Essay
Received for the life of the world
Near the end of Holy Communion, after the Scriptures have been read, the Creed confessed, prayers offered, gifts brought, thanksgiving made, and the Body and Blood of Christ received, the congregation asks the Father to “send us out to do the work you have given us to do”. The blessing follows, and then the deacon or priest dismisses the people into the world in the power of the Holy Spirit (Book of Common Prayer, 137–138).
These words do more than bring the service to an orderly conclusion. The congregation does not simply leave because the liturgy is over. Having received the gifts of God, the people are sent with them. They go in the peace of Christ, under the blessing of God, and in the power of the Spirit, to undertake work that is itself received as a gift and calling. The dismissal therefore gathers the movement of Anglican worship into a remarkably compact form: God acts, the Church receives and gives thanks, and the people are sent.
This is also the movement of the Anglican life considered throughout this series. The faith once received is judged and nourished by Scripture in the Church; the Word becomes the faith we pray; common prayer brings us to the grace we receive in Baptism and Holy Communion; and that sacramental Body becomes a people ordered for faithfulness. Yet none of these gifts is given so that the Church may become a more complete religious world unto herself. The Word, prayer, sacraments, and ministry gather and form a people who are then sent into the world God loves.
The Eastern Orthodox priest and theologian Alexander Schmemann describes this movement with particular force. The Church is called out of the world not because creation is spiritually empty or beyond God’s concern, but so that the world may be received again as God’s gift and offered in thanksgiving through Christ. In the Eucharist, the Church is given a foretaste of the Kingdom and becomes more fully what she is. She then returns to ordinary time bearing the joy and peace she has received. Mission is not an activity added after worship, as though the Church first attended to God and then turned to something more practical. The eucharistic gathering itself opens outward, returning a people renewed in Christ to the world he created and came to redeem (For the Life of the World).
This does not make worship merely instrumental. The proper end of common prayer is communion with God and the glorification of God, not the production of useful citizens or successful religious programs. The Church does not celebrate the Eucharist simply to motivate service. Nevertheless, communion with the self-giving Christ cannot terminate in religious self-enclosure. The people who receive his life are drawn into his love for the world. In Schmemann’s terms, the “time of mission” begins as the Church leaves the feast and enters again the ordinary places in which human beings live, work, suffer, rejoice, and hope.
Christian mission begins, however, before the Church is sent. It begins in God. On the evening of the resurrection, Jesus comes to disciples gathered behind locked doors, speaks peace, and shows them the wounds of his crucifixion. He then says, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you”, and breathes the Holy Spirit upon them (John 20:19–23[1], NRSV). The order matters. Christ’s peace and accomplished sacrifice precede the disciples’ work, and the Spirit’s power makes their witness possible. The Church is not sent to extend its own influence, defend its importance, or manufacture a Kingdom that God could not establish without it. She is given a share in the mission of the Son, bearing witness to what God has done in Christ.
That witness necessarily includes speech. St Peter describes the Church as a priestly and holy people belonging to God so that we may “proclaim the mighty acts” of the one who called us from darkness into light (1 Peter 2:9–12[2]). The Church has received news: that Jesus Christ has died, is risen, reigns, forgives sins, and will make all things new. Loving action cannot make that news unnecessary. Christians must be prepared to name the Lord whose mercy they have received, to invite others to trust him, and to teach the faith that he entrusted to his Church.
This is why evangelism and catechesis belong together. Christ commands his disciples to make disciples, baptize them, and teach them to obey all that he has commanded (Matthew 28:18–20[3]). Handing on the faith means speaking to those who have not yet received it, but it also means forming those who have been baptized into its worship, doctrine, obedience, and hope. A Church that seeks decisions without formation has not fulfilled Christ’s command. Neither has a Church that carefully instructs its own children while losing any expectation that new people might hear and receive the Gospel.
