post-Christendom

I suggested in my review of Alan Hirsch’s book The Forgotten Ways that, in our search for a new paradigm to replace the now more or less defunct Christendom worldview, the historical moment which we should revisit for inspiration is not the beginning of the narrow path of suffering that the radical Jesus movement took in pursuit of its Lord but the end, when the faithful community, having finally overcome the opposition of Greek-Roman paganism, was in a position to ask far-reaching questions about how it should organize and define itself as God’s ‘new creation’.

The ebullient Alan Hirsch was in Portugal recently with the Christian Associates leadership community, talking about what makes a missional church-planting movement, in his words, go ‘Kaboom!’ In his book The Forgotten Ways he faces squarely the fact that the church in the West is experiencing ‘massive, long-trended decline’ (16). For the most part, the techniques and strategies that are currently being proposed as remedies for this dilemma are no more than revisions of techniques and strategies that have already proved themselves ineffective. ‘As we anxiously gaze into the future and delve back into our history and traditions to retrieve missiological tools from the Christendom toolbox, many of us are left with the sinking feeling that this is simply not going to work’ (17). What is needed is a new paradigm: ‘a fundamental change in our thoughts, perceptions, and values, especially as they relate to our view of church and mission’.

I have recently had a very interesting conversation by email with Jonas Lundström, who for a Swede writes remarkably good English, and Graham Old (Leaving Munster). It is partly about the substance of The Coming of the Son of Man and Re: Mission, and partly about the broader question of how the church in the West should respond to the collapse of Christendom – if, indeed, Christendom has collapsed. Jonas and Graham have given me permission to write up the conversation, with only some minor editing, as a post on Open Source Theology.