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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Serie: J-B Leadership Network Series
- Sprache: Englisch
An engaging and thoughtful book that guides readers into the frontiers of being a missional Christian Prodigal Christianity offers a down-to-earth, accessible, and yet provocative understanding of God's mission of redemption in the world, and how followers of Christ can participate in this work. It speaks into the discontent of all those who have exhausted conservative, liberal, and even emergent ways of being Christian and are looking for a new way forward. It offers building blocks for missional theology and practice that moves Christians into a gospel-centered way of life for our culture and our times. * Offers a compelling and creative vision for North American Christians * Puts forth a theology and ten critical signposts that must be observed to follow a missional way of life: post-Christendom, missio Dei, incarnation, witness, scripture, gospel, church, sexuality, justice, pluralism * Asks questions and points to issues that trouble many leaders in the post-modern, post-denominational, post-Christendom church This book can fill the gap for the average Christian left discontented with the current options "after evangelicalism."
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Seitenzahl: 439
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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CONTENTS
About the Jossey-Bass Leadership Network Series
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: Following Jesus into the Far Country—the Winter of Our Discontent
Signpost One: Post-Christendom
“Are You One of Those Christians?”
Meaning Anything
Aren’t We All Christians Still?
Aren’t We All Postmoderns Now?
The First Signpost: Post-Christendom
Signpost Two: Missio Dei
The All-Powerful Yet Distant God
Sovereign or Just Plain Cruel?
And God Does Us a Big Favor
Funeral Pyre
So Now God Is Everywhere, Right?
If God Is Everywhere, Then God Is Nowhere
Signpost Two: The Journey into God’s Mission for the World
Joining the Journey
Following God into the World
Signpost Three: Incarnation
Is Too! Is Not!
Once upon a Time?
The Way of the Father’s Kingdom
Is There More?
Signpost Three: The Journey of God into Everyday Life
Wrong Way
Is the Church Incarnational?
The Journey with Christ into and for the World
Signpost Four: Witness
Why Another Church?
How Do We Enter the Far Country?
Standing for the Truth
Boldly Proclaiming the Gospel?
Let’s Talk About It and Talk About It and Talk About It . . .
Lost in Conversation
Signpost Four: Witnesses to the Kingdom
The Journey into Witness
Any true witness is therefore social
The Journey So Far
Discerning the Kingdom: The Last Piece
Signpost Five: Scripture
(Sacred) Authority Through (Secular) Science
Can We Love Propositions?
Is Inerrancy Too Liberal?
After Inerrancy
The Bible as a Library
But Which Library?
From a Text We Cannot Control . . .
. . . to a Text We Must Proclaim
The Kingdom of God in Scripture
Scripture in the Kingdom of God
Signpost Five: The Journey with, by, and in Our Story
Signpost Six: Gospel
Where Are We Going? How Do We Get There?
Martin Luther in Starbucks
Bigger Than “Not Burning”
A Way of Life in God’s Kingdom
Separating Kingdom and Cross
Signpost Six: The Gospel of the Kingdom Through the Cross
Signpost Seven: Church
The Mission of Proclamation?
The Mission of Transformation?
Too Much Kingdom? Too Little Cross?
Mission and the Church
Signpost Seven: Communities of the Kingdom
Signpost Eight: Prodigal Relationships
The Case of the Young Seminarian
We Need a Place That Is Safe
A Missionary Point of View
Let’s Back Up a Bit
Signpost Eight: The Welcoming and Mutually Transforming Church
Signpost Nine: Prodigal Justice
Individuals First, Society Later
I’ll Pray the Prayer If You Pay My Bills
The Wrong Story
From My Front Door to the World
Jerry Falwell and Jim Wallis: Two Sides of the Same Coin
No Jesus, No Justice
Signpost Nine: The Journey into Local Justice
Why Justice Must Be Local: “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”
Signpost Ten: Prodigal Openness
Overcoming Our Violent Ways
What We Need Is Absolute Truth!
