By John Cole

The map of the three circles of relationships gives us a useful mental picture of the range and balance of the church’s task but it leads to some important conclusions:

1. Nothing that we do that appears in any of the circles can ever be an end in itself, not even our prayer and worship. "It is not those who say to me ‘Lord, Lord’ who will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the person who does the will of my Father in heaven."

We need to be aware all the time of the ways in which what we do in the context of one relationship contributes to the development of the other two relationships. For example:

a) Church services can never be an end in themselves. They only give proper glory to God (and are true leitourgia) when they also serve to make us more aware - and tolerant! - of each other and more aware of what God is calling us to be and to do in relation to people's hopes and fears outside the churchyard gate. In other words, there is an ‘evangelistic’ implication.

b) Church unity is also not something to look for for its own sake - however tempting an ecclesiastical monopoly might seem! Nor is a harmonious fellowship within the congregation. At the very least our calling is to ‘appreciate diversity’. We pray and work for Christian unity and for harmony because our disunity and disharmony get in the way of our knowing more richly the love of God and because they are a standing denial of our message that in Christ reconciliation is made possible.

c) Social concern is a third obvious area where it is easy to act within a wholly human perspective. The result is ‘do-goodery’! Whatever we do in terms of responding to the needs of other people should be a means by which we learn more about God. For "Anything you did for one of my brothers here, however humble, you did for me." God, in other words, is already there in that other human life. We also need to receive with the same humility the help and support that others give us, as we learn to trust and depend upon one another as Christians - and on non-Christians too!

2. Seeing God at work in the connections between the different things we do in his name is probably more important than the individual activities themselves. What integrates and gives life to the three types of relationship is the Holy Spirit achieving his koinonia - his communion/community /communication. The fact that God is at work in the connections explains why apparently incompatible activities in different church traditions can obviously all be blessed by the Holy Spirit.

3. There is no permanent role for the church in God’s purposes. We live out our discipleship within the church as a means to an end. What matters are God’s power, God’s glory and God’s kingdom. Nothing in the life of the church, its liturgies, its traditions, is too sacred to be sacrificed for the sake of the kingdom. And for those of us who cling to our experience of ‘church’ as the means by which we are aware of God, this is a very hard lesson to learn. For the ‘institutional church’ is not in itself the sacrament of God’s love at work in his world; we are - insofar as we are the Body and the Bride of Christ.

4. It follows that the size and shape of the unit that is engaged in those twelve activities that make up the core task of the Church may not be all that significant. Certainly it need not be a congregation as we have traditionally known it. There are signs, as we shall see later in this book, that the ‘centre of gravity’ of church life, where we really engage with these tasks, may now be shifting away from the congregation towards very much smaller and more informal groups, ‘faith communities’ - which are held together as they meet to celebrate in gatherings much larger than the traditional congregation. Here we may be seeing how a ‘Stage Five/Six’ church might operate.

5. Versions of the three intersecting circles (the so-called ‘Venn Diagram’) are commonplace. Many - as for example in Robert Warren's hugely important report for the General Synod of the Church of England, ‘Building Missionary Congregations’ - locate spirituality (or prayer) at the point where the circles overlap. I doubt whether our response to the presence and activity of God can be located in this way. Spirituality is God initiating connections in all aspects of life inside and outside what we recognise as ‘church’ - and it is the process by which we become part of them.

6. Robert Warren (in ‘Building Missionary Congregations’) speaks of the need for us to move from an ‘inherited’ mode of being church ~ pastoral, rooted, centred on building and minister ~ towards what he describes as an ‘emerging’ church ~ a community of faith, distinctively Christian, but actively engaged in its context. There is a marked similarity between this vision and that of the ‘Stages of Renewal’ at the beginning of this chapter. Stages One to Four are all ‘inherited’ modes of being church ~ and we do not yet clearly know what is emerging for Stage Five!

6. The problem with the exercises in this chapter has been that, with the best will in the world, they have tended to look at the church too much as a thing in itself - out of its context. In chapter one it seemed as though, in order to be local, a local church had to cease to be church. In this chapter, in trying to understand the nature and purpose of the church - God’s church - we are in danger of overlooking its continuing connections with the local. The exercises may have produced generalised answers to the question "What are we for?" - but not "What are we here for?"

So our next task is to take a closer look at the connections, particularly by looking at the kind of communication which is already taking place between the local church and its wider locality - whether the congregation likes it or not!

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