Joining God in the Great Unraveling

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.

Ferment in the Local

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.

Fabrications are not suited to the life of faith. They don’t wear well.

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.

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.

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

Anxieties around Survival Remain