Fighting Against or Standing With
Signpost Ten: The Journey into Diversity
Epilogue: The Prodigal Returns
About the Authors
Index
Cover image: © Thomas Northcut/Getty
Cover design: JPuda
Copyright © 2013 by David E. Fitch and Geoffrey Holsclaw. All rights reserved.
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To Elmer Max Fitch, a little man on a journey, whose life already witnesses to the radical excessive love of God the Father. May we—you, me, and Mommy—live our lives prodigally together for God’s mission in the years that lie ahead.—D.F.
To Cynthia Joy, my true friend and inspiration along the way, and to Soren and Tennyson as you prepare for the journey.—G.H.
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There’s nothing quite so irritating as the “much-vaunted expert.” Perhaps you know what I mean. We go to a conference. A person comes from some distant place, has an academic degree or two, has a book to sign, and now comes to speak to us on an issue we’re all dealing with in our churches (or our lives). He or she speaks as someone who has done the research and presents some insights, tells us what we’re doing wrong, and offers a solution or two. We are supposed to be encouraged, but in the end we leave with the distinct impression that it’s been a while since this person was actually in the situation we’re going through. We want to ask, “How is that working for you really?” but worry this might cause some embarrassment.
Geoff Holsclaw and I would like to disavow any presumption that we write this book as experts. It’s true we have some degrees, teach in a seminary, and pastor a church. Nonetheless, we write this book not as vaunted experts but as chastened sojourners. We’ve traveled the journeys we write about in this book. We have planted and led churches, and we write from these experiences. We are chastened sojourners—sojourners who have failed many times in the things about which we write. Nonetheless, you can still ask us, “How is that working for you?”
Our journey started about twelve years ago. My wife, Rae Ann, and I (Dave) moved to the northwest suburbs of Chicago to plant a church. We’d learned much about intentional Christian community in the city and accepted the call to go to the suburbs to plant a church. We were focused on gathering a community for the peoples outside the Christian bubble, the people who would no longer go to large megahalls or the traditional edifices we still call church. I wanted to be part of a relational community where church was a way of life that gives witness to the kingdom before those who know nothing about the kingdom.
That church became Life on the Vine (www.lifeonthevine.org). Soon after it started, Geoff and his wife, Cyd, joined us. We’ve been leading this community ever since. Several others have joined us along the way, and we’ve sent two other communities out to be planted in neighborhoods and helped others as well. During these years, we’ve been asked over and over again to talk about church in mission in a post-Christianized world. There have been literally hundreds of these theological and practical conversations along the way with people from all over North America.
Somewhere in the middle of this journey we encountered the fracturing of these many conversations. Our various conversation partners were dividing between those formerly known as Emergent and those who had emerged within the Neo-Reformed resurgence, most notably gathering around The Gospel Coalition, an Internet-based network of like minded Neo-Reformed leaders. (Please see note 2 in the Introduction for why we have chosen to refer to these friends by the moniker Neo-Reformed.) We observed firsthand the clashing of Emergent and Neo-Reformed visions and how they were coalescing around two opposing ways of thinking about church in mission. As things went on, neither option seemed capable of providing direction for us. From our point of view, both sides seemed to lack the ability to engage, that is, bring the transforming work of God in Christ across boundaries to those outside the influence of the Christian church. We needed guidance for on-the-ground missional engagement. Our churches were engaging issues of injustice, sexual confusion, pluralism of religions, and conflict that had now become part of regular life in the newly post-Christianized cultures of North America. What was the gospel in this situation? Where is the kingdom? How is God revealed in these places?
It is out of this journey that this book came into being.
The Process of Writing This Book
These past twelve years, I (Dave) have been assembling stuff—notes, lectures, presentations, blog posts—reflecting on the issues of the church making its way on this journey. Through teaching classes at Northern Seminary, coaching church plants, blogging, and copastoring, I had accumulated pages of reflections. Dialogues with Brian McLaren, Tim Keller, Tony Jones, Ed Stetzer, Alan Hirsch, and Mark Driscoll (whether online, in person, or through writing about them) were provoking discernments for the church in mission. And so somewhere between Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity, published in 2010, and John Piper’s “farewell Rob Bell” tweet in 2011 (at the publication of Bell’s Love Wins), two significant publishing events that drew attention to the Neo-Reformed/Emergent divide, I remember talking with an agent about how to pull all of this together. I wanted to offer some of these hard-won on-the-ground discernments to those who, like me, had grown weary of the fracturing and the bipolar options.
