This is the second post processing the recent blog posts from Andy McCullough on changes he believes are necessary for Newfrontiers to decolonise apostolic ministry (please read part one).

In his second article Decolonising Apostolic Ministry 2: Centring the local Andy makes a solid case for the importance of the local church being led by local leaders.

Christianity was never supposed to have a geographical centre, a holy city, a majority culture or language, although Empire, at times, has co-opted religious control, centred in an HQ in Constantinople, or Rome, or Canterbury. As Lamin Sanneh argued, translatability is fundamental to the gospel, because language is power.

Hierarchy, that form of government which pyramids “upwards” from the local church to an external bishopric, and ultimately to an Empire-sponsored archbishop, is a word actually derived from ieras or priest. This word entered English, and many other European languages, through a layering of spiritual authorities away from the local towards a headquarters somewhere removed from the local scene. This does not seem to have been the apostolic intention.

Quite the opposite. One of the Christian church’s great sources of resilience, right from New Testament practice, has been a centring of spiritual authority in a local body, represented primarily in the appointing of local elders.

And

The pattern that God, in his wisdom, has given, is for local churches to exercise local agency. Only the local can figure out heart-level contextualisation of the gospel. Only the local can articulate the freedom of the Spirit within an instinctive idiom. Only the local is sustainable in the longest term.

At first I wondered what Andy’s issue was because Newfrontiers has, to the best of my knowledge, always put great emphasis on the local church being led by a team of local elders. That’s one of the shared values between the different parts that make up Newfrontiers (or spheres in our terminology). Authority being rooted in the local church has also been one of the things that kept Newfrontiers away from becoming a denomination. In this regard it is much closer to a group like the FIEC. It is a confederation of autonomous churches but with a much greater emphasis on fellowship and partnership that comes about not just through geographical proximity but relational connection to apostolic ministry.

In addition the decentralizing of Newfrontiers that took place in 2011 was a massive shift away from hierarchy towards the local. It brought apostolic ministry much closer to many churches in terms of relationship. It was a wise recognition that one person could not serve, know, love, partner with all the churches in a movement of the size that Newfrontiers had become. It was a studied and determined decision that rejected becoming a denomination by centralizing and institutionalizing the relationships through a HQ on the one hand or putting too much power into one man’s hands by appointing a single charismatic (or otherwise) successor on the other.

But clearly Andy has seen something off. Although perhaps it is more accurate to say that he has not yet seen something that he thinks we should have seen by now. Perhaps the charge here is that the big bold move of decentralizing has not yet gone far enough.

For those committed to a restoration of New Testament practice, hierarchy must be among the vocabulary assigned to the trash can of history. Part of cross-cultural church planting should be local elders as soon as possible. Failure to recognise those God has given locally arises from either from ethnocentric bias or from a refusal to relinquish control. “Apostolic extension” in this sense is an unhelpful phrase – apostles do not plant new churches in order to extend their network or brand or influence into a new place, but rather to release local leaders.

I think this final sentence is probably Andy’s charge to the current crop of apostolic leaders. That the releasing of apostolic ministry that they themselves experienced has not carried on to others or that they have moved too slow because of ‘bias’ or a reluctance to ‘relinquish control’. This may be true. It’s hard to say and here’s why.

One of the things about Newfrontiers is how uneven it all is, it’s a patchwork quilt. Not every patch has been knitted in by the same person at the same speed using the same threads and so there can be a challenge to the whole that perhaps is better aimed at a part. And now that we’re ten years into the decentralized world of Newfrontiers it’s almost impossible to know what is happening in other parts. I would find it incredibly difficult to know with any accuracy at all what is really happening in any of the other spheres.

So what can I say about the part that I do know? What I do know is the frustration I have encountered has been not in a refusal to relinquish control. What we have encountered is perhaps not so much a failure to recognize apostolic ministry but a failure to apprentice or raise up apostolic ministry. We’ve been waiting for someone to emerge but we may not have done enough to take a ‘Timothy’ along in the journey and now we are wondering where they are.

I think, to borrow the language of the markets, it can be wise to spread your investments – in other words to invest in as many potential leaders as possible knowing that not all of the investments will result in the same level of return for one reason or another. We’re probably paying the price now for a failure to properly and more widely invest in leaders ten years ago distracted as we may have been by the setting up an organisation (which is Andy’s next challenge). There may well then be a recognition bias that has shown itself in a reluctance to take risks with things that seem embryonic or ‘immature’.

In other words I agree with Andy that, in the part of Newfrontiers that I can speak to, that there has been a slowness (not failure) to release local apostolic leaders (not elders) but not for the reasons Andy sees. I think we need to address other issues in order to continue to bring apostolic ministry ever more local.

In my context that means the goal is to see Swedish apostolic leaders working with Swedish church elders primarily in the Swedish language. On a personal level that means that as much as I have tried to integrate (Swedish citizen, competent in Swedish) and as much as an international church may have some use in a city like Stockholm, the goal must be to raise and release leaders that can better serve this culture and context because as Andy said:

Only the local can figure out heart-level contextualisation of the gospel. Only the local can articulate the freedom of the Spirit within an instinctive idiom. Only the local is sustainable in the longest term.