Joining God in the Great Unraveling

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

Anxieties around Survival Remain

It’s as if a few more “add-on” tactics can make everything different.

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.

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.”

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.

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

No Real Sense of the Missional Conversation

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