MNO Synod Bishop's Message

Pioneer Models for Church Renewal

In a presentation to the North American Regional Consultation at the LWF
60th Anniversary meeting, Dr. Kjell Nordstokke, challenged the North American
churches to begin to share our “colonial” mission experience with the African
churches. African churches were colonized with European expansion and have
had to move to more self sustainability when the colonists left or were removed.

The suggestion is that there is a parallel here with our North American society
and our churches. We too were colonized, and when the governing groups left,
we were left with a country that needed to sustain itself and no longer live off
the mother country.

Missionaries came to the continent and built mission outposts. These outposts
were managed by colonial structures. Then liberation or self governance left the mission centres in the hands of the African people. They now must find ways to sustain these centres, in a world where maintenance structures were not in place for the long term, where jobs were few and most migrated to the urban centres in order to sustain a livelihood.

Small rural Canadian parishes experience the same. With immigration, small parishes arose all over the prairie. But as depopulation continues in the rural areas, self sustainability is increasingly becoming the focus. It is becoming harder and harder to maintain so many small parishes.

The African churches continue to grow. Over 2500 new congregations arose in the last two years. Itinerant pastors serve many congregations, some so remote the pastors must drive a motorcycle between the various parishes. What do the pastors do? They teach and preach and provide the sacraments to the community. And from within, come the leaders of the congregation, who carry the work of the day to day ministry as their own calling.
These small mission outposts depend on their denomination to provide resources, whether it is pastoral, teaching, or material resources. What they don’t have is the structures and infrastructure to maintain this model of ministry.

Isn’t it interesting that we have the same concerns in Canada. We have the knowledge regarding the structures but don’t know how to call out forth the resources, or have not maintained leadership training to work with this model. We still like the idea of having a pastor in every parish. And it is not only happening in the rural congregations. Urban areas have the same expectations.

How do we learn to think of ministry in a different way? How do we learn to uphold the Christian calling to “go and baptize in the name of Christ …” and actually expect all people to do the work of ministry. What can we learn from the African churches? What could we teach them about transformation? What is it that both contexts could be doing to revitalize their congregations? I wonder if we need to look to our ancestors to remember how they first developed their congregations. The pioneer model might be the one that helps us revitalize and renew ourselves.