Marginal Christianity

Nov 01st, 2015 0 Comments by Leonard Allen -  It mostly hasn’t hit us yet that we are living in a post-Christendom culture. The cultural status and power that Christianity in America held from about the 1850s to the 1960s is virtually gone. In Christendom, the church occupies a central and influential place in society; after Christendom, it gets pushed to the margins, out of the place of power. And that’s where we find ourselves now—more and more at the margins. So let’s be clear: Any sort of Christian establishment has definitively ended. As David Bentley Hart put it recently, “we now live in the time after Christendom, among the rapidly vanishing fragments of its material culture, bound to it by only a few lingering habits of thought.” Christianity’s loss of cultural power in America is waking us up to the reality that we are in a missionary situation in our own culture. And this is forcing us to rethink our mission, our theology, and our priorities. http://www.l...

http://www.postost.net/2014/06/missional-pneumatology-spirit-active-outside-church Submitted by Andrew on Mon, 02/06/2014 - 20:38        The piece I wrote last week on the difficulties that post-charismatics can have finding an honest place for the gifts of the Spirit in a justice-oriented “missional” framework provoked a rather aggrieved response from Michael Frost on Facebook . That appears to have been largely a matter of misunderstanding, for which I must take some responsibility. It was cleared up, more or less, in the comments. But as part of his response, in order to show that the missional movement has a strong pneumatology, Michael put up a series of excerpts from his chapter in a book called Following Fire , edited by Cheryl Catford. There is much in this material that seems uncontroversial—or perhaps better, controversial in a good way. This paragraph, for example, sums up rather well at least part of what I was trying to say in...