Ferment in the Local

The book Joining God, Remaking the Church, Changing the World, written in 2015, responds to the question of what was involved in being a missional church.

Anxieties around Survival Remain

The Spirit invites us to do something that few families, ethnic or affinity groups would choose: cross boundaries and enter the lives of others who are different and have their own stories, practices and traditions.

Leaders want to know how to become more locally focused in the hope that this will make their churches more relevant or effective.

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.

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

the missional conversation that Newbigin shaped needs to be reimagined from outside the logic of anxiety, survival, or techniques of change.

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