“During that period, which is roughly coterminous with the nineteenth century, more new Christians emerged from a wider number of new people groups than at any previous time in the history of the church. Never before had so many Christians moved to so many vast and remote parts of the Globe and communicated the gospel across so many cultural boundaries.”
There will be far fewer people who identify themselves as Christian and who attend any form of corporate worship. The next 35 years will see a rapid increase in the number of congregations who will close their doors and an increase in the number of church buildings which are put up for sale.
We are not to be self-dependant, but interdependent. This is true of individuals, but it is also true of Churches. To plant churches which are fully independent and self-reliant is as much of a problem as planting churches which are wholly dependent on foreign missionaries.
This means realizing that we are not the majority, and we are not going to force the rest of society to adopt our ways. We are going to have to acknowledge that society has a different view of marriage from us, that we practice business differently and are not typical in how we conduct our affairs, that we use our time and resources differently, and so forth. We are going to have to know who we are better than we have in the past, distinct from the larger society in many ways.
There is a vast amount of missionary literature on approaches to culture but virtually nothing on the most persuasive culture of all; the Western one. Both the power of Western culture and the degree to which the church has accommodated to it, make an analysis of the culture an urgent task.
The Reformation allowed authentic, diverse versions of Christianity to develop across Europe. But this diversity came at a price.
Three paradigms; a few factors and thirty odd pages. The history of the world mission movement briefly (and brilliantly) summed up by Mike Goheen. With notes by me.
Some thoughts on the religious, political and intellectual worlds that gave birth to the modern missionary movement and how they have changed.
Church historians sometimes downplay one of the key planks of the Protestant Reformation; the use of indigenous languages in Bible study, worship and disciple making. A great deal is made of the theological influence of Luther, Calvin et al, but language gets much less attention. However, the Reformation both encouraged and depended on the use of […]
Rachel Held Evens recently wrote a piece on the CNN blog entitled Why Millenials Are Leaving the Church which gained huge readership (I lost count of how many of my Facebook contacts mentioned it) and has sparked a fair bit of debate. There have been a number of responses to Rachel’s paper including this thoughtful […]