Missional
church-next
23/09/08 09:06
i've been reading many posts of late concerning the labels emergent and emerging when used to describe the church. because i have discussed this somewhat before, and since it is not totally germane to today's thoughts, i would suggest if you're not familiar with the terms you could go here and here and here.
for our purposes today, i would only say that with the pending death of christendom, and the final disintegration of the christian consensus as the world view of the west, the church (at least the protestant version of it) is in steep transition, some would even say decline.
but here's the question: transition to what?
some would say that the emergent church is the new church emerging, the church-next. some would argue that the missional church movement (go here) is more to the point (my sympathies lie more with these ideas), but i say that we are a far way from home, and we have miles to go before we sleep.
said another way, we simply have no idea what the new ekklesia will look like. further, this transition will take so many years that most of us will only be part of the transition and not the final result. that is, it will not be complete in our life time.
having said that, notice just some of the profound movement:
VIEW OF GOD
sovereign & immutable ----------> open & responsive to us
VIEW OF CHURCH
solid & institutional -------------> fluid & a movement
CHURCH GROWTH
large is better ------------------> small is a must
VIEW OF THE BIBLE
inerrant & scientific -------------> authoritative & non-scientific
VIEW OF ATONEMENT
substitutionary & victorious -------> representative & identification
VIEW OF EVANGELISM
programatic -------------------> relational
and all of this in just the last few years...the times they are a changin'
missional cost
08/09/08 09:38
made at wordle
in today's rapid and radical movement of culture away from all things institutional, which includes christendom as it is expressed in the institutional church, the call is clear for us to find a new missional movement within the community of the faithful -- a new way to follow the christ. (and by "us" i mean those not on the cutting edge, but rather those locked in the remnants of christendom, sometimes called the marginalized)
the rub here is that we are either paralyzed with fear because christendom was our plausibility structure and now we are left adrift cognitively (and sociologically), or we understand the it's a new day but we grieve so deeply for christendom (read nostalgia) that we are paralyzed by confusion over the next step.
there are no easy answers here, believe me. perhaps the best we can do is to move beyond fear toward some sort of faith. (da? ya think?)
now what would this faith look like?
= it would look beyond the past
= it would be willing to put everything on the table, including both doctrine & practice
= it would be willing to act courageously, even at the risk of going out of business (this is happening anyway, so what is there to loose?)
= it would mean we would have to become part of the community that we desire to reach and not a shrinking island of benign neglect