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Book review: On Mission with Jesus: Changing the default setting of the Church by Graham Cray

by
19 July 2024

John Pritchard reviews a forceful bid to change church self-perception

GRAHAM CRAY has written the book that he, more than anyone else, has the responsibility and experience to write. As the prime mover behind the 2004 report Mission-shaped Church, and national leader of the Fresh Expressions movement, he knows the territory of mission very well indeed. As a former theological-college principal, teacher, and writer, he has the theological acumen to reflect seriously on many years of engagement with the nature of mission.

He says that it is a book of missional diplomacy to help practitioners and permission-givers to understand one another, but it could equally be described as a heartfelt plea to change the default setting of Anglicanism from one in which mission is simply one of the tasks of the Church to one in which mission is the very nature of the Church. Or, to be more specific, where the Church’s self-understanding is that it is a community of disciples on mission with Jesus.

The author is well-known as a cultural commentator analysing post-modernity and his preferred “liquid modernity”. He speaks from deep immersion in contemporary youth culture. Here, however, he takes the conversation between these insights and the abiding wisdom of scripture to a deeper level, so that practitioners at all levels can have firm theological foundations for their commitment to mission as the core nature of the Church.

Cray structures the book around essential characteristics of a church on mission with Jesus. Such churches will know that they are sharing in the mission of God, making disciples, following the Spirit, shaping the Church itself, anticipating the future, joining the family business, becoming a pilgrim people, and recognising Jesus in the Church. This is the way in which a church becomes a “Jesus on mission”-shaped church.

All these characteristics are explored with biblical thoroughness and amply supported by pertinent quotations from the author’s wide reading on mission and the Church. It is not a “how-to-do-it” book, but a “how-to-see-it” book. From that basic re-set of the Church’s mind might come release from the long captivity of being a transactional Church, giving people what they want, to a transformational Church, reflecting the priorities of Jesus.

The book is strong on incarnational and Trinitarian theology and — surprisingly for an Evangelical writer — less strong on the cross and resurrection as core descriptors of the Church as a community of disciples following Jesus in mission. Doubtless other readers might want more emphasis on the formative power of tradition or a closer critique of the Church from other social sciences apart from sociology.

Nevertheless, the overriding impact of this book is its forceful bid to jolt the Church out of its Christendom or even post-Christendom mind-set, and to rediscover the profound simplicity of being a movement following Jesus in what he is always doing in the power of the Spirit.

There is a wealth of missiological wisdom here, absorbed, sorted and made available to us in ways that could be radically re-orientating for the Church. Cray recognises how hard it is to reimagine an entire way of perceiving a revered institution, but he has offered the Church a compelling opportunity to regroup around a simple, profound purpose — to be a community of disciples on mission with Jesus.

The Rt Revd John Pritchard is a former Bishop of Oxford.


On Mission with Jesus: Changing the default setting of the Church
Graham Cray
Canterbury Press £18.99
(978-1-78622-541-2)
Church Times Bookshop £15.19

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