GIVING THE CHURCH is hailed on its back cover as “the most important book in decades”. That is quite a claim, not worth disputing. But it does indicate a sense that institutional Christianity in the West continues to face challenges, and here is an extended response.

Moynagh seasons his work with references to Roman Catholic theologians whom we would associate with the Second Vatican Council. Henri de Lubac, Paul McPartlan, and Hans Küng are among them. But it is Avery Dulles who provides the rationale for Giving the Church. Alongside Dulles’s six models, Moynagh asks, “Might there be a seventh, the church as gift?”

This appealed to my own Catholic outlook. But Moynagh is no convert to Catholicism. He approaches his subject with the same avoidance of any explicit acceptance of Catholic teaching as we find in the Book of Common Prayer. What we do find, however, is an extended theological case for “contextualised forms of church planting, ‘fresh expressions of church’”, which he sees as one of the most distinctive contributions of Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury.

It is perhaps worth going back to what Lord Williams said to the General Synod about Fresh Expressions in 2007. He noted that this had oddly become part of the bloodstream of the Church’s life, reminding the Synod that actually “the Church is something that happens before it’s something that is institutionally organized.”

A weakness in Giving the Church is the lack of a historical perspective on how the Church Catholic has experienced the subversion of its power and consequently, not without struggle, received the fresh expression of beauty and true identity. We could identify St Catherine of Siena, John Wyclif, St Thérèse of Lisieux, and Prior Roger of Taizé as instruments of this renewal. When the historical perspective is overlooked, the danger is that subversion rather than the beauty of holiness can become the goal of all our efforts.

The Archbishop went on to warn that he was thinking of new expressions of the Church’s life as the kerygma, the gospel proclamation that gathers people around Jesus Christ, “not a series of scattered experiments, not a series of enterprises in religious entertainment, not, God forbid, a kind of dumbing down of the historic faith and its requirements so that more people may get vaguely interested”.

To be fair, Moynagh is well-aware of the fallibility of the Church. This is evident in how he sets out the first part of the book, looking at the Church’s identity as gift. In these five chapters, he asks whether the Church is called to give, what the gift is, how attractive and available it is, and whether it is for everyone.

These are all fundamental questions. In tackling them, Moynagh demonstrates the value of exploring gift as characteristic of the Church’s character and behaviour. The demonstration is cumulative rather than deductive: one layer of exploration added above another.

The impact is at times overwhelming. It was often tempting to put the book down and sort out one’s response to a statement. “A referee is essential to a soccer match but is not the essence of the game” leads to the claim that “word, sacraments, ministry and disciplines are not the essence of the church,” but that does not mean that they are inessential. In that assertion, the question what we mean by sacramentality leaps off the page.

The second part of the book explores the Church’s self-giving. This includes interesting explorations of reciprocity, liberation, conversationality, and eucharistic spirituality. It was fascinating to note how the absence of attention to sacred matter follows from a lack of eschatological perspective. In the Church’s life, there seemed to be no routine encounter of the intersection between eternity and time and space.

Moynagh has given us much to think about in this book. But the words that tumble off the page of an exploratory book such as this are, I often find, an elaboration of something that the people of God might ordinarily hear in their worship week by week. An old phrase that I recall from a Eucharistic Prayer sums up for me what Moynagh is getting at. It asks that Jesus Christ, our High Priest, may make of us an everlasting gift to God the Father. Enough said.

Dr Martin Warner is the Bishop of Chichester.

Giving the Church: The Christian community through the looking glass of generosity
Michael Moynagh
SCM Press £45
978-0-334-06612-5
Church Times Bookshop £36