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Anvil Volume 25 Number 2 2008

Missional Discipleship: following Christ the Lord in a Multi-faith Society

Richard J Sudworth

Richard Sudworth provides two scenarios that propose a challenge to Christian discipleship in our multi-faith context and to the nature of mission at a time of increasing suspicion of claims to religious exclusivism. Drawing on the work of Michael Barnes, he outlines a model for dialogue with other faiths that provides a way forward for discipleship which affirms both the missionary nature of the Christian faith and the need for vulnerable and open encounters with the religious other.

Richard Sudworth is a Church Mission Society mission partner based at St Christopher's Springfield, a Muslim-majority parish in Birmingham. Richard works for the Faith to Faith consultancy providing training and resourcing for an engagement with other faiths and is studying for a PhD in political theology at Heythrop College, University of London. He is the author of Distinctly Welcoming: Christian Presence in a Multifaith Society, Scripture Union, Milton Keynes 2007.

From Everywhere to Everywhere, From Nairobi to Manchester

Paula Hollingsworth and Cyprian Yobera

Paula Hollingsworth travelled to inner-city Manchester to interview Cyprian Yobera, an Anglican priest from Kenya who for the past six years has been living and working with his family in one of the most deprived areas in England as part of the Church Mission Society's Everywhere to Everywhere initiative. He describes what it meant for them to encounter such a foreign culture and develop a 'Church on the Streets' approach to mission that, though largely pre-evangelistic, has begun to bring gospelshaped change to the estate. He explains how one has to belong to a community in order truly to be God’s salt and light there, and outlines the five-strands of Message, Messenger, Milieu, Method and Mark of 'Lifestyle Evangelism', which guide their engagement with their context.

Paula Hollingsworth is a parish priest in the Diocese of Leicester. She has previously worked in an inner city parish in Birmingham and in the Church Mission Society's former training college in Selly Oak, Birmingham. She is a member of the Anvil editorial board.

Cyprian Yobera is a priest of the Anglican Church in Kenya. He was Director of Kenya Youth for Christ, and then priest in charge of youth work at All Saints Cathedral, Nairobi. He and his family came to Harpurhey in 2002 to work as fulltime CMS mission partners with the Eden Project and wider community development within this needy part of Manchester.

Looking Forward to Lambeth

Stuart Buchanan

One of the two main themes of the 2008 Lambeth Conference is equipping bishops as leaders in mission. In preparation for this, the Anglican Communion Office circulated a questionnaire seeking information on the nature of mission and evangelism within Provinces, as well as on the particular challenges they face and the lessons they are learning. Stuart Buchanan here gives an overview of the responses received. These paint a hugely diverse picture, yet one through which various common threads can be seen to run. In the face of such varied contexts faced by the Communion today, he begins by noting the irony that the very first Lambeth Conference was itself called as a result of concerns about appropriate local inculturation of the gospel and the risks of syncretism in mission which were little different in principle from those we face today.

Stuart Buchanan is a Research and Administrative Assistant at the Anglican Communion Office.

No-one can be forgotten in God's Kingdom

Rowan Williams

The Archbishop of Canterbury gave this address at the 'Towards Effective Anglican Mission' (TEAM) Conference that took place in South Africa in March 2007, with around 400 development practitioners, clergy and lay people from 33 of the Anglican Communion's 38 provinces. Focusing first on the Old Testament's repeated admonition to 'know the Lord' and its close association with fairness for the poor, and then on the New Testament promise of becoming a renewed people of God, who gather at Christ's invitation, he reflects on the Pauline teaching 'where one suffers all suffer'. He argues that the prosperous are also deprived and dehumanised by global injustice, and concludes that one way of understanding mission is for the churches 'to make the difference that only they can make'.

Rowan Williams is the Archbishop of Canterbury.

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