Fitch and Holsclaw end their book with these words.
The Kingdom now depends more on our obedience than our skills, more on our; integrity than our technique, more on what the Holy Spirit will do than anything we have figured out. It is ultimately dependent on one gospel reality: Jesus is both Saviour and Lord. Jesus is King.
The final chapter raises an important question.
How do we witness to what God has done through Jesus in a culture where people see a claim that Jesus is unique as intolerance? How can we live in a pluralistic culture without losing our identity as followers of Jesus? These are good questions.
Cultural pluralism makes anything said about God into issue of personal preference and emotive sentimentality.
Brian McLaren responds to pluralism by calling us to see God working in the world outside the church. The danger is losing the efficacy of God’s incarnation in the world through Jesus.
God is a God of justice, and his coming disrupts the status quo, exposing lies, rendering justice, intruding into our lives and reordering all things. Our witness in the world must take into account that God has come into the world in the Son and the Spirit to set the world right. This is the kingdom breaking in. This is justice. We cannot give up on this.
The Neo-Reformed group responds by championing absolute truth. This can leave us looking hard and argumentative.
Two often Christians behave as if no one from the outside would be watching. But outsiders are watching and the see the insecurity at the core of our theology. We look as if we are more interested in winning an argument than engaging those who are outside the faith who have legitimate questions.
Fitch and Holsclaw argue that we must live our daily lives knowing that Jesus is Lord. They suggest that pluralism might be God’s way for accomplishing his purposes in the world.
The time for aggressive defensiveness has passed. The posture of wielding truth against and opposing religion is over. It separates from those outside the Christian faith and prevents us from crossing boundaries.
God has come not into the world to win an argument, but to incarnationally engage a lost and fallen world by inviting all peoples to be reconciled and renewed in Christ.
Justice happens though being with people in the midst of their lives. It is intensely and simply relational.
There is some really good stuff in this chapter, but I do have a problem with the way that they use the concept of justice. Fitch and Holsclaw say that, The person may have messed up their own life. This happens quite frequently. People in this situation need mercy and compassion, but no injustice has occurred. The person may be made decisions that were perfectly sensible, but because of unforeseen circumstances, they turned out badly. This is very common. People start a business, the economy turns down and they end up losing their investment and in debt. A person chooses an occupation that pays well, but technology changes and they find themselves at the bottom of the heap. People often end up unemployed due to circumstances beyond their control. In this case, no injustice has occurred, but the people are still trapped in an impossible situation. They need mercy and compassion, not justice. Some people suffer an injustice that leaves them financially crippled. Indigenous people get their land stolen. People in business get ripped off by a business partner, or a client refuses to pay a debt. These people need justice, and they deserve justice. There are two options with in this category. The person or people who committed the injustice have disappeared, or died, or no longer have any financial resources top put the injustice right. Recognition of the injustice might be morally uplifting, but it relatively empty because there is no possibility of restitution. The victim of the injustice needs mercy and compassion. They person or people who committed the injustice can be brought to account, and they have the resource to remedy the injustice. We need a process of justice the remedies these situations. The OT model of restitution, rejuvenated by Zacchaeus is good example justice working.
Justice, especially social justice, means different things to different people.
However, they carry on using the term anyway.
There is a lot of good stuff in the chapter, but I do not consider that it has to be hung on the concept of justice.
The problem I have with using the word in this way is the concept of injustice assumes that a wrong has been done and that justice means that it needs to be put right.
If a person or group of people are in as messy situation, it is not necessarily the result of an injustice. There are three possibilities.
It follows from this break down of the various options that in most situations where people are in a mess, justice cannot help them much. What they need is mercy and compassion. They people to stand alongside them, understand their pain and help them to escape from their troubled situation. This is something that Christians should be really good at doing. Standing and sharing with people in trouble should be bread and butter to Christians.