Words alone, however, can be contradicted by the people who speak them. Peter joins proclamation to conduct that neighbors can see. The missionary bishop and theologian Lesslie Newbigin similarly argues that mission cannot be divided neatly into word and deed. The Gospel is announced in speech, embodied in acts of mercy and obedience, and made publicly intelligible in the new common life Christ creates. His description of the congregation as a “hermeneutic of the Gospel” means, in simpler terms, that a Christian community helps the world understand its message by becoming a visible interpretation of it. A reconciled people cannot prove the Gospel by achieving moral perfection, but its worship, mutual belonging, truthfulness, forgiveness, and care can make the character of Christ more recognizable—or, when these are absent, obscure the message it proclaims (The Gospel in a Pluralist Society).
The Prayer Book’s General Thanksgiving holds these dimensions together. It gives thanks for creation and preservation, for the blessings of this life, and above all for God’s love in the redemption of the world, the means of grace, and the hope of glory. It then asks that gratitude may bear fruit, so that we may show God’s praise “not only with our lips, but in our lives”, giving ourselves to his service and walking before him in holiness and righteousness (Book of Common Prayer, 25–26). Christian holiness is not a private refinement undertaken apart from mission. A people formed in truthfulness, repentance, fidelity, hospitality, generosity, and patient love offers a public witness to the Kingdom it confesses.
For the same reason, service cannot be reduced to a useful supplement to proclamation. The Anglican Communion’s Five Marks of Mission place the proclamation of the Kingdom and the teaching and nurture of believers alongside loving service, the transformation of unjust structures and pursuit of reconciliation, and the care of creation. The framework is not an exhaustive theology of mission, but it makes an essential point: the mission of the Church is the mission of Christ. The Lord who announced the Kingdom also healed the sick, received those pushed to the edges of society, confronted oppressive power, reconciled enemies, and exercised his authority through self-giving love. Christian testimony and Christian service become distorted when either is separated from that one Lord.
Most Christians live this calling not in a category called “mission” but in homes, neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, institutions, friendships, and civic communities. The post-Communion prayer describes these varied vocations as work entrusted by God. That work will differ according to circumstance. It may include teaching, making, healing, studying, administering, cultivating, parenting, befriending, advocating, or caring for someone whose need interrupts our plans. These actions do not become Christian merely by being performed by Christians or described with religious language. They become occasions of faithfulness as they are received under Christ’s lordship, directed toward their proper goods, offered in love, and joined to a willingness to speak truthfully of the hope that animates them.
This is part of what it means to institute the Church in the world. The goal is not to make every school, household, business, charity, or civic body into a substitute for the Church. Nor is it to make ordinary work appear holy by covering it with ecclesiastical forms. Christians are sent to inhabit these places truthfully as parts of the creation Christ claims, bearing into them habits learned through Scripture, prayer, repentance, sacrament, and common life. The parish gathers people from these varied callings, brings them again under the Word, nourishes them at the Table, and sends them back. Ordained ministers serve this mission not by undertaking it in place of the laity, but by equipping the whole Body for the work God has given it.
The language of handing on therefore guards against two corresponding failures. A Church can preserve its inheritance so anxiously that the faith becomes an artifact: carefully protected, intelligible chiefly to insiders, and detached from any expectation that it will be received as good news. It can also pursue relevance so anxiously that the Gospel becomes a product, continually adjusted to secure attention, approval, or institutional survival. The first treats the preservation of inherited forms as the measure of faithfulness; the second treats cultural approval and institutional survival as the measure of mission.
St Paul offers another way. He reminds the Corinthians of the Gospel they received, in which they stand and through which they are being saved: that Christ died for our sins, was buried, was raised according to the Scriptures, and appeared to his witnesses (1 Corinthians 15:1–5[4]). This living Gospel can be translated without being replaced, taught without being possessed, and carried into new circumstances without becoming whatever those circumstances already find plausible. Its faithful transmission requires confidence and humility: confidence that Christ remains Lord and humility because neither the message nor its fruit belongs ultimately to us.
At the end of the Eucharist, then, the Church does not congratulate herself for having guarded the tradition or completed her religious obligations. She gives thanks for gifts she could never provide for herself. She asks to be sent to work she did not choose alone. She receives the blessing of the God whose mission precedes and sustains her, and she goes into the world in the power of the Spirit. What we have received is not ours to invent, and it is not ours to keep. It is given, received, and entrusted to us for the life of the world.