Page 48 - The Church of Ireland Apologetic for Mission?

both politically and socially. The emerging Home Rule movement, the 1916 Rising, civil war and partition provided the backdrop against which the Church of Ireland had to develop. In the process
the Protestant community moved from a place of political power and dominance to being a minority in the Republic of Ireland, with greatly diminished religious power relative to the Roman Catholic Church.
Negotiating identity and a way of working in the context of such unsettling times will have inevitably helped to shape the psyche of the Church of Ireland. It may also help to understand how its structures and way of being often seem geared
for the preservation of the organisation rather than embodying the dynamic that is necessary for mission. One wonders how its history, rightly or wrongly, has helped create a psyche as described
by one interviewee as being about “... keeping ourselves safe, secure and maintaining the status quo”? One might add to the psyche a temptation to keep the ‘head below the parapet’, fear of diluting our cultural identity as well as fear of being perceived to be ‘sheep stealing’.
There is always the temptation to idealise history. It is also possible to have a deep understanding of how history helps create the present whilst still recognizing the challenges it has created. As one interviewee observed, “If our perception of history imposes a sense of sclerosis or inertia it becomes (our) master and a tyranny”.
c. Passing it on to the next generation: Maintaining the church and passing
it on to the next generation was a
strong characteristic noted by one interviewee. They commented “Locally we see mission (in the same way) as transmission of the land. We want to pass it on as good, or better, than we got it. Transmission of faith and land (can be) mutually interpretative in rural minority communities”.
3. Theological struggles with mission 48 72 Moltmann 1993
a. Some of the struggle with the concept of mission, from within and outside the Church arises from what are perceived to have been lesser motives which saw global mission as:
• Imperialist – turning people into docile subjects
• Cultural – transfer of superior culture
• Romantic – an opportunity to get away
to exotic places
• Ecclesiastical colonialism – exporting our confession / church order
b. Is mission primarily about evangelism
or is it meeting human need, however manifested? Gathering together all the material that comprises a Church of Ireland apologetic for mission suggests it is not a matter of ‘either / or’ - there is no dichotomy between work to meet need and evangelism. Whilst this may be the case there are still obstacles in how this is worked out in practice.
Evangelism is something that the Church of Ireland can sometimes struggle with. The struggle is both theological and in the practice of it. Moltmann reminds us that “Evangelisation is mission, but mission is not merely evangelisation.”72
The essence of the theological struggle is captured in the words of one interviewee who said, “Global mission is easier than local because the issue is understanding lostness here. If I don’t see people as lost what have I to bring them? ... People don’t know what it is they bring”.
By virtue of its own cultural instincts and because it now finds itself in a more pluralist society the Church of Ireland faces the challenge of understanding what it means by evangelism.
Is the difficulty that the Church of Ireland sometimes has with evangelism rooted in a reluctance to grasp a nettle - of articulating a theological understanding of the human condition and the remedy