PART ONE: On a Journey Together

How would you go about reforming the church? This is the invitation to all members of the Catholic Church together with their critics and well-wishers. The Catholic Church worldwide is currently trying to implement the “synodal way”, that is, the church as people journeying together.

This is different from the old two-tiered church of clergy/laity, teachers/taught, or shepherds/sheep that many of us grew up in. The “synodal way”, journeying together, has taken a particular form in the present time as we journey towards October 2024 and the second of two Assemblies of bishops where they hope to discover how to put this synodal way into practice. The first Assembly took place in Rome in October last year and produced a report entitled “Towards a listening and accompanying church” which emphasises the importance of “listening” to one another.

Nearly everyone I know who is involved in the church agrees that there are many ways in which it should be reformed. But what kind of reform? A reform could leave us worse than we are now. Many reforms have. If we can agree that the church is in process and willing to learn — and there is no point at all in talking about a synodal way if we don’t — then we also need to agree on what its mission is. If we are going to reform it, let’s reform it so it is better at doing what it was founded for. So many discussions about mission today are in fact about how to attract more people into the church. But would they, and would we, be better off?

Church as Contributor to the Evolving Realm of God

At the centre of any of these current debates about
the church is what we think the church is for. What is
its mission?

The “realm of God” (kingdom of God, reign of God, kingdom of heaven) as we find it in the Gospels is God’s hope, actively underway but not yet completed, for the whole world — a much bigger reality than the church. This is an image of a process, based in the present but also projected into the future, of life-giving relationships among human beings within the vitality of the planet Earth.

A contemporary idea that can alert us to signs of this process within the world today is that of “well-being”. Such “well-being” includes the whole planet Earth, not just human beings. It includes the well-being of all people, not just of some elite groups or our own nation or some cultures rather than others.

The church is a much smaller reality than the realm of God. Its mission is to act in service to, to be an active contributor to, the evolving realm of God. The key point here is that the church is not just about itself and its own members. The church is called to be engaged in the environmental, social and economic issues of society as participation in the evolving realm of God. The first criterion for a good reform is that it gets us closer to this purpose.

The mission of the church is concerned primarily with the larger reality of the realm of God. Yet — and here stands the core of the issue for a “synodal way” — we’ll never achieve this purpose, nor even get close to it, if we don’t live out that realm of God within the church itself. This means a call at the same time to a reform of the church itself, ensuring loving, life-giving relationships within the church community and supporting the personal growth in holiness of its own members.

Yet there is a further danger here. This is the stumbling block where church members focus too much on themselves and their own well-being. The practicalities of maintaining good human relationships and Church organisation can become distorted so that our primary focus is on ourselves. This would be a self-focused church concerned mainly with, for example, the salvation of our own members or with building a lively local community, or with attracting more and more church members.

Reform of Self-focused Church into a
Mission-focused Church

We can easily name some obvious ways in which the real church that we live in needs reform. The proven cases of abuse of vulnerable people by church personnel show such a need. Also obvious are other abuses of power or wealth that come under the headings of clericalism, sexism, ethnocentrism, elitism and egotism. Alongside these we can put the simple, even if not malign, lack of cooperative leadership skills in many church leaders and the subsequent collapse into authoritarian management.

In the recent past, it has become common for Christian communities, parishes in particular, to see their mission as mainly community care and community development. The objective in this case is to develop a Christian community that is vibrant and welcoming. This is a friendly community that provides a fertile spiritual ground for everyone to grow in love and wisdom. This is a beautiful yet still self-focused church. It is concerned more with building up the church than being a contributor to the wider, evolving realm of God.

Nearly every local church engages in some form of care for people in need regardless of whether they are church members or not. This is a compassionate community, yet it remains primarily self-focused if it ignores the full agenda (social justice, peace, planetary care, etc.) of Christian mission which extends well beyond this immediate sense of compassion.

Nearly every local church community also has a committee or process for receiving and welcoming new members into the church. It reaches outwards but its outreach is focused on increasing church membership rather than transforming society.

Most of the local Christian communities I am familiar with are self-focused rather than mission-focused. They have mission activities of some kind (compassionate care for the vulnerable, processes for attracting and welcoming new members).

But a mission-focused church is one in which service to the realm of God is seen as the church’s primary purpose. Most of its energy is directed outwards to the well-being of this wider realm of God. This church will still engage in internal church activities such as care for one another, vibrant liturgies, catechetical programmes, etc. Yet in a mission-focused church, all of these are both relativised and invigorated by its primary purpose of service to the larger realm of God.

Education, for example, would alert people not just to inner church beliefs and common practices but also to action for well-being in the wider society. Similarly, liturgy would not just gather church members together in celebration but also send them out purposefully into God’s wider world. Pastoral care would not just attend to people’s needs but strengthen and equip them for engagement in the wider society and the health of the planet. A mission focus does not abandon the traditional activities of a Christian community, but it shifts our centre of attention and refocuses the direction of all these activities outwards.

The synodal way is a journey where the first steps are to reform the church itself so that we do in fact become mission-focused and fit for mission.

This article is the first of three on this issue of church transformation. Two following articles in the May and June issues, will focus in particular on leadership in the church.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 291 April 2024: 8-9