Every Priest a Missionary

On becoming a missionary church

Church decline has been on my mind again. It’s hard to escape in Canada, and perhaps especially in Quebec, arguably the most secular part of Canada.¹ And let’s be clear about the situation: for all the vestiges of Christianity that still surround us, North America is undergoing a rapid and unprecedented dechristianization. This is true even in the United States, which has long been an outlier troubling simplistic secularization narratives. And it’s true beyond the mainline and white Roman Catholics. Ryan Burge, a demographer of American religion whom I find very helpful, recently reported on the latest statistics out of the Southern Baptist Convention, showing a 3.5% membership decline in 2022, the SBC’s largest ever. As Professor Burge notes, it’s a percentage loss which is quite similar to that of the annualized percentage loss for the Presbyterian Church USA since the ’80s; the PCUSA is now careening towards nonexistence (as, of course, are my own Anglican Church of Canada and Episcopal Church). The General Social Survey, which began in 1972, tracks worship attendance in the United States. A full third of Americans now never attend worship services; about a third attend at least monthly and the last third very infrequently. In 1972, only 9% of Americans never attended worship and around 57% attended monthly or more. North of the border, the Anglican Church of Canada’s statistician has reported that our projected number of members hits zero around 2040; I believe that the numbers for the United Church of Canada, Canada’s largest Protestant denomination, are similar. Our churches are collapsing.

What’s more, I find that none of the compensatory narratives that we tell ourselves as to why this collapse isn’t really as bad as it seems hold water. I’ve written before that the data simply does not match the claim that the church will be smaller than it once was, but it will be more faithful, more genuinely committed to following Jesus, because those who just attended due to social pressure have now dropped out.² I don’t think what we are seeing is just a sorting out of the uncommitted, a reversion to a mean, or the short-term response to evangelical nastiness or a global pandemic. No: what we are seeing is the replacement of the system of values and beliefs that undergirded both private and public life in North America, or – to put it more polemically – a continent turning away from God. I’m not saying that North America in its more emphatically ‘Christian’ moments lived up to Christ’s demands. Of course it did not, to our deep shame. I wonder at times whether the collapse of European and North American Christianity is God’s punishment for our faithlessness. But it was once Christian, in the sense that Christian beliefs, narratives, and practices structured both the individual lives of most people and their common life, and increasingly now it is not.

One response, a not unpopular one in the mainline, is to say that this collapse may indeed be real, but might not be such a bad thing (I’ve written about this here). On this account, Christianity is simply a matter of taste, a way of being in the world that may be lifegiving for some but not for others, true for some but not for others. Christianity, on this reading, is a particular expression of a universal religious impulse or need for meaning, but isn’t essential to human flourishing. And so its rapid diminishment might be mourned, especially for the sake of those who have found it meaningful, but it is hardly catastrophic, especially when one considers the (very real!) evils committed in the name of Christ and his church. This view has the advantage of fitting well with the value-pluralism of contemporary Western society (so long as those values do not constrain the autonomy of the individual or the market!) and anaesthetizing despair about decline. But it is not compatible with either the Bible or historic Christianity.

Rather, the view of the Bible and of historic Christianity is that we are given good news to share, good news that is not just for some people but good news for all people! Christianity is the good news, the truth for all (or “public truth,” to use Lesslie Newbigin’s phrase), that in Christ Jesus God has reconciled all the world to himself, has given us the gift of forgiveness of sins and new life in his name, has acted in history to break the power of death forever. And what Christ Jesus did isn’t just for the cosmos in general (although it certainly is cosmic in scope), nor for strangers we do not know, but for each and every one of us! He invites us – invites YOU – by Word and Sacrament through the power of the Holy Spirit into life in Christ for our good and his glory. We dare to affirm that we don’t just have a strategy for eking out a meaningful existence in a fundamentally meaningless cosmos; we don’t just have an iteration of the various ways that human beings relate to ‘the Absolute’ or indulge their ‘religious impulse’. No: we have Christ Jesus, put to death for our sins and raised for our justification. How could we not long to share this, or see it as great tragedy when people do not have the opportunity to hear what God in Christ as done for them?

On this reading, then, we can only see the church’s collapse as very bad indeed. We have good news to share, and the collapse of North American Christianity means that we fail to share it. So what then should we do about it? I think the answer is simple in theory, but the work of a lifetime to put into practice: the Church in the West, from its leaders down to the people in the pews, needs to embrace a missionary identity. The Church in North America, if it will survive as more than just irrelevant, isolated, fading pockets of belief, needs to become a missionary church. And I mean being missionaries in the sense of proclaiming, by word and deed, the Gospel of Jesus Christ and inviting people to respond by faith. As Jesus commands us, as God’s glory and people’s salvation impels us, we need to evangelize, to place evangelism at the heart of our understanding of what our church does.

