Joining God in the Great Unraveling

The Euro-tribal churches have reduced God to a day of the week, a building, a professional, a private moment in the day, to a thing called “evangelism” or “social action,” to “helping” and “meeting needs.”

This, in part, is why so much of the missional conversations in North America became one more version of ecclesiocentric anxiety and a clergy-focused need for control.

modernity’s wager—namely, the practical conviction that life can be lived well without God.

Modernity’s wager means that God has been made a useful element in our own agency.

Joining God further argued that these four characteristics taken

together reveal a more critical deformity driving these churches: the primacy of human agency.

ecclesiocentric: their primary concerns are about how to make their church successful; clergy centric: driven by a professionalized, ordained class from whom the congregation expects direction.

But ask church members to put down those transactional activities for simply “being with” others and these questions immediately pop up.

driven by technique (technique creates transactional methods of engaging); defaulted to methods of management where prediction and control are high values;