Sublime

The “ages” triad is the movement from what Taylor calls the ancien régime to the age of mobilization to the age of authenticity.

we hear him calling the church to locate itself at the midpoint of various polarities,

The second assumption is that leaders of the people of God in every era and cultural context are continually called, through the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit, to discern and appraise their congregation’s practices and call to missional responsibilities.

But he did challenge some of the core propensities of modernity. To give Rosa Charles Taylor’s language, as we have done with Barth, he saw that conceding to the closed structures and spins of the immanent frame couldn’t release us from the alienation that modernity produces.10 The immanent frame needed to be opened.

The pastor’s job was to give order and protection from the constant flood of enchantment. It was a world drowning with meaning because it was a world soaked in divine action.

themselves at or near the center of North American society. 2. Beginning in the mid-1960s that period came to an abrupt halt. The unraveling had begun and it produced increasing levels of anxiety. The churches engaged in more than fifty years of efforts at church growth, health, and renewal, all to get back to their normative location at the center

“Euro-tribal churches

In contemporary Christian parlance, we would call these people “missionaries” or, if they don’t travel too far from home, “church planters.”77 This too is clearly an authoritative role of Christian leadership that includes teaching doctrine to adult men and women, but it was not designed to be an office of local, ongoing church administration and i