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.

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.

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

No Real Sense of the Missional Conversation

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.

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

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