Now, of course, nothing that I am saying here is particularly novel. As Newbigin noted back in his 1989 The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, “it is frequently said that the Church in Britain is now in a missionary situation.”³ But what he wrote next remains true for us today, some 35 years later: “it is not clear that the full meaning of this [i.e., the above statement] has been fully understood.” We may mouth platitudes about how we need to be ‘missional’ or even ‘missionaries,’ but we do not train our clergy or structure our churches with that end in view. In words that are still painfully resonant today, Newbigin goes on to describe how ministerial formation and deployment fails to meet the missionary needs of the moment:

We have lived for so many centuries in the “Christendom” situation that ministerial training is almost entirely conceived in terms of the pastoral care of existing congregations. In a situation of declining numbers, the policy has been to abandon areas (such as the inner cities) where active Christians are few and to concentrate ministerial resources by merging congregations and deploying ministers in the places where there are enough Christians to support them. Needless to say, this simply accelerates the decline.

I am, to be clear, deeply thankful for the ministerial formation that I received, for the many brilliant and godly professors who helped me better love God with my mind and formed me for the priesthood. And yet I cannot deny that much of Newbigin’s critique rings true. We spent precious little time thinking about evangelism – there were no classes on the topic at Yale Divinity School during my tenure there – nor even terribly much time thinking about discipleship in the face of an increasingly explicitly non-Christian world. We aren’t trained to be missionaries. Few of us mainline clergy, I imagine, think of ourselves as missionaries (that’s a thing that those awful evangelicals do!). And in both the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, when I look at how staffing decisions are made, how and to what sorts of positions ministers are deployed, well, with honorable exceptions, Newbigin’s description of a focus on pastoral care of existing congregations is it to a “T.” This isn’t the fault of individual bishops or parishes or clergy; we are dealing with how decision-making, finances, and clergy formation and deployment are handled in our churches writ large. But all the same, it is a massive problem: for all our jeremiads against ‘Constantianism’ and calls for a more socially-engaged ministry, what mainline ministers are trained to do and what we find ourselves doing is increasingly the accompaniment of dying congregations as a more-and-more irrelevant branch of the caring professions.

And so I’m left wondering: what would it look like if we clergy embraced an identity as missionaries and trainers of missionaries, working to equip both ourselves and our people to share the Good News to a culture that increasingly does not know it, increasingly has not even heard of it? Not just a few of us ministers, but each and every one of us? What if every priest was a missionary? Yes, it may not be what we trained for – it may not be what we are naturally most comfortable or happy doing – but it’s what the moment demands! What would it look like if we sought (by the Spirit’s power!) to make our congregations evangelical in the best sense of the word: full of people who knew and believed the Good News of Jesus Christ and were empowered to share that Good News, the new life they found, with their friends, their neighbors, the strangers on the streets? Indeed, what if not just every priest was a missionary, but every Episcopalian, or Canadian Anglican, say? The change that this would involve is daunting to imagine.⁴ I know that I, and most of my colleagues, have not been formed to be a missionary. But today, rather than waiting around for structural changes to how our churches function that I doubt will come in time, I want to learn how to be one.

There are many places, I expect, where we could go to learn how to do exactly that. I wonder whether some of the skills that I was trained in as a union organizer might translate here. I wonder too where we could learn from the evangelicals, not just their mistakes (which we are too glad to point out!) but also their successes. We certainly have tremendous things to learn from the church outside the West; it may well be the role of the Sub-Saharan African or Chinese churches now to re-evangelize the very nations which first sent missionaries⁵ to bring the Gospel to them. What’s more, we are not without examples of missionary endeavors in Anglican/Episcopal churches in North America. We have so bought into an account of ourselves as an ‘establishment’ church, whether we celebrate this or decry it, that we forget that we have our own stories of planting churches and sending forth missionaries to reach people who lacked the ministrations of the church. This is, of course, a complicated and difficult history, linked to the church’s involvement in the expropriation and oppression of indigenous peoples and promotion of white settlement across the continent following their removal. But for all our self-perception as people who “don’t do that sort of thing”, we once sent out missionaries to plant whole dioceses!

I wish that I had a tried and tested program to end on here, beyond embracing anew faithfulness to Jesus through proclaiming his wonderful works to all. But as I said, I think it will be the work of a lifetime, for myself and church leaders (lay and ordained) in my generation, to work this out in churches that have largely lost a missionary spirit. For now, it’s enough to say this: the church is collapsing in North America, which means that if the church has a future it will be as a missionary church. And I want to learn how to be a missionary.

1. British Columbia might give us a run for our money.

2. Or rather, the data clearly shows that mainline churches like the Episcopal Church which have undergone serious decline are less much spiritually healthy than evangelical churches, in terms of members engaging regularly in spiritual practices and trying to live in accordance with their faith. One could, I suppose, argue that Episcopalians still have not shed our nominal members and been reduced simply to the faithful core — but if so this faithful core is looking rather tiny indeed!

3. Perhaps back in the 80s this was not yet true of the United States — but it is certainly true now!

4. Of course, we must never forget that conversion is God’s work, not ours. While we can say that some evangelistic techniques are more effective than others, we must never imagine that we will find the one neat trick to convert the nations to Christ. Our job is to be faithful (and even that we can only accomplish by the Spirit’s power!); we are not promised success. This does not mean, of course, that we should ignore the fact that some evangelism methods are more successful than others.

5. Yes, of course, European and American missionaries all too often joined the Gospel to plunder, colonialism, assimilation to Western culture, and death — but the Spirit used even them!