Marginal Christianity

http://www.reclaimingthemission.com/going-beyond-the-current-polarities-an-immoderate-proposal/ March 18, 2013 davidfitch Reply As Christians in N. America, we face stark new challenges related to our inherited ways of being church. I’m talking about the cultural challenges to truth, poor perception of Christians in the public, pluralism, a loss of sanctification/discipleship practice in the face of consumerism, alternative sexualities, and our participation in bringing justice to the world (to name just a few). As we seek to respond to these challenges for Mission, it seems we are locked in between two options: conservative or progressive, stretched out on a continuum. On the one hand, there are those who want to return to older Reformation articulations of the faith while re-applying these understandings to engaging Mission. On the other hand, there are those who seek relevance by updating their faith along with their prac...

          The first four signposts F & H identify for our search for a prodigal Christianity deal with a journey into the life of the missional triune God – our context, God’s mission, missional Jesus, and missional witness.   How we make this journey is the subject of the next three signposts:   scripture, gospel, and church.           Signpost Five takes on the contentious issue of scripture.   F & H begin to develop a new approach in line with the narrative and missional theology they deem integral to prodigal Christianity.   Scripture, contrary to the tenor of much biblical study in the last three hundred years, is a source/resource for our journey that we cannot control but must proclaim and live.   No matter how closely we read the text and grasp its language and teaching in detail, the text never becomes an object we can domesticate and (worse) use...

          In their new book, Prodigal Christianity:   10 Signposts into the Missional Future, David Fitch and Geoff Holsclaw point the way into a genuinely “missional future.”   They situate their work in our North American context in which two particular vision of the theology and mission of the two form a continuum.   On the right end of this continuum is the resurgent Neo-Reformed movement (e,g., The Gospel Coalition) and on the left end resides the Emergent/Emerging church movement.   These movements and the numerous variations along this continuum are symbiotically related by cause and effect in a variety of ways.   They exist on a single continuum according to Fitch & Holsclaw (hereafter F & H) because they are each committed to the same “operating system . . . a bygone cultural consensus of Christian dominance that no longer exists.” (Kindle Location 496).      ...

David Fitch and Geoff Holsclaw locate their new book, Prodigal Christianity: 10 Signposts into the Missional Frontier , in the context of a North American Christianity whose most vital streams at present seem to be the Emerging Church movement, on the one hand, and the Neo-Reformed movement, on the other. Fitch and Holsclaw (F & H hereafter) see these two movements, divergent as they are, function on the same “operating system.” “ Although each has promised us a “third way” beyond the conservative-liberal theological wars, they nonetheless keep us trapped within a bygone cultural consensus of Christian dominance that no longer exists. One side assumes people will listen to us as we speak about justice in “the way of Jesus.” The other side assumes people will listen to us because we speak of orthodoxy and the Bible. The truth is that these ways make sense only to those who are already convinced. In contrast, we sense the need to escape these kinds of cultural Christianity...