Page 49 - The Church of Ireland Apologetic for Mission?

that one offers through evangelism? Or as our interviewee put it more succinctly, “understanding lostness here”.
Whether the difficulties with evangelism are theological or practical the end result is as one interviewee says, “There is no galvanizing of the issue locally, and global poverty (becomes) an easier galvanizing issue”.
One interviewee commented, “The danger is to get lost in foreign mission so that we are relieved of any obligation to do something at home”.
c. Is evangelism a churchmanship
marker? The struggle with evangelism
is sometimes not just theological but with those methods that seem culturally alien. It is also true that an emphasis, or not, on evangelism can be seen as an unspoken marker to demarcate differing camps of churchmanship and theological outlook within the Church of Ireland? One interviewee posed the question as to whether evangelicalism was “more just low church style than winning society for Christ?”
d. One interviewee also identified a familiar challenge for any church involved with meeting need. He asked the question
“Is our action distinctively Christian or is
it ridiculed and seen as overly pious? If
we don’t start with the incarnation and redemption ... (or) forget why we are doing it in the first place we end up with a shell of a thing with the heart and purpose lost”. This is not to suggest that every
act of meeting need is suffused with evangelism. It is rather to keep in mind the heart and theological imperative that motivates us to do it.
4. The sea upon which the iceberg floats
If organisations can be likened to an iceberg, with visible and invisible aspects, it is worth reflecting on something else – the nature of the water upon which it floats.
David Bosch suggests there are certain presuppositions within Christian mission, including:
• A sender
• Asenderwhohasauthoritytodoso–
God / Church / agency
• Person/personssentbysender • Thosetowhomoneissent
• Anassignment
David Bosch also contends that from without and within its own ranks “more than ever before in its history the Christian mission is in the firing line”.73
The Church of Ireland is like any other body on this island in that it does not exist in a cultural, economic or political vacuum. There are external influences that come to bear
on its ability or disposition to be missional, either at home or globally?
a. We live in a time of distrust of institutions. A wide variety of scandals along with
the financial collapse mean that large organisations, including the Church,
are often viewed with cynicism. Human leadership has been shown to be flawed.
b. Postmodern culture: We now live in a postmodern culture. Postmodernism stems from a recognition that reality
is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own and personal reality. Postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person.
In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality
only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one’s own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal.
Popular postmodern culture has a number of manifestations:
73 p 2 Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission
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