The executive committee has endorsed plans for a wide-ranging Alliance study on mission

The decision came after the Alliance's department of theology brought together an international group of missiologists to design the study.

"We are servants and co-workers in God's mission (the missio dei) of creation and redemption, a mission entrusted to us as gift and task, bringing a message of healing and wholeness to a divided world," the group said.

"Yet the integrity of our mission is threatened by the situation of global injustice and ecological destruction which we highlighted in Debrecen. We believe that the gospel frees us to respond in new and creative ways to these challenges..."

"In our life in koinonia, in the relationships which our churches maintain with one another, in the many programmes and mission projects of our congregations and churches, in our cultural and religious plurality, we see signs of God's reign and indicative directions of where we should be going," they said. "This is the lived mission of the people of God."

The promise that all may have life in fullness "suggests a direction for our re-understanding of mission in the context of the injustices of the global market and ecological destruction. This is the hope that draws us towards Accra."

The mission study advisory group

Participants in the meeting included Dora Canales Nuñez (Chile), Maitland Evans (Jamaica and the Cayman Islands), Kai Funkschmidt (Germany and the UK), Carlos Ham (Cuba), Milton Jeganathan (India), Christine Lienemann (Switzerland), and Philip Wickeri (USA).

Alliance staff also took part in the consultation, which was held in Geneva at the beginning of July.

The group proposed three foci for the study:

Mission in the context of the global market place;
Mission and the fullness of life;
Mission in paradox: life out of death.

A key image in their reflections was the "household of life" - a gift from God, but now in disorder and in need of rebuilding and repair.

"I found the meeting very intense. I cannot remember ever having spent three days with twelve people, no two of them of the same nationality! In the end I thought it showed that WARC is not just after flashy new themes. Sometimes challenges are given up because they cannot be solved - but they do not go away. I think that economic injustice is such a theme - not nearly as popular a theme in the church as it was in the 1970s and 80s, but as much an injustice now as it was then."

Kai Funkschmidt

"In our image of household, we make no distinction between private and public spheres, between what goes on inside and outside the house, between the centre and the margins of the world," the group said.

"We must ensure that there is a place for all people with all of their differences within the household... We must welcome all women and men around a common table in eucharistic fellowship, just as we have been welcomed by Christ... We must tend to the garden, for mission is concerned with the world of nature and the orders of creation. A household (oikos) missiology embraces the economy, the ecology and the ecumenical world, and brings us together in movements of resistance and dialogue..."

"An understanding of mission and koinonia in the household of life emerges "from below', and is therefore more a Galilee- than a Jerusalem-centred missiology. It takes into account the perspective of the listener as well as the speaker as the subject of mission. It must be involved in multireligious conversations, for there are different, conflicting and even contradictory visions of the household..."

Any new understanding of mission will need development "through the strengthening of missiological reflection of all in each place," they said.

"We begin our understanding of mission with our contexts, but our reading of the Bible helps us to understand the kairos and the signs of the times. There is continuing interaction between text and context, time and place in mission, as we engage one another, struggle for justice and try to reorder the household of life."

"We proceed... in a spirit of semper reformanda, trusting that God will continue to guide us into a fuller understanding of mission."

"Mission was for us a vision that unites. We were from different continents - and worlds apart in some respects - we were working in different languages and with different understandings of the Reformed tradition, but we were brought together - made one in Christ - by our common calling. This is what inspires me about the Alliance, and it is why the work that our churches can do together is so very important for the ecumenical movement today."

Philip Wickeri

The executive committee agrees that the study of Reformed mission should be integrally connected to covenanting for justice in the economy and the earth, and to the general council theme. It will learn from concrete situations in the various WARC regions, and take into account youth, women's and interreligious perspectives.

Plans are to hold a series of regional consultations, followed by a global gathering to crystallize the findings into a coherent mission statement. The results will be fed into Accra and fed back into our churches.

The goal is not to produce "just another statement", but to help churches to engage in mission with fresh understanding.