Reimagining Mission from Urban Places

Anna Ruddick

Description

Reimagining Mission from Urban Places offers much needed reflection about the nature of mission and about expectations for missional outcomes. Using the stories of team members within the Eden Network (which emphasises an 'incarnational' approach to urban mission) the book demonstrates that at its best, mission happens in a shared life rather than being about 'us' telling the listening world.

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 28 février 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334058670
• Langue: English

Extrait

Reimagining Mission from Urban Places

© Anna Ruddick 2020
Published in 2020 by SCM Press
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ISBN 978 0 334 05865 6
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Contents
Acknowledgements
1 Reality is Good Enough
2 How People Change – Finding Pastoral Care in Mission
3 Missional Pastoral Care in Practice
4 If it’s Messy, Slow and Complicated, You’re Probably Doing Something Right!
5 Is Missional Pastoral Care ‘Good News’?
6 Our Theological Season
7 The View From Here
Appendix: Practical Theological Research
Bibliography
Further Reading
Index
Acknowledgements
It feels like time for this book; and, equally, this is a book of its time. A particular moment within British evangelicalism created the Eden Network, alongside other incarnational mission initiatives. Since then, many courageous and dedicated Christians have joined Eden teams and have committed themselves to missional living in communities described as marginalized. This research belongs to them and to their neighbours as much as to me. It arises primarily from the urban community members and team members I interviewed and I have lived and worked alongside. I am immensely grateful to them for their wisdom, honesty and creativity, without which there would be nothing to say.
I am not alone in responding to this cultural and theological moment. I have been challenged and encouraged by friends and colleagues on similar journeys as we articulate some complementary shifts from our different standpoints, and for each of their unique gifts I am grateful.
In the process of re-storying a doctoral thesis for a general readership I have benefited hugely from friends, family and colleagues who have read drafts, listened and offered their reflections. Thank you!
Finally, my love and gratitude go to Andrew Ruddick, an incisive editor and true encourager. I am so glad to be able to share this adventure with you!
1 Reality is Good Enough
When people join in with you and support the cause that you both believe in and it’s like, wow, this is really collaborative and I never expected it to be like this . . . I always thought it would be, you know, like our team getting together behind our vision and making it happen . . . And, you know, maybe I expect to be great and stooping, you know, when really it’s about another person helping me and changing me and humbling me in the process and helping me realize, oh my goodness what a gift, what a gift that that person wants to give to me, how beautiful is that! (Mission team member, Greater Manchester)
These words are the reflections of an evangelical Christian in his twenties who had relocated to an urban community and had been living there for four years. He is not a church leader or a professional mission practitioner in any way. Instead he has sought to share his day-to-day life with the people of his community, hoping to share his faith in the midst of it all. In these few words he articulates the gift that this choice has been to him, and also the challenge. It has led to unexpected outcomes, and he has been changed in the process.
‘Missional pastoral care’ is the name I have given to an intentional form of missional living shaped by seven elements: being among people who are different, living locally, being available, taking practical action, long-term commitment, consistency and love.
Mission is usually seen as what Christians do among people before these people become Christians. It is often characterized as edgy and exciting, requiring entrepreneurial leadership and great communication skills, whereas pastoral care is perceived to be what happens within the Church, among existing Christians. It is characterized as quieter and more introverted, mainly concerned with helping people through personal problems. Pastoral care can easily be sidelined, particularly in strongly activist and mission-orientated contexts, while we all ‘get out there’ on mission. I appreciate these are caricatures, but ones that perhaps many of us recognize.
But among the incarnational mission teams of the Eden Network these categories have begun to seem less clear. Their ministry involves supporting and caring for vulnerable people over the long term, without this being seen as a means to the end of evangelism. It does include faith-sharing but is not focused primarily on evangelism; and while it can lead to conversion, this is not the sole aim. Members of Eden teams understand their work as mission, although in it there are patterns that echo pastoral care. So these two vocations, which often seem so different, are brought together in ‘missional pastoral care’, a way of life that enacts the mission of God in three ways: by holistically sharing our lives (for the common good) with those we once thought of as ‘other’; by talking about our life stories, including faith stories; and by engaging in a process of reshaping our world views, leading to life change.
This book is an account of mission in marginal communities: the experiences of Christians involved in mission and the urban community members they got to know. In their often unheard reflections we find a changed mission, and a changing evangelicalism. Whatever they may have expected it to be, mission turns out to be about recognizing the personhood of people who we assume are ‘other’ to us. It is about leaning into the discomfort of vulnerability and about celebrating the flourishing that comes when we do. Mission, as it turns out, has something in common with pastoral care – blurring the lines between mission and discipleship, between the Christian on mission and non-Christians in a community. In the end we discover that God is on mission and that mission is to us all, whether we name ourselves Christian or not. The invitation is to be open to God’s mission in our lives as Christians as a fundamental part of our joining with God in mission in our world.
My questions about mission, the way people change and the language we use to describe it came about through my work for the Eden Network over a period of nine years. The Eden Network is an initiative of The Message Trust, a Christian mission organization based in Manchester and working nationally and internationally. It engages in incarnational urban mission, developing partnerships with local churches or church planting denominations and recruiting teams of Christians to relocate into communities identified, using government statistics, as among the most deprived in the country. 1
‘Missional pastoral care’ is the result of many conversations, observations and much grappling. Specifically, it is the result of a programme of doctoral research, which began in response to my work supporting Eden team members, and with the starting question: ‘What does it take to change a life in an urban community?’ It seemed evident to me that God is at work in the experiences of Eden teams and in the urban communities that they inhabit. My hope was to find out how God is at work, and that meant unravelling many of my own assumptions and the corporate narratives of the Network. Now, working as a community theologian in a range of different contexts, I have found that the learnings of Eden team members and urban community members offer a rich source of theological reflection for Christian mission. This is not a book about the Eden Network, nor is it my intention to offer an evaluation of incarnational urban mission models. Rather, Eden’s gift was (and still is) to provide a way for ordinary evangelical Christians to become neighbours and build relationships in marginal communities. This book is about what happens when they do and what it can teach us about God, ourselves and the task of mission in twenty-first-century British society.
The insights shared here have arisen within the context of urban ministry, and all of the people mentioned live in communities that experience poverty and marginalization. While this is a book about ministry and mission in urban places, it is also not about ministry and mission in urban places. It is about relationships in mission – how they work, what makes them life-giving and how we understand them to be fruitful. Writing about mission and ministry in urban contexts is important, but here I am doing something different. I am writing about mission and ministry from experiences in urban contexts. Having spent the last 14 years listening to and reflecting with people involved in urban ministry, and having lived in marginalized communities myself for half of that time, I believe that the urban is a place of encounter with God, with ourselves and with those we consider to be ‘other’. When people all around us are living with the precariousness of low incomes,