I do not see any need to hang all these situation on the word injustice. Adding the adjective social confuses the situation. Good biblical words like compassion and mercy will do just as well. The motivation for doing something about these situations must be love, rather than a sense of justice. The 4000 Jesus saw hungry were day labourers who survived from day to day, so going to listen to a preacher for the day instead of seeking work left them hungry till they could work again. He did not feel a sense of injustice, he was filled with compassion.
The problem with using the word justice is that the word assumes that the existence of a political power with authority to remedy the injustice by coercion or sanctions. Citizens hold the authorities accountable for the satisfaction of the injustice using coercive mechanisms. That is fine if the injustice is real, but it leads Christians toward political solutions for problems that are better dealt with by mercy and compassion. The fundamental assumption behind the concept of social justice is that someone has the right and duty to take the reins of power to put the injustice right through the use of political power. I think it is better to avoid the term “social justice” because it leads to political power that is contrary to the gospel.
That said, if you can accept Fitch and Holsclaw’s use of the term social justice, they have some good things to say about getting involved with people in distress.
Most of us are constantly tempted to join larger, more magnanimous justice efforts in the world that promise big things. There is an allure around the promise of changing the world through "the worlds ways": big government, big fundraising campaigns, and heroic relief efforts. Frankly, a lot of good has occurred through these efforts. But many times these big campaigns distract from just being present with the poor in the simplest most patient everyday ways that God can use to bring the kingdom.
They turn the church into a recruitment centre for individuals to go out and seek a justice in the world that is more conceptual than real. And the church itself, the social embodiment of the Lordship of Christ, is never considered as an entity that lives God’s justice and reconciliation before the world and in the world. The justice of God must begin in communities of people who share the new reality of reconciliation and renewal, love and transformation in their neighbourhoods.
This is the key question.
How can a people come together and spread justice through a neighbourhood?
We cannot presume that putting Christians in city hall is the way God will save the city.
Their answer is no Jesus, no justice.
One last issue, I had with this chapter, and it pops up all through the book is that they talk a lot about “the Kingdom breaking in”. I find this an odd way to describe the Kingdom. A kingdom is not something that breaks in. A kingdom that just breaks in temporarily is not really a kingdom at all. The Kingdom does not just break in. It is Jesus ruling the world through the Holy Spirit.
In most places, it could just as easily be written as the church breaking in, but they seem to want to say more than that. I sense what they really mean is that the “the Holy Spirit breaking in”. He is a person who can be welcomed for a moment, and then ignored, or rejected, so he often has to break in over and over again. When people obey his prompting and guidance, the kingdom is a reality, because the father’s will is done. They are in the Kingdom, and people meeting them are seeing or being touched by the Kingdom. But it is really just a glimpse of the kingdom, not the fullness of it.
I know that Jesus talked about the kingdom being near (Mark 1:15; Luke 10:9). The kingdom could only come near, because the Holy Spirit had not been released on earth. The fullness of the kingdom requires the fullness of the Spirit. He has not been poured, so the kingdom is not limited to just breaking in.
I wondered as I read this chapter, if they did not refer to the Holy Spirit breaking in, because they were not sure that it was him. Are they seeing people doing the right thing, but are not sure of the Spirit’s presence.
David Fitch seems to have a very narrow view of the Kingdom. I think that may be because he is afraid of slipping back into Christendom. Christendom was the church ruling the world, so it not the kingdom, which is the world being guided and lead by the Holy Spirit.
His vision of the kingdom seems to be restricted to the church being among the poor. This seems to reflect an Anabaptist lack of confidence in the ability of the Holy Spirit to expand the Kingdom. Therefore, he visualises a Kingdom that is isolated on the edges of society.
This seems to be the weakest chapter of the book, but it was probably by far the hardest to write, and even harder to live out in their community.
Fitch and Holsclaw describe the problem in this way.
Amidst the sexualised culture of North America, we have become inhospitable and dysfunctional.
This the challenge they are trying to meet.
The local church should be the place where we gather to participate in God’s healing and renewal of all things sexual.
