Re Mission

Paul Fromont muses on the Prodigal Kiwi blog:

If the church according to St. Paul is the "new creation"; if Lesslie Newbigin has emphatically said, “the Church is the hermeneutic of the Gospel ” and as Andrew [Perriman] writes, “The church is the medium of its message”, what is the actual on-the-ground message that the church in the West largely conveys? Or, perhaps more to the point, what are the messages (pl) the church (and churches) conveys, and to what degree are these both hermeneutically and credibly aligned to the gospel and yet also critiqued and challenged by God’s “good news” embodied and enacted in Jesus of Nazareth, by means of the filling of the Spirit…? And, for that matter, is it actually possible for the church to get out of the way of the unfolding drama of God’s purposes for all of creation?

And while we're mentioning Andrew Perriman, here's some notes about his 2007 book (which I've only just caught up on - it came out in the interim between my leaving OC Books and arriving at National Mission)

Re:Mission: Biblical Mission for a Post-Biblical Church was published by Paternoster in their ‘Faith in an Emerging Culture’ series. The book builds on the argument of The Coming of the Son of Man but broadens the scope of its historical-realist narrative to embrace an understanding of ‘mission’ that arises out of the summons to Abraham to be the progenitor of a creational microcosm, a world-within-a-world, an authentic humanity.

The green-tinged picture of an escalator on the cover alludes to Jesus’ suggestive remark to Nathanael about the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of man. To Perriman’s mind it is an image that captures marvellously the intersection of the Bible’s two defining narratives: one about the vocation of a people to recover the original blessing as God’s new creation amid the nations and cultures of the world; the other about the rescue of that people through the suffering and vindication of the Son of man and the community that associates itself with him during a period of eschatological crisis. It is out of that clash of stories that we must fashion a sense of identity and purpose for the post-Christendom era.

Alan Roxburgh talks

Alan Roxburgh will be in New Zealand soon, but for those who may not be able to get to his talks, here's a way to catch up with what this missional speaker has to say. The Montreal Diocesan Theological College has put half a dozen or so of Alan's talks (from Sept this year) online. They can be downloaded as mp3s or listened to online.

Either way these are worth checking out. Paul Fromont says, Al is one of the Western churches foremost missiologist/theologians. He brings real intellectual grunt, breadth, experience, a network of diverse conversations, and great communication skills to the table. All are in evidence in the audio recordings of the talks.

New David Runcorn title

The Road to Growth Less Travelled: Spiritual Paths in a Missionary Church, by David Runcorn.

This is one of a wide-ranging series of booklets (all 27 pg long) from Grove Books. Part of what Runcorn is saying is that we need to be careful to challenge rather than mirror our culture, and that our very ‘irrelevance’ to the society at large may be one of our strengths.

He also explores why so many people are drifting away from churches, while still ostensibly remaining Christian. At one point he quotes Douglas John Hall: ‘the church of Christendom, so often growing in the wake of national, expansionist interests, missed [the sense of loss in the Christian life].’ ‘Christendom tried to be great, large, magnificent. It thought itself the object of God’s expansive grace. It forgot the meaning of its election to worldly responsibility. Today we are constrained by the Spirit to rediscover the possibilities of littleness.’

Paul Fromont has written four brief posts on the Prodigal Kiwi blog discussing some of the book’s points, starting here.

If you don't listen, you can't hear and if you can't hear, you cannot know.

In a kind of serendipitous morning, three posts arrived from various blogs I keep in touch with that all seemed to link together.   Maybe it's not so serendipitous given that all the writers are mission-minded in one way or another....


David Fitch wrote 
Neo-Reformed Theology is built on the same logic as evangelical theology. In fact this is also the same logic as the protestant mainline theology and for that matter the Emergent theologies. They all rely on the cultural foundations of the West and in particular the Enlightenment. And, for me, this means all of these movements will eventually fail to engage the new and changing cultures of Post-Christendom in the West for the gospel, they will fail at resisting the consumerist forces of modern American society, they will fail at transformational engagement (eventually). They will all end up repeating the fate of evangelicalism – i.e. being successful at harvesting those who are already in some way culturally inclined towards Christianity but not capable of inhabiting the new post Christendom cultures of the West for the gospel. This is why we need a third way!!

Len Hjalmarson began his post in this way:
In The Secret Message of Jesus (2006), McLaren devotes an entire chapter to contextualizing the concepts of the kingdom of God for the current generation.
Len's shorter post mostly offers a variety of ways of rethinking the way we view the kingdom, and by connection, God's mission. 

Paul Fromont, on Prodigal Kiwi(s) quotes another writer - Barry Taylor - who doesn't at first seem to be writing about mission...but is - note what he says about listening....

“…On the final day [of a two-week intensive class on Theology and Popular Music] I attempted to sketch out something of a beginning posture for the initiation of a conversation between these two elements. Posture, being the operative word, because for me, any act of theology requires a posture, an attitude, from which it springs, and for me, this is first and foremost, listening - to the other - if you don't listen, you can't hear and if you can't hear, you cannot know. All too often, in my experience, people begin with a pre-formed schema, which is then imposed over whatever it might be, and then, what fits is accepted and the bits around the edges are cut-off--negated etc. A bit of a broad dismissal of the theological enterprise I know, but I use that analogy simply to say that my approach is a bit different--I am interested in the surprising intersections that arise because of the rupture and disconnect as well as the congruity and synchronicity between various elements…”

 ...if you don't listen, you can't hear and if you can't hear, you cannot know. 

Robert Jenson on mission

“We … need to face [the] fact often spoken of but rarely acted upon: that the West is now a mission field. We can no longer count on the culture doing half our work for us. On a mission field, the church has to do its own work, and that means first of all that it has to know what is not … in the culture, that it hopes to bring to it. Which is to say: it must know and cultivate its difference from that culture. All that talk a few years ago about the world setting the agenda, about seeing where God was at work in the world and jumping in to help etc, was the last gasp of the church’s establishment in the West, of its erstwhile ability to suppose that what the culture nurtured as good had to be congruent with the good the church had to bring…” (Pp. 29-30).

This quote comes from a chapter, What is a post-Christian?, the book, Strange New Word of the Gospel: RE-Evangelizing in the Postmodern World, edited by Carl Braaton and Robert Jenson, published Eerdmans, 2002.

Paul Fromont writes: it seems to me that Jenson is critiquing a church that has nothing distinctive to say (and embody) in relation to its host culture(s); a church that lacks distinctiveness and thus public prophetic voice. A distinctive church is one that embodies and offers an alternative. Is he, to rework a statement by another contributor to the collection of essays, saying that the gospel only emerges in comparison with what is not the gospel?

In an ealier post, Fromont also quotes David Bosch on a similar topic:
“…Evangelism means enlisting people for the reign of God, liberating them from themselves, their sins, and their entanglements, so that they will be free for God and neighbour…. To win people to Jesus is to win their allegiance to God's priorities. God wills …that within us, and through our ministry also in society around us, the "fullness of Christ" be re-created, the image of God be restored in our lives and relationships…”