The Church and Its Vocation by Michael W. Goheen

Author:Michael W. Goheen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mission/Ecclesiology;Missions—Theory;Newbigin;Lesslie;REL045000;REL067050;REL108020
ISBN: 9781493415847
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2018-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

Worship

Two Simultaneous Duties

In the mid-1980s a reviewer of Foolishness to the Greeks challenged Newbigin to apply the heady discussion of his book to the local urban congregation. As it happened, he was pastoring a poor urban congregation in Winson Green at the time, so based on that experience, he responded with reflections on what his “heady discussion” would look like in a missionary congregation. He begins with the affirmation that we have been chosen to be bearers of the good news for the whole world. The only way anyone will believe that God’s final word for the world is a crucified man is if there is a congregation that believes the gospel. He says the key is the work of God himself in the Holy Spirit both when the congregation is gathered for worship and when it is scattered throughout the world: “The Holy Spirit is present in the believing congregation both gathered for praise and the offering up of spiritual sacrifice, and scattered throughout the community to bear the love of God into every secular happening and meeting.”20 He then goes on to say that the “first priority, therefore, is the cherishing and nourishing of such a congregation in a life of worship, of teaching, and of mutual pastoral care so that the new life in Christ becomes more and more for them the great and controlling reality.”21

It is typical of Newbigin to place worship either at the beginning of a list of characteristics of a faithful church, as he does here, or at the end. Putting it first enables him to speak of it as the first priority. Putting it at the end enables him to show its crucial need for nourishing the life of Christ for mission. For example, in another list he says, this “brings me to the fifth [and last] point, which is that the church will be a worshipping community.” He then comments that it “may be thought that this should have stood first in the list. But I think we understand its meaning better if we take it after we have considered the church as a serving, suffering, witnessing, open community.”22 His ensuing discussion shows why this is so important: only in worship can we recommit ourselves to the true story centered in Christ that gives meaning to human life and be nourished by his life week by week so that we can faithfully bear witness. We see here with clarity the importance Newbigin placed on the institutional and communal life of the church—and especially on worship.

The church is like an ellipse with two foci: gathered life and scattered life. The church, he says, “always has two simultaneous duties.”23 The first is to strengthen and make more real the citizenship of God’s people in the kingdom of God in word and sacrament, in prayer and communion, and in an ever-deeper rooting in Christ. And if the church fails to do this, “it is liable to become salt without savour.” The second duty is

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