Being A Missional Gospel For The Institutional Church?
For some time now it has been a fashion amongst Christian futurists of a low-church bent to talk about the demise of the institutional church. So, it’s not surprising that a number of writers in the emerging/missional camp have taken this sort of line, sometimes being so bold as to name a timeframe – 30 […]
For some time now it has been a fashion amongst Christian futurists of a low-church bent to talk about the demise of the institutional church. So, it’s not surprising that a number of writers in the emerging/missional camp have taken this sort of line, sometimes being so bold as to name a timeframe – 30 years being the current figure picked from the ether. I guess if one is trying to market a book or seminar based on radical and urgent moment we apparently live in, then choosing a number that sits well within the lifetime of one’s target audience would make sense.
Not that we don’t need radical changes in how we do church; but maybe we don’t need to gloat about the death of a failed ecclesiological culture quite so loudly and arrogantly?
It’s a thought that came to mind repeatedly while reading Charles Taylor’s recent piece in the NYRB, A Different Kind of Courage. Taylor reviews Jonathan Lear’s book, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, a work that does not directly address the question of church structure at all, but does address the challenges and struggles faced by those who see their culture destroyed by social change.
Of course, this is a massive issue for many in our world today – not just those within the church.
But maybe, those of us proclaiming new ways of expressing our faith, new ways of engaging with our world could pause a little more often to count the cost for those who are struggling to adapt. It’s all to easy, when we hear the accusations from those who do not understand our project, to miss the pain in their voices. Globalisation, contingency, postmodernism, multiculturalism – these have never not been a part of my life and I’ve chosen them as much as they’ve chosen me. But for many, these are now being forced upon them, not by choice and there is a fight to adapt.
Perhaps instead of merrily announcing the immenent demise of the institutional church, celebrating the death of that culture, we should instead be asking ourselves how we are “good news,” or “gospel” to those who are still God’s people within those structures?
