ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CH3-028 PROFESSOR LAWRENCE REST PROFESSOR WILL SCHUMACHER Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 ***** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communications Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***** >> PAUL: As you were answering my last question, I realized that I actually have a question about what we mean by independent when we talk about new churches that get started through missionary work. Is this a question of money or structure or what? >> SPEAKER: Paul, I'm glad you followed up on that because the word independent can mean different things and is not without its own complexities and controversy. First of all, in a theological sense, we're not independent of one another. As worldwide members of the body of Christ, the same one body of Christ, we are not independent of each other. We're connected with each other and really dependent on one another in important ways. So if we're going to talk in a healthy way about independent churches, we have to be fairly clear about what we mean. I think that this idea of independence does include the things you mentioned of finances and structure and leadership. A few questions back, I've had occasion to mention the name of Henry Venn, a 19th century leader, really a visionary thinker about mission who was in charge of the Church Missionary Society, this Anglican missionary society, and his idea that the goal of mission work was to plant churches that are self-governing, self-supporting, and self-extending. Well, that three-self ideal is still widely popular, even 150 years later even though there have been some criticisms leveled at this as being somewhat artificial. Venn�s idea was that churches aren�t really independent until they�re governing their own affairs, until they're managing their own decisions. That is, they�re led by their own people and structured in a way that is appropriate for their local circumstances. They're also not independent as long as they're depending on external sources of funding and support to make their ministries possible. And finally, they're not really independent churches; they're not really planted as churches in the full sense if they don't take ownership and responsibility for extending the gospel, for spreading the message and engaging in evangelism and mission themselves. In a way, you could argue that Venn�s three-self ideal goes both too far and not far enough. And that is going to require some explanation. It goes too far if it's used to impose an artificial standard of self-sufficiency on young churches that may just be a cover for the selfishness or apathy of wealthier churches. So for instance, if a church in America or Europe that has engaged in mission work in another country finds itself now in difficulties and decides that it's going to put this young church that it�s helped plant on a program to cut back on its financial support, well, that probably is imposing artificial standards because it's really not motivated by the health and well-being of the young church, but is, rather, driven by financial necessities of the sending church. In that regard, not only can a church be weakened by money that creates dependency, but it can also be dramatically weakened by a kind of artificial ideal of independence. Self-support in mission work should not be used as some kind of idol and imposed in an artificial way. On the other hand, Venn�s idea of churches that are self-governing, self-supporting, and self-extending may not go far enough. Some have argued that for a church to be genuinely independent in a healthy way, we need to add a fourth self to Venn�s list; namely, that churches should also become self-theologizing. Now obviously, I'm not in favor of discarding or simply ignoring the rich heritage of the church�s theological life. When churches are planted in new places, we don't simply start over from scratch and reinvent theology as if there never has been any theological history. But it is true that young churches need to develop their own theological thinking so that they're able to read and understand the scriptures in a way that lets them confess the gospel adequately in their own languages and in their own situations. That's not something that an external authority can just tell them. They need to grow up and learn their own theology well enough that they're able to articulate that in a new context. That does require a certain healthy theological independence, not that they become disconnected from the theology of the whole church, the theological tradition that gave birth to them, but that they do need to be able to think in an independent way about questions that confront their church and their situation. I think what this boils down to is that when we talk about independent churches, we're talking about a multi-dimensional question. That is, it's a question of leadership. It's a question of finances. It's a question of task and purpose and engagement in the mission of the church. And it's also an independence of thought and theological reflection that allows young churches to make their own contributions to the whole theological life of the church. When churches are independent in this way, they don't become disconnected from one another. In other words, a mission field that becomes an independent church doesn't simply lose its connection to the church that supported its establishment. Rather, the relationship becomes more mature and develops into a genuine partnership. This is a phase in the mission life of the church worldwide that we have entered into in our own day. That is, former mission fields are now genuine partners who are fully engaged in a two-way relationship. Some of the partner churches in Africa and elsewhere that were started by missionaries from the Missouri Synod have now sent missionaries to the United States to work with the Missouri Synod in specialized mission tasks in North America. So the Missouri Synod is now receiving missionaries from churches that grew out of the mission work of their own missionaries. And this is a really gratifying development that only happens when the partners on all sides have a certain healthy independence of one another. Then we can really engage in a genuine partnership. Independence is not intended to be an artificial standard of self-sufficiency or something imposed from without. It�s a goal of mutual sharing and a genuine partnership in the global task of mission that the church is engaged in. ***** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communications Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *****