God Communities Among the Poor: History Informs the Future
By Viv Grigg
Is Word Made Flesh a Protestant order among the poor? In Protestant Mission Societies: The American Experience, Dr. Ralph Winter argues that mission structures are equivalent functionally to Catholic orders. Protestant orders are built around core values that resemble those of the early phases of Catholic orders. With the emergence of new Protestant mission thrusts, raising this question is essential in understanding the nature of mission for the next decades.
Orders grew out of responses to a growing imperfection within the church as it became increasingly corrupt, powerful, wealthy and lukewarm. Generally they began as lay movements, growing out of a sense of rebellion against the increasing structuring of the Catholic Church. Often a man or woman of God would seek out a place of retreat only to find other seekers after holiness drawn to them and a community would spring up focused on the search for holiness and for God.
Orders grew out of seeking a lifestyle that was consistent with the gospels. At the same time there was much in them that was in conflict with the gospels: the desire to work for one’s salvation, withdrawal from society to work for salvation, and often severe asceticism growing out of early Gnostic tendencies with their rejection of the physical body.
For most of two hundred years, the Protestant Reformation lost the positive aspects of monastic and preaching orders. Fortunately, the concepts were not entirely lost within Protestantism. John Wesley deliberately set about modeling his movement (which became the Methodist church) on the concept of an order. The Salvation Army, with a similar commitment to the poor, was originally an order. Ralph Winter seeks to demonstrate how many Protestant mission societies today are essentially orders in their structure.
Winter focuses on the structural components of orders, comparing them to Protestant para-church and mission structures. He comments on various functional similarities between these two, mentioning decentralization, mobility and eliteness of the religious communities. His plea is for an acceptance of the optional, voluntary structures for deeper community and effective service. He summarizes the characteristics of these voluntary structures:
1. Voluntary deeper commitment
2. Response to a challenge
3. Stress on both devotion and active involvement
4. Task forces ready for any good work
5. An organizational esprit de corps
6. Both come-structures and go-structures
7. Amazing durability (of purpose and existence)
8. Stress on Christian basics
9. A normative pattern of discipline
But in the process of reinventing the wheel (a Protestant version of a Catholic wheel in this case), we need to speak to a deeper level than the structural level at which Winter’s analysis initiates us into thinking about Protestant orders.
The need of the urban poor requires a new call that is more than a faint Protestant echo of the structural forms of the Catholic orders. It is a call that goes a long way back into some of the lifestyle and value issues out of which the Catholic orders emerged, while rejecting the theological and historical distortions that were the cause of so much destructive schism.
Not all para-church or mission structures are orders. Although there are useful structural similarities that Winter mentions, there is more than simply a structural issue here. There is a question also of the spiritual dynamics that produced the early orders. There is a different value system in the traditional Catholic orders than is evident in Protestant missions. For many of these orders, it was this value system that facilitated a ministry to the poor.
These thoughts, molded amid the cries of the poor and born of the compulsion of the Spirit of God to seek out the poor and the needy, are the dynamism behind the development of a series of new Protestant movements embodied by communities such as Word Made Flesh.
In initiating these new Protestant orders, it has been helpful to work from some of the value systems of the older orders, rejecting their asceticism and other aberrations and tracking with their strengths. With the loss of the orders came a loss of focus on incarnation as the central component of missionary strategy. In seeing Protestant failures to minister to the urban poor in the mission context, it has become increasingly apparent that incarnation is essential.
Orders were devotionally focused. Ministry among the poor cannot be sustained unless there is a strong pattern of devotional lifestyle. Protestant missions have been work focused. Orders were communally focused. Protestant missions have had teams, but they have primarily been work teams of loosely-related individuals. Community is essential to provide sufficient emotional and spiritual support for incarnational workers among the poor. The Two-Thirds World perception of invasion by North American missions is that of missionaries who are heavily dependent on a large sourcing of finances, living affluent lifestyles in the midst of a sea of need. Orders on the other hand have always had a focal commitment to poverty and hence to the poor.
Many would understand that going back to the old orders for models would lead to regulations and static patterns. But there were many types of orders, and many in their formative stages were distinctly evangelistic and discipling movements. Similarly, an order from an evangelical arm of the church, by its very source, will be apostolic rather than monastic. For Assisi, Xavier and Wesley, poverty was not seen as a virtue in itself alone. Although good for the soul, it was seen as essentially apostolic in nature, a key to effective evangelization. This concept of community is developed from the patterns of Jesus and Paul’s mobile ministering teams rather than the pastoral communal concepts of Acts 2 or Acts 4. As such we are looking more to an order similar to the early Celtic orders and the 12th-century preaching friars than to the more monastic meditative orders.
One of the lessons learned from Assisi is not to structure too highly a work. He refused for years to write down a rule for his order. When he did, it gave room for men within it to execute power plays that stripped him of his leadership. He understood the necessity to have only a very narrow set of focal values and minimal structure. He sought to avoid the error of many of the orders, where the Rule became central and that Rule focused on minor details and administrative structural issues. This administrative focus error occurs monotonously within Protestant mission societies. Their focal document is normally an administrative document, a manual, rather than a document setting out focal values and lifestyle.
What is needed to facilitate an order is a simple yet demanding value system that structures people into critical areas of focus but at the same time frees people for the mobility of apostolic ministry.
The emergence of Protestant mission societies was a task-focused emphasis. Out of the pietism in the Protestant revival movements came “modern missions.” Pietism was assumed rather than built into the pressures of the structures. By contrast, older Catholic orders were focused around devotion, out of which stemmed mission work. Mission and work were part of the search for God, not the raison d’etre. In returning to the concept of an order, there is a desire to return to the focal value that our apostolate is for the purpose of deepening devotion. Many Protestant groups have slogans such as, “To know Christ and to make Him known,” but the written documents and structuring of the works include no significant parameters that will compel the missionary to focus on a devotional lifestyle. The pressure of the structure is toward production and work, not toward devotional lifestyles.
The resultant underlying guilt of evangelical missionaries is consequently a major stress factor. Intense work pressures are accentuated by the task orientations of the mission organizations. In general, there is little emotional release through the mission community, because when it meets, it is task-oriented. This is not to deny that major attempts are taken to combat these two areas of sin by mission organizations that care for their younger missionaries. The problems, however, are inbuilt into the heart of the work-oriented structures. Thus, only modifications are possible.
Hence, there is a need for a paradigm shift from a work-oriented mission structure to that of an order or a community drawn together and propelled into the world by their devotion to God not their desire for results. Such a model is evidenced in the older Catholic orders where mission was the fruit of the devotional life not just a task to be completed. A Protestant order will celebrate lifestyles that enable the individuals and allow for freedom in the community. The centrality of a Christ-focused community rather than centrality of administration is essential; the former is life-oriented while the latter remains task-oriented. An order, much like the Gospel, is a response to a fractured relationship. Where Christ came to connect God and man, an order seeks to remind the world of Christ’s relevancy. Consequently, an order is nothing more than a group of people united by their devotion to Christ, who come together around a Kingdom value system that they communally celebrate in order to allow mission to become a natural expression of their life.
Viv, his Brazilian wife, Ieda, and their three children seek to follow Christ among the poor. Viv is the International Director of Urban Leadership Foundation. Viv’s prophetic ministry has involved him in pioneering churches in slums of Manila, teams in South Asia, and in the favelas of Latin America. God has used him to catalyze several SERVANTS-style missions from different countries.