I just finished reading The Sky is Falling!?!: Leaders Lost in Transition by Alan Roxburgh. It is a wonderful proposal for rethinking leadership in our changing world in order to cultivate communities of faith who are willing to take risks for the kingdom of God. I hope to put out some other excerpts of and reflections on his book in the near future, but I was struck today by a great little sentence that gets at the heart of one of the great challenges that we must face if we are to rethink what it means to be missional communities.
Roxburgh writes: The crisis is not just discouragment among existing leaders, but a rapid loss of small, local congregations rooted in neighborhoods where they can live an incarnational life in context. Just as Wal-Mart models suck up the small neighborhood stores resulting in weaker social and economic links in a community, the loss of small, local churches to the regional megachurches is an equally great tragedy for the missional life of the church. We need a new imagination about being the church in, for, and with local neighborhoods and communities. (p. 184)
This highlights one of the ways that the worldview of our host culture (specifically our capitalist economic system with the case of Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Lowes, Meijer and other such companies) has crept into our models of church to the detriment of the development of missional communities of people willing to take risks for God. How can we cultivate a different kind of thinking in people, help them imagine their lives as disciples differently, and rethink what it means to be church in light of our primary narratives of faith as found in Scripture?
No comments:
Post a Comment