Good on them for having a go at such a tough topic.
The seventh signpost is the church as a place of community with Christ.
Fitch and Holsclaw discuss alternative views on the relationship between the church and the kingdom.
One view is that the kingdom does not come in fullness until Jesus returns in glory. The gospel of the kingdom is for the future, and the gospel of the cross is for now. The problem with this is that the Kingdom is over personalised.
The alternative view pushes an understanding of the Kingdom that goes beyond the church.
This approach to gospel, scripture, and mission sequesters the kingdom of to the interiority of our hearts.
Because this gospel is about me, it can become narcissistic.
The problem seems to be too much Kingdom and too little cross.
Fitch and Holsclaw discuss the incarnational approach of Hirsch and Frost.
Christians are to enter the world by identifying with the people around us, getting to know, understand and live in that context.
They say that “missiology precedes ecclesiology. Fitch and Holsclaw warn that this could separate us from Jesus by separating us from the church.
They say that we are not church planters, we are the church. Dave advocates,
Churches should send out three or more leaders (or leader couples depending on whether they were single or married) into a neighbourhood context to get jobs live relationally and begin the rhythms of life in Christ there. This would require a commitment to a place, humble living in a neighbourhood, and going to places on the margins, not the most affluent places where large churches already exist. It would require being sent as missionaries through a discernment process at a local church.
Fitch and Holsclaw list practices that shape a community people in this kingdom within a neighbourhood.
These practices will create a different church.
When the apostle, the teacher, the evangelist and the prophet function together in mutual submission one to another in dependence on God, the authority of the Lord is made manifest in a community.
Because of this submission to these practices, each one of these communities will necessarily be the humble, vulnerable and incarnational expression of God coming into the world.
These are good practices, but it sounds more like the church than the kingdom.
Instead of a volunteer association sending well-trained professionals out into the world to do God’s mission, communities are shaped in a way that incarnates Christ in the world for God’s mission. Whenever such communities come into being, sin is overcome evil defeated, and death not longer holds power. The Kingdom is breaking in. This is what witness looks like, and we contend that these communities will engage the most difficult issues of our day. They will not shrink back.
Fitch and Holsclaw suggest that our modern gospel is shaped by Martin Luther. At the time of the Reformation in Europe, there was a strong sense of the justice of God punishing sin and righteousness. Guilt was a major issue for Christians. The gospel of justification by faith was a huge relief for guilt-wary people. It does not work for broken and oppressed people.
They criticise Brian McLaren for reading the Kingdom of God into to the practice of “following Jesus as our model. Talking about Jesus as merely a new way of life can sound like a distant promise to those already in the throes of sorrow.”
If you are among the lowly, oppressed and downtrodden, emphasizing the kingdom of God as a social strategy feels like just another burden to bear.
The justification by faith gospel has focussed entirely on the cross as a place our personal sin is taken away…. Meanwhile, the cross has been ignored as the place where God’s final victory is accomplished.
What is the gospel according to Fitch and Holsclaw?
Here on the cross, God has definitely dealt with sin in such a way that not only are our sins forgiven, but the power of sin and death has been overcome.
The gospel is the good news that “God has become King in Jesus Christ”. In and through the victory at the cross, Jesus is now reigning over the whole world, drawing it into his salvation, including you and me.
They reject the three-point presentation of the Gospel
I agree with them on this, but would note that these three points are fine, if we understand the full scope of the sin problem. If the sin problem has stuffed up the entire universe, then the gospel is that God is fixing up the sin problem through Jesus is a very big one. The problem with the three-point presentation is that the sin problem is narrowed to my personal sin, and escape from hell.
Fitch and Holslaw take their understanding of the gospel from Wright and McKnight.
God is now reigning over the whole world, making the world right. In the victory of the cross, he now rules over all sin, death and evil. Whenever his rule is extended, the world is reordered and restored. In Christ, the blessings promised through Israel are now making their way to all nations. And this is the way that God is making things right.
