Excellent and highly encouraging new article this week by Alan Roxburgh in his Roxburgh Journal: real support for those of us who want to see creative missional life in established denominations. Just take this paragraph as a taster:
It’s not only possible for all kinds of existing churches to innovate missional
life but it’s at the heart of what God does. There are stories out there of the
Spirit calling into being emerging missional local churches in congregations
some of us would have given up on a few years ago. This is the nature of the God
we worship and praise. Our Lord just keeps turning up in the most God-forsaken
places. How else do you make sense of the Incarnation and the perduring life of
both Israel and the church? These convictions are not based upon new theories of
change, complexity and emergence but are a confession about the way God is
revealed in Jesus. Those who say the church is dying in the West are mistaking
the phenomenon of transition for death. They’re not the same! We may say the
church we have known and experienced for the last 150 years or so no longer has
legitimacy as the sign, witness, instrument and foretaste of the kingdom. But
that’s very different from saying the church is dying. We shouldn’t confuse the
two. The church in the West isn’t dying and it wont because God keeps turning up
in all these places we so easily give up on because we see them as hopelessly
out of tune with the times or just not getting what needs to take place. The
stories emerging in these places are harbingers of God’s emerging life in old
churches. Emergence theory tells us that when lots of little stories start to
percolate you can be sure some strange attractors will start doing
uncharacteristic and unexpected things. I believe lots of existing congregations
are pregnant with strange attractors ready to do uncharacteristic things. That’s
always the way of the Spirit. What a great time to be alive!
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