One day, I met Geoff at the local McDonald’s to talk and get feedback on my ideas for gathering this material together. All I really remember is that Geoff proposed “prodigal Christianity” for the organizing principle of the book. I was already familiar with Karl Barth’s (a famous German theologian) notion of the Son going into “the far country” of sinful humanity in order to return humanity back to the Father (a play on the parable about the prodigal son). This radical, excessive, prodigal journey of God in the Son compromises neither his divine nor his human nature. God fully enters our fallen context. This principle, which drove much of Barth’s missional description of God, seemed to galvanize much of what I was working on. It organized all the notes and lectures beautifully, offering a way beyond the impasses of either the emerging church or the Neo-Reformed. The more we talked about it in the following weeks, the more I liked it. In fact, we talked about writing it together. It couldn’t have made more sense.
And so this book was born. In McDonald’s.
Starting with my main themes, Geoff organized them into the outline for the book. We worked several weeks on that. Then, starting with my notes from teaching the missional theology class at Northern Seminary as well as other classes, I drafted the chapters with the stories I felt important. Geoff then revised those rough drafts, adding an occasional story from his perspective (he’s twenty years my junior). He also developed much of the biblical theology that undergirds the book. I revised Geoff’s revisions, and then Sheryl Fullerton, our wonderful editor at Jossey-Bass, did a further edit. One of our mutual friends from the Vine, Gordon Hackman, helped with a final edit, along with Geoff. All in all, the final result is a book that reads well and accomplishes much more than what I could have accomplished on my own. I’m convinced the writing is seamless, the theology better, and the perspective broader because Geoff and I wrote this book together.
Some Warnings
What has resulted is this book, Prodigal Christianity, which proposes a way of being Christian: in missional communities who live in such a way that we invite the kingdom of God into our lives and the neighborhoods around us. It asks anew the questions: What is the gospel? Where is the kingdom? How is God revealed in the Son and the Spirit? It recognizes the advances made in the past fifteen years from the various Emergent and Neo-Reformed groups. But it asks us to go further, to recognize the lacks in these theologies for mission. The book does not seek a compromise middle ground between these two camps; it proposes a way beyond them that learns from both but defies the categories of each. So be forewarned: this book will probably be looked at as liberal by the Neo-Reformed and as fundamentalist by the Emergents, but we hope you can avoid those labels as you read this book.
We could label the way forward that we propose in this book as “evangelical Anabaptist” or “radical evangelical.” For those who find these words troublesome, again, be warned. The book is evangelical in the way of the pioneering evangelicals of the twentieth century who believed unashamedly in the gospel that transforms lives and society. In the words of the old hymn, we believe “Jesus saves.” Yet it is also radical in the sense of the radical Anabaptist reformers of the sixteenth century in Europe who knew, in a time of massive upheaval, that Christians must leave the comfortable structures of the past and live together radically under Christ’s Lordship for the sake of mission. We must trust the Lord of the harvest and give up control of a lot of things evangelicals have sought to control in the past thirty years. In these ways, this book is both markedly evangelical and intensely radical.
Be forewarned as well that we offer no step-by-step process in this book to change our churches or our lives. Rather, we seek to shape imagination for the way God is working in the world. This, we suggest, will naturally lead to new ways of being God’s people in the world. But it will not look the same for everyone, and the steps needed in each context will be decidedly different. If you’re looking for a solution to the problems of your local church, you need read no further.