They highlight four on-ramps to the kingdom.
There will often be other on-ramps. Forgiveness for guilt and shame of sin will work in some situations.
They say that our gospel must be personal in a community.
Reconciliation, forgiveness and peace are things that you cannot encounter as a conceptual issue. These ideas need context and must come to life in real people. We must therefore live the gospel in communities and share and live the Kingdom of God together.
David Fitches’s response at his ordination interview when asked if he believed in the inerrancy of scripture is worth the price of the book. It is a pity he does not have a photo of the expressions on the faces of the interviewing committee. He could have added $10 to the price of the book. The scriptures were written by people. They used their own vocabulary and style, and they did not realise that they were writing scriptures. They put stuff in that is irrelevant to us. According to 2 Tim 3:16, the scriptures are God-breathed (theopneustos). We do not fully know what that means, but I believe that the Holy Spirit got everything into the scriptures that he wanted in. The scriptures contain everything that he wanted to about God and the world. When interpreting the scriptures, I am not so worried about understanding the author’s intent. I always want to know what the Holy Spirit intended . I try to read the scriptures listening to him. Reading and listening at the same time are important. (We sometimes need to be in a group to hear clearly). The Psalms teach that loving the law leads to wisdom. I find that loving the scriptures leads to insight (we must not worship them). The more I read them the more insights I get. Spurgeon said that you should defend the scriptures the same way that you defend a caged lion. You let it loose. All people and all cultures have blind spots. My culture has blinds spots, but I do not know what they are, because I am part of my culture. I have some blind spots that cause me to miss part of what God is saying, or to get some things wrong, but I do not know what they are. It is really hard to escape from our culture and see it as God sees it. They best we can do is to read humbly and be as open as possible to the challenges of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit chose to use verbal revelation. He could have given us twenty pictures, but he did not. He could have waited until the modern age, and given us a movie or an audio-visual, but he did not. The Holy Spirit chose to use words, so words are important. This means that we need to listen to the words carefully, but in the context of the whole message. The scriptures should be read as they are written. The epistles are more propositional than other parts of the scriptures. The gospels contain more story, with a bit of proposition. Much of the Old Testament describes events, although the law is much more propositional. Propositional writing is a clear precise way to communicate. Communicating in this way is fine, as long as we understand the limitations.
His response was that the expression is too liberal. Get Prodigal Christianity and read the story and his explanation of what this means.
Getting on to the substance of the chapter, this signpost begins by noting that the modern world is hostile to the scriptures.
The Bible is nothing more than a cultural artefact; it actively disdained when offered as an authority in the public realm.
They note that many Christians trying to defend the scriptures end up undermining their position.
Add to this the fact that our culture is suspicious toward interpretation. The automatic rejoinder to any authoritative statement is the proverbial, “ Well that’s your interpretation.”
Authority in general has a bad name.
From uniting the inspiration of the scripture to the scientific methods comes a concern for inerrancy and a focus on propositions.
Some have reacted to this approach by over emphasising the human nature of scripture and the importance of personal experience, but his does not work either.
Many pastors and leaders have sought to defend the Bible according to the most accepted of all standards in Western society: science. We have been tempted to deploy the scientific method to prove the authority of scripture.
We inadvertently put a human authority above the bible.
Scripture, when viewed that way can seem like a static collection of divinely perfect scientific propositions.
Each approach accommodates to a different cultural attitudes. One side capitulates to scientific rationality and the other to a “hermeneutics of suspicion”
Fitch and Holsclaw say that the authority of scripture is something we receive, not something we control. When we preach the gospel, the scripture receives its authority from be connected to God’s mission.
Scripture is not some great ideological document that seeks to dominate or control.
They quote NT Wright.
We must understand the scriptures authority as principle component through which the kingdom comes.
We should rarely find ourselves defending the bibles authority. Rather its authority becomes undeniable when its compelling reality becomes visible among us. The story of God as displayed in a people speaks for itself.
