the “sent” church: a missional people 9

June 11, 2008

Series recap: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8

CONCLUSION

One of the reasons much of the American evangelical church has not faced the same steep degeneration as the Protestant churches of Europe and Canada is because in the U.S. there is still a ‘heartland’ with the miscellany of the old ‘Christendom’ society. Michael Wolff says:

There is a fundamental schism in American cultural, political, and economic life. There’s the quicker-growing, economically vibrant…morally relativist, urban-oriented, culturally adventuresome, sexually polymorphous, and ethnically diverse nation…and there’s the small town, nuclear-family, religiously-oriented, white-centric other America, [with]…its diminishing cultural and economic force….[T]wo nations… [1]

In conservative areas, it is still probable to see people confess faith and the church expand without becoming ‘missional.’ Most traditional evangelical churches still can only win people to Christ who are traditional and conservative. But, as Wolff notes, this is a ’shrinking market.’ Keller states, “…eventually evangelical churches ensconced in the declining, remaining enclaves of “Christendom” will have to learn how to become ‘missional’. If it does not do that it will decline or die.” [2]

Churches that have been denoted by a stalwart sense of their distinctiveness have employed in faithful witness to the world. And to carry out this witness, those churches have perpetually required new structures and forms fitting to the cultural context.

But ecclesiology is the most fluid of the doctrines of Scripture. The church is a vibrant, cultural representation of the people of God in any particular place. Forms and practices are not sacrosanct. Worship style, social dynamics, and liturgical expressions, to name a few, must result from thinking “missionally” by contextualizing the Gospel in any given culture. Church follows mission.

In The Mission Shaped Church, Graham Cray, its editor, says:

Those who start with the questions about the relationship of the existing Church have already made the most common and dangerous mistake. Start with the Church and the mission will probably get lost. Start with mission and it is likely that the church will be found.” [3]

No doubt the deliberation over the nature of the church’s mission will continue. Yet the most alarming reality threatening the church as it enters the 21st century is not an disproportion of resources on the issue but rather “the unequal distribution of the light of the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ.” [4]

Thus, the church is called upon to do what the world cannot and will not do – bring the Gospel to the lost. It was the ultimate task for the Church of the New Testament, so it must be for the church today. [5]
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1) Michael Wolff, “The Party Line,” New York Magazine, 26 February 2001, 19.

2) Tim Keller, “The Missional Church,” Redeemer Presbyterian Church, Recommended Resources – A Gospel Movement; available from http://download.redeemer.com/pdf/learn/resources/Missional_Church-Keller.pdf; Internet; accessed 13 May 2008.

3) Graham Cray, ed., The Mission Shaped Church: Church Planting and Fresh Expressions of Church in a Changing Context (Brookvale, NSW, Aus: Willow Publishing, 2005), 116.

4) Ralph Winter and Steven Hawthorne, eds., “Evangelism: The Leading Partner.” Perspectives on the World Christian Movement. 3rd Edition. (Pasadena,
CA: William Carey Library, 1999), 575–577.

5) Ibid.

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