Welcome to the Missional Church paper at the University of Otago. I'm looking forward to "meeting" you all tonight at the audioconference. I'm looking forward to the dialog we will have during the audioconferences and on this blog. Students at the 300 level are welcome to read this blog and make posts.
Students at the 400 level are required to make posts during most weeks of the semester. I set up the paper this way because I want you to learn from each other online as well as in the audioconferences. You can write about
- something you read about the missional church that you found interesting, either in an assigned reading for the class or elsewhere
- something we talked about in the audioconference that you want to follow up on
- questions you have about the missional church
- or other topics related to the missional church
Here's one thing I would really appreciate. I intended to order Steve Taylor's book,
The Out of Bounds Church?, for the Otago library. In fact, I thought I ordered it, but evidently I forgot to. Some of you have undoubtedly read his book and some of you probably read his blog. I would appreciate comments about what you learned from his book, particularly as it relates to our discussions about the missional church. And if you see something interesting on his blog, please post a link on this blog for the rest of us.
For this first week, feel free to write about anything in the bulleted categories above or to write about Steve Taylor's book. If I think of more specific questions after the audioconference, I'll post those questions.
2 comments:
Hi Lynne and others...
I've not read Steve's book yet! but intend to.. I have however read his doctoral thesis recently that was published in 2004 (which I suspect is where the book comes from). One part of this I really gel'd with was a practical theology of creatively "making do". It's a lovely idea of emergent faith communities developing theology by doing community together as a practical hermeneutic or interpretation of Christian scripture and tradition. Taylor extends the practical theology of “making do” that was developed by French Jesuit Michel de Certeau in th 1950s. Taylor offers this hermeneutic as a third way to engage meaningfully with postmodernity’s fragmented social identity. For Taylor the other two options on offer are a fundamentalist unitary locus (batten down the hatches and cycle the wagons) or extreme dissemination where the church is indistinguishable from the surrounding culture. “Making do” has that wonderfully messy sense of church at the margin…
FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC...
I read far too much material about the terrible church that is out of touch, out of reach and out of date. That was the first thing which came to my mind as I was trying to analyse the two class readings this week. Riddell’s synopsis at best (there are plenty of great stuff in Riddell’s reading I am sure others will offer for discussion) offers new terminology and imagery of the condition of the tired and reactionary church, such as Trojan horse, passion transplant, ecclesiastical heavy-handedness, tired and reactionary and smothered by churchianity to name a few. Minitrea is less so and we find new terms such as maintenance mentality, home court advantage (George Hunter), museum curator mentality (Darrell Guder) and of course missional. These offer great material for sermon illustrations. I am aware of course that without such a formative abstract a winning formula for momentum and impetus cannot be proposed. The word Missional might just not be invented. Further, with such a prognosis an alien who finds the dishevelled church about town might just beam back a report to planet Q that the Church is dying on planet earth, only to find Churches full of people and life, Catholic Masses full to overflowing, the Anglican renaissance around the globe and 30,000 people attending Parachute at Mystery Creek every year (my definition of church is general and broad here) not to mention the thousands and thousands of people who meet in homes on every day of the week to fellowship, break bread and pray. I will borrow from Hal Lindsay’s book title (the second half) – The Church is Alive and Well on Planet Earth. It maybe disorganised here and there, and there are old ideas that have run their course that need to be replaced but in the main the Church is living and breathing and is full of life. It is because the Church does not belong to us. It belongs to God and He will bring it to completion. The problem I have with descriptive and depictive analysis of the church, it is because what follows sounds all too awkward and hard work. Mechanical is another word that can go here.
Today we have a church that is out of touch and is disorganised and not growing much (some would argue). Here is the bigger picture in my view the church has been like this before and much worse. There was the dark ages, the Age of Reason, the deists and the Enlightenment, the Modernist period when reason and knowledge, and not God, was all-powerful. Not to mention the terrible Julio-Claudian dynasty of Rome and following. There was the Church itself at times turning on itself like a necrotising fasciitis flesh-eating disease. With all its opponents and enemies the Church should be extinct many times over. But in the fullness of time God intervened in every era. The Church became Missional in the first century only after the Wind of the Holy Spirit blew life into the gathering of the believers. The Spirit visited again during the Reformation, and again during the Wesleyan revivals and the Great Revivals on both sides of the Atlantic in the 18th century and in many other occasions. We can be missional when the Mighty wind is not blowing but it will be like looking for summer flowers in the middle of winter or like Virginia Andrew’s Flowers in the Attic. Aspects of our faith are as seasons, they are cyclical. It is what we do in between that prepares us for the season of reaping and celebration. That would be my focus as I continue to ponder the two readings.
Seti Afoa
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