Giving the Church

Not giving to the church, but giving the church.

I would like to recommend that you purchase and read Michael Moynagh’s Giving the Church: The Christian Community through the Looking Glass of Generosity. Published in England by SCM, this is a book with an outward, mission-shaped vision of the church. The church as gift to the community. Look at your budget as you read (or read about) Moynagh’s book, and he is the leading thinker in the Fresh Expressions movement.

His book is an alternative to, or a reframing of, the standard models of the church:

Church as institution

Church as mystical communion

Church as sacrament

Church as herald

Church as servant

Church as community of disciples

I’d add church as performance, and church as growth machine

Moynagh’s could be seen as Church as gift

As a blogger and Substacker I have been sent mss and books for review. And at times publishers send me the edited ms for an endorsement. I was sent this book to endorse. Here’s how it went: Who is this author? (I’m being honest. I didn’t know him.) But I had been in contact with his publisher/editor, and I liked that person. So I opened up the PDF and began to read… and this is how it goes sometimes. I was interested and then more interested and then I couldn’t put it down and I sent in a blurb. On the back cover this is what you find above my name: “Moynagh offers to pastors and professors alike an ecclesiology with its feet on the ground and its heart-shaped by a God who loves the world.” And the God who loves, gives.

Churches are loved by God. They are called to love God. Those who love God are to love others, including one’s community. What happens when a church understands itself, or morphs into understanding itself, as a gift to the community.

A story. A student of mine, from the very beginning of my career, became a pastor in the northern suburbs. His church grew and grew. It grew enough that they decided they wanted to build a building for the church. At the heart of their decision to build a building, because it was at the heart of the church’s self-identity, was this question: what can we do for you? They once asked this question of the local school board. The school board answered the question by saying they have a school out of code and need help bringing it into code. So the church used its resources and human bodies to work on the school for a year or two. So, when they built their building it was shaped for the good of the community. Giving the church is Moynagh’s title.

The theme is generosity, and John Barclay’s great books about grace and gift are all over this book. In fact, John endorses it. The ecclesiology of this book is a gift-based expression of church.

His points:

generosity starts by paying attention;
generosity demands that the gift be appropriate to the receiver;
a gift is not a gift unless it is released;
giving is reciprocal;
giving strengthens human relationships;
gifts change the people involved.

A very interesting chp in this book is how generosity and mission reshape the four classical “marks” of the church. In other words, what does generosity do to one, to holy, to catholic, and to apostolic? The author knows his theology, and he’s part of the Greenhouse movement in England. The entire book reframes and reforms church through the lens of generosity. It’s missional in a theological, grace-and-gift-shaped manner. It avoids the dodgy stuff one at times sees in missional theologies, but the theme runs straight through the book: giving the church.

It's an eccesiology book; one for pastors and leaders and classrooms; and it will set off a hundred conversations in need of conversation.