We approach scripture first not to analyse it or subject it to study as on object, but rather to allow ourselves to be immersed in it.
The authority of Scripture makes the sense it does within the world of God’s kingdom, at every level for the cosmic and political through to the personal.
I have always felt that the concept of inerrancy claim is not helpful. My thoughts on the authority of scriptures are as follows.
When it comes to Witness, Fish and Coleslaw react to two extremes. The first extreme is preaching the gospel boldly regardless of whether anyone is listening. The opposite extreme is endless conversation and listening that goes nowhere and changes nothing.
The World comes to know the truth of God’s kingdom not by us defending the truth, but by our witness to it; not by having well-policed conversations about the kingdom, but living lives that testify to the truth.
They have some great things to say about witness that is radically different.
This approach to encountering others often puts the question of truth before the act of witness. Strangely, we demand to know what people believe about truth before we offer any witness to the truth. We think that if people do not believe in “absolute” or “propositional” truth, then it will be impossible for them to believe the truth of the gospel. But such a “stand for the truth” can reduce people to disembodied minds and reduce the gospel to the transfer of information.
Ongoing conversations on issues facing the church are fine for open forums, but for people living these issues in life together, conversations must touch the ground in concrete actions and decisions, if the kingdom of God is to break in. We must discern what God is doing in the here and now and respond.
An overemphasis on conversation now looks like a bunch of people standing around talking, and talking, and talking, and nothing ever comes of it.
Witness communicates that we are participants in something big happening in the world. This something must be bigger and greater than us, or else why would such an event require a witness.
They end the chapter with a clear challenge:
The Spirit’s presence ensures that witness is not something we have to do, defend, or somehow make happen.
Witnesses are not expected, like lawyers, to persuade by the rhetorical power of their speeches, but simply to testify to the truth for which they are qualified to give evidence.
We realised that our task, when it came to the poor among, was quite simply to do nothing. Absolutely nothing. We simply had to be present, available, in relation to the poor, to listen to God’s Spirit, and then respond when God spoke in and through these relationships. We were to let the kingdom of God flourish in and among us and thereby be witnesses.
Let us walk recklessly into the middle of God’s making right what is broken in the world (gospel), and move boldly into the centre of the kind of people God has called us to be (community).
Fitch and Holsclaw have been criticised for making the incarnation too broad. This could be right. The incarnation of Jesus was a unique event that is unrepeatable. The Holy Spirit working in the Body of Christ is also incredibly important, but I am not sure “incarnational” is the best word to hang it on. That said, they have something important to say.
They are concerned that the incarnation is presented as something that happened a long time ago, and does not have much relevance now.
In this view, it seems Jesus came to do only two things: prove his divinity and then die for our salvation.
A defensive posture to the incarnation is not helpful.
When we are engaging those outside the church, this view of the incarnation often leads into defending the divinity of Christ and the truth of our future salvation. We spend a lot intellectual energy trying to make the case that Jesus is God and has saved us from hell.
In this process, we too easily made Jesus into a concept, a proposition to be upheld, or a truth to be defended.
If the reality of God in Christ has truly entered our lives, then he needs no defending. We need only bear witness to the reality of his working in our lives.
The alternative view is that Jesus everyday life is a model for discipleship and that we can enter the Kingdom by following Jesus example. Fitch and Holsclaw see this as a useful emphasis, but are concerned that this view fails to recognise how radically God comes into our lives through the humanity of Jesus.
It fails to take hold of the way in which Jesus himself has promised to be present in his authority and reign whereever we go and engage in the kingdom.
Listening to the alternatives,
God has won a victory in the sending of the Son. His power, rule and victory are a reality breaking in right now. Jesus is not merely a model of God’s Kingdom; rather Jesus is God’s kingdom coming. Thinking of Jesus as only the way into the Kingdom misses the point…
Devoid of God’s cosmic victory over sin, death and evil in Christ, the “way of Jesus” easily drifts into becoming another religious mentality, a moralistic social gospel that leads us not into his kingdom, but into burnout.
