Alan J. Roxburgh - Practices for the Refounding of Gods People: The Missional Challenge of the West

PRACTICES FOR THE
REFOUNDING OF GODS PEOPLE

PRACTICES

FOR THE

REFOUNDING OF

GODS

PEOPLE

The Missional Challenge
of the West

A LAN R OXBURGH &
M ARTIN R OBINSON

Copyright 2018 by Alan Roxburgh and Martin Robinson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

Unless otherwise noted, the Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Church Publishing
19 East 34th Street
New York, NY 10016
www.churchpublishing.org

Cover design by Jennifer Kopec, 2Pug Design
Typeset by Denise Hoff
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Roxburgh, Alan J., author.

Title: Practices for the refounding of Gods people : the missional challenge of the west / Alan Roxburgh and Martin Robinson.

Description: New York : Church Publishing, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017061192 (print) | LCCN 2018014344 (ebook) | ISBN 9780819233851 (ebook) | ISBN 9780819233844 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Christianity and culture. | Mission of the church. | Missions.

Classification: LCC BR115.C8 (ebook) | LCC BR115.C8 R668 2018 (print) | DDC 261--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017061192

Printed in the United States of America

This book addresses the nature of a missiological engagement with Western culture in all its paradoxical, conflicted complexity. What we call the West was formed out of Christian imagination. The modern West emerged from a trajectory that dispelled that imagination in what is called modernitys wager, which consists of the belief that all life can be lived well without the need for Gods agency. The practices and beliefs of the modern West were shaped by the conviction that the future lies in our own hands. Human agency became the primary driver of social, cultural, political, and economic life.

The West is like a child becoming independent of her parents. Imagine a parent teaching her daughter to ride a bike. At the beginning the parent reassures the daughter that she is (thinkthe Christian story) holding the bike solidly; she has no need to worry about falling and being hurt. For the daughter, it is a passage to adulthood, a step into maturity, a memory to look back on with the smiles of a grown-up. The parents goal is straightforward: provide security as her self-confidence grows. Gradually the parent takes her hands off as the daughter joyously rides down the road with no assistance. The modern West has taken a similar view of its Christian past. Were all grown adults no longer in need of that kind of support. Were mature agents in control of our own destiny. For those who need it, theres still a religious tradition. God has not disappeared but become useful: a resource in our journey to independence. God, however, has nothing to do with the systems, structures, and operations of everyday life. Few foresaw this consequence as the modern West was forming out of its earlier Christian narrative, which is why Nietzsche has remained such a prescient voice. He declared that we killed God. For some, his language is too strong to accept. What we can say is that the West has transformed the God of the Christian tradition into a merely useful support or addendum to human action. God is still here, cheering in the stadium as we push ahead with our agendas.

We argue, in this book, that modernitys wager has been far more corrosive to human thriving than any of its architects would have imagined. All of us in the West are part of the unraveling of this wager. Further, we propose that this unraveling is only part of the story. There is another story forming within the unraveling. It is about a ferment and bubbling happening across the West within which God is continuing to make all things new. The missiological challenge before the churches is to embrace this ferment in the confidence that God is the primary agent in the sea-change that is remaking the West. God is present in this disorienting change. Lesslie Newbigin asked, Can the West be converted? The response is yes, but make no mistake: the missiological challenge is not to focus on fixing or reforming the churches but to participate with the Spirit in the refounding of an unmoored society.

The West and its Euro-tribal churches have entered a time of unraveling that questions the nature of Christian identity and the meaning of the West. This is more than a description of historical fact or a nostalgic longing for what once was. Far more is at stake. With the loss of the Christian narrative and the ascendance of modernitys wager, the West has lost its way to the extent that many of its citizens feel unmoored and cast adrift. Modernitys promises have lost their power to deliver. Questions of a missiological engagement with the West are not parochial; they are not primarily about the churches and their survival. The questions are about Christian vocation in the restoration and healing of all creation. This is the core vocational challenge confronting Christians. Larry Siedentop, Faculty Lecturer in Political Thought at Oxford, questions:

Does it still make sense to talk about the West? People who live in nations once described as part of Christendomwhat many would now call the post-Christian worldseem to have lost their moral bearings. We no longer have a persuasive story to tell ourselves about our origins and development.

Niall Ferguson states it in these terms:

I really got to the point about the first decade of the twenty-first century, just as it was drawing to a close: that we are living through the end of 500 years of Western ascendancy.

Paul Weston, in reflecting on the intellectual work of Lesslie Newbigin comments:

When Lesslie Newbigin returned from India in 1974 after 36 years of missionary experience, he was struck by what he came to describe as the disappearance of hope in the culture of the West. Always the missionary, Newbigins quest to find out what had happened to produce such an effect propelled him into a program of study and reflection. As he would later describe it, this process led him to the judgement that the culture of the West was the most challenging missionary frontier of our time.

This book is not about how Christians might contribute to restoring the West. Our concern is about how God is calling the churches to participate in the healing of the world. In the West, too many of the children of modernity live without a narrative core that provides hope or direction. A widespread malaise, a disappearance of hope, has only deepened since Newbigin wrote. This book addresses ideas that might reorder Christian life in response to this challenge. The churches have little to say to the late modern culture of the West. They are little more than clubs where people gather for forms of personal reinforcement and are profoundly disconnected from the massive challenges of our culture. Christians in the West can discover ways to act in the conviction that God is the primary agent; only from this vantage point can we join God in the restoration of life in the West.

Throughout its history, the Church has faced crises of meaning and identity in all kinds of contexts. In the early 1950s, Newbigin presented the Kerr Lectures at Trinity College, Glasgow. In that time just after the end of World War II, there was a stark realization among Christian leaders that churches in the West had finally lost their identity as meaningful participants in the shaping of Western societies. They had become loosely compacted fellowships providing only a minimal, even token, part of the life of their members. They were mostly clubs with little to no effect on the wider society. Not much has changed. This loss of capacity for churches to influence and shape the lives of people in the West has, in fact, become more exacerbated. The societies of the West see churches as largely irrelevant to their search for a way out of the multiplying crises of Western life. Newbigin wrote of the need for Christian communities to be shaped around an eschatological and missionary imagination. The identity of churches cannot be formed around notions of religious clubseven very useful clubsbut from the perspective of Gods actions in the remaking of the world and the healing of life (eschatological). Such an orientation means that the Churchs fundamental character is a community participating in the mission of God. Newbigins response to the crisis of the churches in the West remains before us. Augustine framed his great