Marginal Christianity

“That is the first question: no longer to know whether God exists, but to exist as Christian communities.” So writes the French Jesuit writer Michel de Certeau in an essay “How is Christianity Thinkable Today” (Theology Digest 19, 1971).  F. C. Bauerschmidt glosses this statement: “One cannot even pose a question about God without the existence of a community for which such a question would be of concern, and it is the existence of such a community as much as the existence of God which is in question for Christians today” (“The Abrahamic Voyage: Michel de Certeau and Theology,” Modern Theology 12:1, 1996, 10). Dietrich Bonhoeffer poses the same question this way in his notes for a book he never lived to write: “What do we really believe? I mean, believe in such a way that our lives depend on it?” (Letters and Papers from Prison (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works) Fortress Press. Kindle Edition: 486). This is the question David Fitch wrestles with in his new book The Church of Us vs. The...

David Fitch’s Faithful Presence sketches a vision of church oriented around the presence of God. God’s “real presence” to steal a trope from Eucharistic theology. Filled with both analysis and anecdote his work helpfully weaves a tapestry of church life that fills out a genuinely missional understanding of the church in practice, something which missional theologians have struggled to do. Among the many virtues of Faithful Presence are -a biblical theology oriented around God’s presence, -a vision of life in Christ rooted in radical trust in God’s actual presence in our midst leading us mediated by the Eucharist and the faithful practices of gifted koinonia, and -a threefold differentiation of sites of ministry/mission into the close circle, the dotted circle, and the half circle. Within this overall profile Fitch offers seven disciplines that train and position Christians in their churches to grow toward the vision he sketches. The seven disciplines – the Lord’s Table...

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).      ...