It seems that Jesus is all too divine to be any good, (for our everyday lives) and also all too human to do anything (against the reality of evil). Neither option seems adequate to capture God’s radical movement into the world.
This is great stuff.
In essence, Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection are the proclaiming and making present of the Kingdom of God.
This is what it looks like when God is at loose in the world, no longer contained in heaven—now teaching, confronting, healing, restoring, and making all things new. Jesus the Son of the Father, filled with the Spirit, is the proclamation and presence of the kingdom in power, overcoming the evils of bodily sickness, social exclusion, and spiritual oppression. This is what is happening in the incarnation.
Somehow, this central reality of God’s work in Christ has been lost in much of the North American church. But if we look closer at the Scriptures, we can see it everywhere.
There is a kingdom dynamic set loose in these disciples. Jesus promises that his very presence will be with us in all of these activities.
The incarnational model challenges us to be a people who inhabit neighbourhoods, go where the people are, live among them and listen to them, know their hurts and their hopes.
The second signpost introduced by Fitch and Holsclaw is the Mission of God. Christians tend to convey God in two different ways, neither helpful.
The common view is that the Christian God is all-powerful, but distant. This makes him see cruel to many people.
The pendulum is now swinging from a distant remote God, to one who is everywhere.
The problem is that if God is everywhere, then God is nowhere.
Fitch and Holsclaw push a different way; God is on a mission. They portray God as always actively breaking into the world.
We should think of God as the one who invaded the world in the Son. We should live as if God has remained active in the world through the Spirit.
This changes the nature of prayer. Fitch stopped praying for opportunities to witness, and prayed that he would see what God is doing and know what to do to help.
God is always drawing near, entering in, walking beside the world in all its distress and uncertainty, in all its poverty and depravity.
If the Triune God is already in mission, then I need to see the worlds in which I regularly walk as the arenas of the Sprit-places imbued with the presence of God.
God is already working there in each person’s life. Just pray that you will have eyes to see what God is doing so you can participate with a work or a prayer, with laughter, or a tear.
This is good stuff, but I characterise the situation differently.
This is our world.
God made it and gave it to us, so it is our world. We decide who comes in and what goes down. Right at the beginning, we made a huge mistake, and let the spiritual powers of evil into the world and they created a huge mess. They tricked us into submitting to them and se we have not been able to get rid of them to clean up the mess.
More importantly, despite Jesus death on the cross and the outpouring of the Spirit, God has mostly been shut out of our world. For most of history he has struggled to break in and put things right, because we have not given him permission.
Presenting God as the one who is constantly breaking into the world to put things right is misleading. He might want to do that, but he has not been able to do it. The problem with the mission of God is that if he is always breaking in, he should have sorted it out by now, but clearly has not. The mess remains. The reason is simple. The idea of God on a mission to the world reflects his heart, but not reality. God might want to break into the world and put things right, but he has not been able to get permission the permission he needs. God has always been desiring to break into the world, but he has not been allowed.
Rather than characterising God as being on a mission to the world, I would describe him as a God who has been struggling to obtain permission to be active in the world (see Gods Big Strategy).
This is our world. God can only enter into it when we invite him. History is actually the story of God looking for a way to break back into the world to put it right. He has spent most of history seeking a people to work through and place to work in. Most of the time he has been constrained. Getting a nation of people with a land to work through was a huge step. Sending the Holy Spirit to live in the body of Jesus was another big step forward. But even in the church age, God can only act in the world when people invite him into situations where they have authority to decide who can enter, but invitations have been surprisingly sparse and limited in scope.
This changes the nature of prayer. When we pray it is good to look for what the Spirit is doing in the world, so we can join him. We should also be looking to see where the forces of evil are at work, so we can join with him to resist them. More important we should be listening to the Holy Spirit to find out what he wants to do and where, so we can give can invite him to do it. Our prayers give the Holy Spirit the authority that he needs to be active in the world. The more active our prayer and the broader the scope, the more freedom he will have to put the world right (see more on this at Prayer and Authority).