This is not to say that Prodigal Christianity does not provide some pointers to help us live the gospel anew in our contexts. The point of the book is to fund imagination for Christians to patiently inhabit our contexts, discern God’s work, and practice the kingdom in our neighborhoods. The book challenges us to inhabit the world differently than we do now, build relationships differently, and allow God, through Jesus Christ by the Spirit, to bring the kingdom in over the long term until Christ comes again (1 Corinthians 15:25). As a result, I suspect that if the message of this book sticks, we shall put a different emphasis on discipleship and the way we do that discipleship in our churches. We will focus on leading Christians into living under God’s reign in our everyday lives together for God’s mission in the world.
This book refuses to exclude anyone. So there are no polarizing arguments in this book. Although we critique both our Emergent and Neo-Reformed friends, we affirm each of them for what they have taught us. We invite everyone from all kinds and sizes of churches to join us in this journey, take a look at ourselves, and seek a way of life that can engage the mission fields of our post-Christian West.
Finally, I warn anyone who thinks we write as authors who have figured it out. As “chastened sojourners,” we confess we have yet to fully experience much of what is in this book. But we’ve seen glimpses, and we live expectantly that these glimmers are harbingers. But this journey in many ways has also just begun for us. By writing this book, we do not invite you to imitate us in any way. We invite you to join with us on this journey, let us join up with yours, or both. As evangelical Anabaptists, we submit the entirety of this book to the Lordship of Christ, one another, and you for feedback, pushback, and clarification. Let us work together for a new faithfulness for our time.
Special Thanks to Some Special People
Special thanks go to Northern Seminary and all my students down through the years who have listened, critiqued, written papers, and encouraged me by their radical lives and ministries. Special thanks to Sheryl Fullerton, our editor at Jossey-Bass, who was an exceptional editor and encouraging; Scott Boren, our agent and provocateur; Gordon Hackman, who helped us with editing; Matt Tebbe, Cyd Holsclaw, and Ty Grigg who read parts of the manuscript and gave us feedback; and of course to Life on the Vine, our church, where we learned so much and have so much more to learn about leading people into the kingdom. We also thank Peace of Christ church in Westmont, Illinois, and Church of the Shepherd in Hyde Park, Chicago, two communities sent out by Life on the Vine that have also helped us learn a great deal about the kingdom coming in different contexts.
There are a lot of stories in this book. We have changed the names, genders, and even surrounding circumstances slightly in them in order to protect each person’s privacy. Thanks especially to Drew Marshall of the Drew Marshall radio show for permission to use “A Young Seminary Student Wants to Know If He Should Still Go into Ministry Considering He Is a Celibate Pedophile” from his website.
I thank Rae Ann, my wife, for supporting my work and rolling with the ebbs and flows of being married to an eccentric pastor/apostle/professor. She continues to join in when moves are hard and change is continual. She’s put up with many weeks when I have had to work too much on this book. And to my son, Max, who inspires me with the ways he grows to love and know God each day. Thanks for growing and loving even when Daddy has been busy.
Geoff thanks his wife, Cyd, for all her love, support, and patience while he worked on this book even while finishing his doctorate. She never complained about his early morning commutes to school or the late nights writing and studying. Geoff also thanks his sons, Soren and Tennyson, who are a continual source of joy and wonder as they teach him about the Fatherhood of God.
INTRODUCTION: FOLLOWING JESUS INTO THE FAR COUNTRY—THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT
On a humid Chicago summer night in 2007, forty people from our church, Life on the Vine in Chicago’s northwest suburbs, gathered for another Friday night town meeting. These meetings could be called by church members any time a controversial issue needed to be addressed by the church community as a whole. The topic for the night? Sexual brokenness and how we were dealing with it as a church community. Issues of sexual abuse and brokenness run deep and are shrouded in much darkness. But tonight we gathered to hear stories of redemption and hope, forgiveness and freedom. Individuals shared their brokenness, shame, and embarrassment. We lamented the isolation and invisibility of victims that invalidates their hurts and silences their voices. And we discussed the overly prudish restrictions around sex and sexuality enforced by churches that do not know how to deal with it in any other way. Two hours later, we were all a bit shocked at how personally we had connected to each other and surprised at how intimately we had shared our lives. Closing with a time of prayer, we walked out under a stunning star-filled sky, hopeful that life truly can spring from darkness.
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
