Book Review: The Once and Future Church

The Once and Future Church: Reinventing the Congregation for a New Mission Frontier
By Loren B. Mead
Alban Institute: New York, N.Y., 1991

In his book, The Once and Future Church, Mead makes the following observation about the church today. "The Church of Christendom structured itself to address mission beyond the Empire. That meant that it built parish systems, regional structures, and national entities that could gather and deploy resources to the critical point on the missionary frontier. Because that frontier was far away, it required the kinds of logistics and organization it takes to mount a military campaign in a far-off land. There were lots of training camps to prepare the key troops, special training for the leaders, airplanes ans hips for transport, policy decisions at high levels at meetings of the generals and the prime ministers, and total support from the citizens at home." [Mead, Page 58]

This quote puts into perspective both the result of 2000 years of building up the church that we know today and why we need to move to a new paradigm to define the church and its mission. In many ways, Mead has been prophetic in his analysis of the church today. This is not the first time that I have read this book. In fact, I've read his book twice before and continue to be amazed at his insights and his analysis. In 1991, Mead was already beginning to see the amazing shift of the church from a centralized, well organized, well funded and resourced church to the shrinking "mainline" church that is struggling to remain a viable faith community in changing times.

Mead's fundamental thesis in this small, but powerful book is that the Christendom paradigm has become so much a part of the society's social, economic, and political structure that it has forgotten its purpose as a missional church. He argues that now is the time (really the decade of the 90's) is the time to break loose from the structure and trappings of the establishment and return to the Apostolic model that he believes is more faithful to the intent of the early Christian community and more quickly adaptable to the rapid changes we are experiencing in this high-tech and globalized world. In the review that follows, I will look at what Mead believes the best model for the church must be if we are to adapt to the 21st century.

Mead believes that the Christendom paradigm is no longer an effective model for the church today. The Christendom paradigm began in the fourth century with Emperor Constantine when in 313 A.D., Constantine declared Christianity to be the official religion of the Roman empire. This declaration by the Roman Emperor, the congregation was enlarged to include everything Roman. The congregation was the church; the church was the empire. With this new relationship between the church and Empire the structure, its mission, the congregation, and expectations of clergy and laity changed. In effect this relationship fortified the church from the mission field, which up until this point, had been the mission of the local congregation. Now, in this new paradigm, mission had become a "far-off enterprise". No longer would mission be the direct responsibility of the ordinary person, but it would become a ministry of the"larger church", the institutional church.

Besides the change in the congregation's understanding of mission, with the Emperors decree, the boundaries between the sacred and secular became blurred. Bishops, kings and princes were leaders of the church and of the empire. In this new context, the nature of the church was no longer a tight community of committed and embattled believers that would support one another in the hostile environment. Rather, the empire divided up the congregation by geographical boundaries and identified an area as a parish. The drive to unify this diverse people across vast geographic areas gave way to regional bodies governed by a Bishops, Priests, or Cardinals, thus creating a hierarchy that did not exist before this time. This hierarchical system was then imported to the United States where we adopted similar models in order to unify our congregations. During this time, clear roles and expectations were set between the clergy and lay leaders. Instead of being zealous missionaries where leadership was often assumed by passionate lay people, the church became a religious system that was more passionate about morality, turf, doctrine, structure, and denominations than they were about mission. Nearly two thousand years later, we are still working under a structure that we inherited from Constantine and the Holy Roman Empire.

In his book, Mead would argue that today's congregations are living in a time when familiar landmarks have been erased and old ways have stopped working. He believes that if the church is to survive into its next incarnation, we will have to return to the church of an earlier time, a model Mead has called the Apostolic paradigm. The Apostolic paradigm for the church is a community formed of common values and shaped by a story within a larger, hostile environment. The apostolic community was called to reach out to the environment or as Jesus said in Matthew, "...go into the world" and be in the world but not of it. This is the church's new call.

In his book, Mead identifies the changes that are occurring in church life and whether we want it to or not, we are in the midst of a seismic shift in our understanding of church. Destiny has placed its hand upon Christendom and the shrinking pool of resources, religious people, and the competition of many, many spiritual and religious options that are available to the population is forcing its hand upon the changes that have begun and will continue to transform the church in the 21st century. In this time of transformation, Mead identifies three polarities that will define the church of the future. They are Parish vs. Congregation, Servant-hood vs. Conversion, and whether the congregation identifies itself as an exclusive organization with a clear understanding of who is in and who is out or whether it chooses to be an inclusive congregation that risks a more laissez faire attitude where anything goes. Each of these polarities alone is not the church of the future, rather it is a creative tension between them and with an eye always toward the hostile world around us.

In summary, Mead's thesis is that a new church is being born around us. This notion is better presented and argued in the previous book I reviewed entitled, Borderland Churches. Both Mead and Nelson would agree that the Christendom paradigm is rapidly fading. The theology, the structure, the mission priorities of Christendom still surround us, support us, and frustrate us all at the same time. God's call for the church is God's call for newness, not only for the church, but also for a new world. Those of us serving, participating, and leading in this new movement are called to renew and embrace the new church, not as an institution from the past, but as a centering presence from which we may serve the new church and the new world that God is creating around us. Now is the time to see the new possibilities and the new ways in which God is renewing and re-creating his Church.