Understandings God’s desire to break in should also change the way that we live. The Holy Spirit wants to go into the world, but he can only go there if the people he dwells in will carry with them. If we hide in our huddles, he is shut way from the world that he loves. To be active in the world, the Holy Spirit needs us to carry him into all the places where people are living, working and struggling. That means that we must be active where he wants to work.
The third post- in the first signpost is post-attractional. People will not come to us. We do not have a position of authority in society. People have diverse beliefs about the spiritual and different experiences of religion.
The argument here is that language and worldview are no longer universal to everyone we meet. It is probably more correct to say that modern culture is approaches God and spirituality in diverse ways.
I am not sure if the world is as post-modern as Fitch and Holsclaw suggest. It is active in philosophy, literature and theology classes, but modernism is alive and well in the sciences and engineering. The political scientists and economists are not worried about avoiding the power of language, because they are looking for power to change the world in their image.
Adam, a commenter on the Jesus Creed said,
We are not leaving modernity behind, we are just now seeing it at its peak. We do have language and world view that are universal. Math is a universal language that transcends culture. Technology and science are similar, universal language and world views.
I agree with Adam’s view. We are living at a time when it is easier to communicate than ever. I can go to a statistical conference and speak in English to people from places as diverse as Finland and Iran, and talk about the issues that they are dealing with. I can email them to clarify things that I do not understand.
More and more we are straying into a world where Truth is “verified by experiment”. That is where the church has failed.
Adam’s point that “Truth is verified by experiment” is really important. People have tried looked at Christianity, perhaps superficially, but they have decided that it just does not work. They do not like our ethics, because they are harsh and cruel. Our rejection of abortion and hostility to homosexual marriage seems old fashioned an irrelevant. Modern people do not like Christians. They see them as arrogant and judgmental. They see Christian any as the cause of wars and sexual abuse.
The modern world may not have heard our message very clearly, but they have rejected it as untrue. People do not turn back to our God during times of crisis, because they do not believe he is able to help, even if he exists. The problem for Christianity is not that it is hard to communicate. The problem is that we have communicated and people are rejecting our message.
The core problem is not the confusion of language, or that people do not believe that truth exists. People have strong views about what is not true, and many have decided that Christianity is not true. Parts of it may be acceptable, but as a complete faith and work view, it is not true. This leaves us with a huge problem. We have a gospel that people have stopped trusting, because they have decided against believing it is true. We will not change their decision by arguing or shouting at them.
The problem is not really that we are living in a post-Christendom world. We have three more immediate problems.
Reading their chapter on the fist signpost again after writing my response, I would couch their three posts- slightly differently.
I don't fully agree with their characterisation of the problem, but I like their solution.
We will have to go to them.
That means that most of what we are doing now does not work very well now, and will not work in the future.
People can choose to ignore us. Many already are and more will.
We cannot take anything for granted.
A standard message will often fall on deaf ears.
We must enter each local context, each neighbourhood, each place of work, and each social space.
The second post- in the first signpost is Post-Positional.
Fitch and Holsclaw say that Christendom lasted for a long time in the United States, and that gave the church a position of influence, which is now disappearing. I am not sure about this. The church in the US did not have a position of power like the Christendom churches of Western Europe. The constitutional separation of church and state prevented. There are no bishops in the United States crowning presidents and senators. The influential presidents of the twentieth century, Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman Eisenhower, Kennedy Nixon, went to church occasionally, but they were political men driven by political realities, not controlled by the church.
The influence of the church in the United States mostly came from having the numbers. When 35 percent of the population are Christians, politicians have to take notice of their concerns, especially when many of them are middle class and know how to get their views heard. The problem in America is not loss of position, but loss of numbers. Evangelical Christians are now a small minority that can be ignored by the politicians.
