The contribution of this case study to the greater church and her ministry is that it provides a long term perspective of the formation of a missional church within a unique marginalized context. Here the marginalizing factors are poverty, addictions, and mental health challenges. It is a story of a small Canadian Church in a hurting place that is being transformed by and with the marginalized people in its context, all the while being dependent upon the grace of God and all of the partners God provides for its own existence. Yet, this story challenges traditional ecclesiology with regard to the expectation of self-sufficiency and self-sustainability. It affirms the importance of learning from others in our family of churches through documents such as Transformed and Transforming. The Apostle Paul describes it in 2 Corinthians 12:9 “But he (the Lord) said to me ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’” It is a story that affirms and challenges traditional ecclesiology. This is a story of dependency on the grace of God. It was then that a journey of transformation began. I accepted the “Call” to serve as its Pastor in June of 2006. With the support of Classis Ontario a specialized Interim Minister was hired for the purpose of discerning whether the church could be revitalized. In the aftermath of successive short-term pastorates which ended badly and included an exodus of members in 2005, amid the further economic decline of a once prosperous manufacturing city of 50,000 people, the ministry then 26-years-old was in crisis. Located among the marginalized of society on the southeast side of the city of Welland, Ontario, Canada, is 36-year-old Christ Community Church. God called me homeward, near to the place of my birth and upbringing, to find it. The project concludes that we must not collapse these two terms into one another, but rather hold them as distinctive and yet interdependent facets of the church’s calling.Ībstract Somewhere beyond trying harder, and just before giving up, there is a sacred place of grace to be discovered, personally and corporately. The former places the emphasis on mission, and the latter puts its focus on a form of gathered worship. Both models have validity and can learn from each other. The central argument is that these two approaches represent poles which ought to be held together in tension. This is contrasted with the 'inside out' approach, where the locus of mission is the gathered liturgical assembly. The first example is termed 'outside out', the model of mid-sized, Mission Shaped Communities. It then takes two practical approaches to Missional church worship and critiques them in the light of Missional theology, and each another.

The project begins by exploring an outline of missio Dei and Missional ecclesiology, making use of theological and missiological scholarship from the past century. Therefore it is important to understand how they ought to interrelate, and how this relationship might be worked out in practice. In church many settings, the relationship between worship and mission remains unclear and often the two can appear to be in conflict, or the agenda for one can consume the other. This King's College London dissertation (for MA in Contemporary Worship) aims to explore how Missional Church theology might impact the practice of Christian worship.

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