| Intro - Missional Church |
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I have more or less finished a walk through of this new title from Alan Roxburgh and Scott Boren. It was worth the read. There isn't a lot new here, but the book pulls together some significant thought and practice. I've been trying to decide whether to write a formal review or just post some excerpts. The following is a summary of page 76-77. "Most of us know the stats - we don't have to repeat here the losses shaping denominations and the aging of the church. Church systems engage the missional conversation becasue they are scared and looking for a lifeline. Across the continent people are telling us that their church organizations are approaching a tipping point where local churches won't be able to afford full-time, seminary trained pastors. The confusion, stress and anxiety are high among full time leaders... "Some counter this data from the perspective of the megachurch phenomenon. There are more prominent churches of 5,000, 10,000 etc which might lead us to think the church is playing a MORE significant role in the culture.. But you can't build a future on this model. Just from the perspective of leadership, these megachurches are created by people with leadership gifts that few have. To see this as an ‘answer" is to tell 98 percent of churches and their leaders that they have no future. But the issue is not .. how many churches are shutting down.. we are in a new world and the church as we have known it has to become very different in order to journey to this new place. "The philosopher Charles Taylor calls ours a 'secular age,' in which ‘our present dondition is to say that many people are happy living for goals which are purely immanent..' People's primary concerns are for success in this life - they rarely ask questions about the transcendent. At the same time, they are feeling terribly insecure .. Witness the recent financial crisis and the stress created.. People go to church looking for words of security and a sanctuary.. but this is the problem. Churches give people what they want: [an escape] and comfort. The church is called to be what people really need: a foretaste of God's new creation, a movement of people who change hte world, not escape it. "In the midst of all this transition a missional church is formeed by people who are starting to own thaty they are no longer living in a safe place.. Just as Dorothy had to learn new skills to navigate in Oz, we too must learn new skills to be missionaries in this new place." Ok, nothing new here -- but it's a good summary of the challenges we face. Elsewhere, just over a year ago, Scott Sunquist wrote a paper summarizing the challenges from the perspective of a Seminary. Scott writes, ".. we need to learn to speak local dialects and act more like missionaries to the pluralistic, hedonistic, pagan late antiquity where we find ourselves today. Let me put it even stronger. We are taking students out of the world and teaching them a foreign culture: 1950s church culture.. "Seminary students accurately sense something that many faculty have not yet admitted: we need a theology of social and religious engagement more than a systematic and philosophical theology that comes out of western Christendom. "When younger students come to seminary, they sing different songs..and they are reading different books... like Resident Aliens, and they know about emergent, house church, small group and missional literature. They are reading about the encounter of Jesus with the post-Christian, post modern and largely antagonistic world of the West. Why do they read Hauerwas rather than Niebuhr? Why the attraction to Orthodoxy and monasticism today? Simply put, these younger students have been raised in a culture antagonistic to, or ignorant of the Gospel and so they think more like the early church or the radical reformers (like Anabaptists) than like us who came out of the magisterial reform." His paper is HERE.
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