Bøger i Christian mission & modern culture serien

What is the church, and what is essential to it particularly in a post-Christian age?In contrast to "the City", that is, the world (including the hedonism and narcissism of popular culture) that virtually all human beings now inhabit, the author calls upon the church to remember that it is "Another City" that does not compromise itself by giving allegiance to any political entity that belongs to this world.Instead, the church must have the courage to live, like Israel of old, in the diaspora as a distinct minority, remaining an uncompromising and faithful servant of God's final (though still future) triumph in the risen Christ.

The church in our post-Christendom era needs different models for conceptualizing its own identity and its relationship to the rest of society. Philip Kenneson sets forth a model that suggests that the church''s role in contemporary society is to serve as a "contrast-society." In this model, the church is animated by a different spirit than that which animates "the world." Moreover, the "contrast-society" model has tremendous missional promise in that its embodied life in the world is its witness to the world.Kenneson acknowledges that this model is sometimes rejected by both Christians and non-Christians because it appears to be too "sectarian." He therefore asks, What are we claiming about a particular group when we call it sectarian? He argues that critics who regard a "contrast-society" church as sectarian often operate with untenable understandings of rationality, culture, politics, religion, and critique.In a concluding chapter, Kenneson offers reflections on how moving "beyond sectarianism" allows us to see afresh some of the missional promise of the church-as-contrast-society model.Philip D. Kenneson is Assistant Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Milligan College and author of Selling Out the Church: The Dangers of Church Marketing.

Jane Collier and Raphael Esteban present a thoughtful and disturbing critique of Western culture. They see the West as obsessed by the "culture of economism"--a pervasive and often oppressive culture in which economic causes or factors become the main source of cultural meanings and values. Such economism, they point out, perpetrates inequality, injustice, divisions among people (especially rich and poor), and a host of other evils throughout the world.The culture of economism touches all of us and is, in fact, manifest also in the organizational culture of the church. In many respects, the church has allied itself with the culture of economism (complicity), participating in a shared history of conquest and oppression. But recent paradigm shifts at the organizational level in both the church (spawned by awareness that the Spirit works in all places and in all cultures) and economism (spawned by the awareness of the basic failure of economism and its institutions to produce human happiness and of its power to demolish so much that is good in the world) present a window of opportunity for mission.Collier and Esteban believe that mission within and to the "culture of economism" needs to be a mission of encounter in which each challenges the other to conversion. Such conversion does not necessarily imply the abandonment of power, but the abandonment of its misuses and the commitment to the pursuit of the good. At that point there is "no longer master and slave, Gentile and Jew, male and female, but all are one in Christ Jesus."Jane Collier is an economist and theologian who lectures in Management Studies at the University of Cambridge. Raphael Esteban, M.Afr., is a theologian and missiologist who lectures at the Missionary Institute, London, on the social and economic context of mission.