The Bush presidency confirmed this for most Americans, when the Christian Right swung the election for him. They woke up and thought, these people are not like us. We do need to let this small ugly minority control us. We are out of there.
That said, Fitch and Holsclaw are right about the current situation. We do not have a position of authority in society.
People can choose to ignore us. Many already are, and more will.
One of my favourite meals is fish and coleslaw. A few chips (fries in the US) are needed to make it really tasty.
I have just completed a meal of fitch and holsclaw and it was pretty nourishing too. I am going to round of the meal by chipping in with my comments and thoughts in the next few posts. The book is Prodigal Christianity – Signposts into the Missional Frontier by David Fitch and Geoff Holsclaw.
The first signpost sets the context for the rest of the book, so I will chip a little more in on it.
1. Post-Christendom
The first signpost is Post-Christendom.
People are living as if God doesn’t exist or, at least, as if God does not matter. Society used to have a general place for God. Now sightings are rare, and if they materialize, they are soon forgotten.
One response is to preach the old message harder (neo-reformed). The other response is to actively embrace the post-modern mind-set and make Christianity relevant (emerging). Fitch and Holsclaw want a more radical response that breaks with the Christendom paradigm completely.
They suggest the cultural shift is characterised by three posts-. I will comment on the first post- in this post.
A) Post-Attractional
People in the post-Christendom no longer think about going to church when they wake up on Sunday mornings.
I agree that the attractional church does not work, but the world is still easily attracted. People are attracted to football games, rock concerts, peace marches. Many of these events are not relational, yet people are attracted.
The problem is that the people of the world are not attracted to church any more. Part of the reason is that there is now much more competition. When I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, there was not much else to do on Sunday morning. Now there are a huge variety of alternatives. You can run a marathon, go to a farmers market, or visit and art gallery.
When I was young, going to church was what people were expected to do, especially if you were in the middle classes. You did not have to go every week, but if you stopped going altogether, you would come under suspicion. So people went, even though they did not always enjoy it. The lower classes were different. They were not expected to go to church, and many did not.
The real problem is not that the world is post attractional, but that our church meetings are boring. Who wants to listen to a pastor droning on for nearly an hour? Congregational singing is a turn off, no matter how enthusiastic are our wannabe rocks the worship leaders. These days, people listen to their music of choice all the time, they do not sing together. Even seeker friendly services do not cut it for modern people. People close their eyes, and try to look solemn during the Eucharist, but many feel nothing. Our church services are not attractional, because they are boring.
Fitch and Holsclaw claim that Jesus did not use an attractional approach, but went to where people are. I like the way they quote of the Message version of John 1:14:
The Word became flesh and blood,
Yet that is only part of the story. Jesus operated in a hugely attractional way. Whenever he entered a village, everyone gathered. When he went in the mountains, enormous crowds followed. So we need to ask, why people were attracted to Jesus, but turned off by our church meeting. People were attracted to Jesus, because he healed the sick, cast out demons, thumbed his nose at the Roman rulers, and got stuck into the religious authorities. I guess the Holy Spirit helped, but people were drawn to Jesus because they like what he was. The apostles were attractional too, in a similar way. The church could still be attractional, but only if it heals the sick, casts out demons and challenges the religious and political leaders of the age.
and moved into the neighborhood.
Jesus challenged his disciples to announce the good news to all nations, but warned them that they should wait unit they were clothed power from on high (Luke 24:45-49). Until the Holy Spirit is doing what Jesus did in our meetings, people will not be attracted, whether we are in a church or in a neighbourhood.
If Jesus has risen from the dead and ascended into heaven, and poured out the Spirit of God to live within us, the that should not be hard. If we cannot heal the sick and cast out demons, or change the world without relying on human politics, the world is entitled to ignore us, because they think our claims are false.
I would characterise post-attactional in these words,
People will not come to us.
We will have to go to them.
That means that most of what we are doing now does not work very well now, and will not work in the future.
