and edgeless-ness
I think it’s nice being able to walk along your road and be able to go. ‘Hi, hi’. As you’re going along rather than just walking around and not knowing anybody.... People just exist, go to work, go home, close the door and they don’t really know the people around them and I really feel that since coming onto Messy Church, it’s made me realise how many people in this community are part of this church.... It really kind of opened me up to a new world. And that they’re actually normal.
(Messy Church, D4 Interview One)
Tonight, I wasn’t quite sure who was a volunteer and who was a guest. And there’s no particular dividing line.
(Housing Justice, E3, Chris)
When I read much contemporary ecclesiology, I am increasingly troubled by what seems to me a ‘management paradigm’ in the reading of what church is. By this, I mean that tendency to assume that: first, we can speak about ‘church’ as if we know what that is and, secondly, that when we speak of it, we are referring largely to something of a bounded, organised, observable reality, all be it one with a transcendent or mysterious aspect, and a missionary activity. ‘Church’ quickly becomes identified - more or less - with eccle-sial structural institutions, all be it in various ways. Even when it is the subject of the church’s identity that is being discussed, there is all too often an assumption that we know the ‘thing’ whose identity we are concerned with. So, for example, Paul Avis in starting with the primary sense that “the church’s identity is derived, not only from how it understands itself but also from its locus in culture and society, the prevailing image of the church in its environment”1 assumes the fact or reality of something called ‘church’ even whilst recognising the contested nature of its identity. The church is a self-evident phenomenon, with an inside and an outside, and some kind of relationship with its environment. It is, in short, an organisation. It seems to me that, in this way, academic ecclesiologies have their own version of the ad intra pull that the previous chapter identified for practices.
What is important here is not, in fact, this common, unquestioning use of the language of ‘church’ in ecclesiology. Indeed, it is hard to sec how even the most open, fluid and liberationist understandings of church can avoid such a starting position: ‘the church’ is what we are thinking theologically about in ecclesiology, and its accepted fact is a foundation for the discourse to exist at all. What is significant, however, in my beginning with a question about such a self-evident focus for the ecclesiologist is that it surfaces a certain kind of learning of my own: it is only since the experiences of working closely with practice-based co-researchers that my own sensitivity to the inadequacy of such a commonplace position in ecclesiology has developed. Increasingly, through such engagement with practice, I have found myself reaching for the kind of liberation ecclesiology set out by Leonardo Boff in which he suggests that the church might helpfully be understood not only in institutional or historical terms but, radically, as “grace, liberation, the irruption of the Spirit, the new creation, the heavenly Jerusalem and the kingdom of God”.2 Karl Barth’s starting place in responding to church also rings true here: “Today, there is rather too much than too little said about the Church. There is something better: let us he the Church!”5 The ARCS research, in a particular way, unsettles the ecclesiologist, and confronts us afresh with the classic question: what is the church?
This is not, of course, a novel question. Modern ecclesiology, in particular, has frequently felt the need to define ‘church’ early in its discussions, in part to distinguish them from a popular and/or sociological readings. Roger Haight’s definition can stand as an especially typical example:
The church is the institutionalization of the community of people who, animated by the Spirit of God, live in the faith that Jesus is the Christ of God.4
As Haight himself observes, this statement carefully holds together “the historical and the theological, the dimension of transcendent faith in God’s presence and operation in the church and the human, historical and social character of the community”.'1 This account is also, significantly, followed by a statement of this church’s purpose as missionary.6 These ingredients of visible-invisible, human-divine, historical-eternal are the mainstays of ecclesiological discussion, as this volume discussed in its opening chapter. I have no argument with this as such; but the ARCS research has left me thinking that, when ecclesiologists talking of the human and historical, we tend more to an unquestioning identification of church with organisational structures than with the just-as-historical and concrete practices of the faithfull Christian in the world.
A notable exception to this tendency to read church ‘managerially’ comes with Pete Ward’s Liquid Ecclesiology,7 which builds on his earlier account of ‘Liquid Church’,8 so as to offer a reading of church as culturally expressed, and so more fluid in its identity and accounts of itself. This
Identifying church 149 notion of liquidity, based on Zygmunt Baumann’s critical account of late modern shifts in social cultural forms,9 offers ways of understanding human life and sociality beyond the gathered and structured. This provides, as Ward recognises, a particular gift for ecclesiology, opening up a logical and theological space for engagement with practices as precisely cultural expressions of church which need to be attended to and discerned.10
Although, ultimately, my own ecclesiological sense of the gathered and continuous church is somewhat more concrete than Ward’s liquid church, it is nonetheless in something like this spirit of liquidity that I turn in this chapter to explore what the ARCS project might teach us about the nature of church, as lived and made historically present in the realities of contemporary culture and society. This learning is already shaped by the intentional selection of co-researching practices that were engaged, in some way, with mission or outreach. This leads to a particular kind of attention being given to the experience of church ad extra, and the struggle to enable such experience to be heard with the authority it truly has within an ecclesiological discourse where, traditionally, a great deal of what is said theologically about the church is articulated from ‘within’. Both the normative voices of church teaching and traditions, and, as I’ve suggested, the formal voices of academic ecclesiology give accounts of church which have already an ‘object’ in mind - whether that is (as most often) an institution, a specific organised tradition, a historical reality or a theological ideal. For the lived church caught up in the dynamics of mission, culture and eccle-sia ad extra, there are, I suggest, different readings of what church is.
In particular, what kind of ‘community’ the church might really be, and how this relates to ‘the world’, receive particular fresh illumination from our ARCS practitioner groups. Developing these emergent themes, this chapter takes up in a practice-informed account the question of church identity at a radical (radix, root) level of what ‘church’ is. I argue in what follows that, learning from ‘the grounds’ of church life, church emerges as more of a verbal than noun-al reality. It is a doing of life in Christ (what Pete Ward might refer to as an ‘abiding’11), which is characterised as essentially edgeless (unbounded) whilst at the same time thriving on the (perceived) ecclesial edges of the organised, structured church itself. Frequently, indeed, the ‘edginess’ is expressed by the ways in which Christians are called to the marginal places - the ‘peripheries’12 of society. Whether ecclesially or societally, the practical living of church seems to find a vibrant home on the edges, away (though not apart) from the perceived centres of political and religious structure. The reality of church which is revealed here is that of a church in mission, in the world, which knows itself as - in these senses - both edgeless and ‘edgy’. It is an ecclesiology based on a particular pneumatological understanding in which participants begin to know church as a living into which they are continually called, rather than something they possess or objectify - let alone manage -themselves. In order to demonstrate this, I will explore what can be learntfrom the Accounts of Practices under two headings: ‘the world’ and ‘community’.
