Identity and Mission

The Christian Century for January 12 carries an interesting book review on The Missional Church and Denominations: Helping Congregations Develop a Missional Ministry (Eerdmans, 288 pp). The reviewer, Anthony B. Robinson, president of an organization called "Congregational Leadership Northwest," catalogues what others have pointed out and most people surmised, that denominations generally are not doing well missionally these days.

The obvious challenge as he and the book see it, is "to refocus their lives and resources on joining God's mission in the world rather than simply promoting or maintaining themselves."

At the end of his review of the book, Robinson writes, "One denomination that has found resources for innovation is The Evangelical Covenant Church. Historically a church of Swedish immigrants, it has in recent decades caught the wave of the new immigration. New church starts for immigrants from many countries have transformed the denomination and made it to grow."

Especially worth noting and pondering, I believe, is Robinson's concluding query: "Will other denominations prove capable of arriving at the clear sense of identity and purpose that fosters flexibility and innovation. Time will tell."

Many in our time are convinced that growing requires one to abandon the traditions from which we have come. Strip the church of all its churchiness. Free your imagination from bondage to questions of identity. How refreshing to have someone recognize that in our case as Covenanters, it is the strong sense of identity we have inherited from our forebears that has in fact freed us to welcome and receive others so different and diverse. And, for their part, trying to find their way in this new time and land often prejudiced against them and fearful of them, they are grateful for an open and safe-enough community of faith that provides them with a sense of family and common identity in Christ.

Clearly Christ's body must always be missional. But only when each part of it continues to affirm and celebrate its own experience in that body will it be free enough to keep opening its doors to others and serious enough to commend without apology what it has been given by God to be and do.