Abraham’s Footsteps

This is another diagram for an event that’s coming up. I must apologize and say that it is dreadfully simplistic and that I am using it to try and sum up two thousand years of Church history. My points therefore are general and lost of exceptions could be pointed out in each category what I am trying to illustrate are what I consider to be two prominent and damaging trends in church history
The first is Ecclesiology - Missiology = Christendom Church. In the Christendom era the whole population was assumed to be Christian or forced to be Christian, remember Charlemagne and his “baptize or die” style of evangelism. Church attendance was mandated by the State and infant baptism reinforced the idea that you were born into a Christian state. Under this understanding the church was mainly pastoral, it existed to look after already Christians. Mission tended to take place at the extremities of empires by specialist monastic orders and eventually protestant missionary organisations. My main point here is that missiology (understanding and being involved in mission) is not integral to ecclesiology (how we understand and exists as church) Obviously into the modern era the forced aspects of church attendance dropped away but the church still I would argue, acted as if its culture is Christian and its main role is pastoral, a provider of religious services, hatches, matches and dispatches. Evangelism here is stirring up people’s latent faith, it assumes that most people in the general population accept the Christian worldview. The twice a year “revivals” of American evangelical churches are perhaps the clearest examples of this at work. Evangelism takes places at special times, by special people.
The second trend is Missiology - Ecclesiology = Para-church. I am characterizing this as “para-church” but there are some churches which operate this way. William Carey sort of launched the Protestant cross cultural missionary movement (I say sort of because the Moravians were ahead of him but haven’t got the credit they deserve) with a famous book, in that work he argued that Christians should band together to send missionaries to the heathen. The interesting thing is that the church is not mentioned by Carey. This thinking was magnified by developing para-church organisations back in the West which were very evangelistic in nature but saw little practical need to connect converts to churches. I have been at too many “crusades” as we used to call them where evangelism was about getting people to sign up for an eternal insurance policy by going out the front and the need for connection to the Body of Christ was absent. Now I know things have got better but my main point here is that in this understanding the church is not integral to the Gospel. I believe the church is part of the Gospel, as one church father said you can’t have God for a Father without having the Church for a Mother. The result of this trend is that is has been claimed that huge numbers of people have been “saved” and yet we have never seen those people connected to the Body of Christ.
SO WHAT? Well I believe that these two trends have combined in contemporary Christianity in the West to make it ineffectual and unattractive in the face of the developing Post-modern culture. Those influenced by the Christendom Church trend still somehow think that the culture is latently Christian and that just by doing what it has always done the Church can impact society. This trend blinds us to the need to realise that we live in mission field and probably one of the most difficult in the world. Lesslie Newbiggin said that mission in the West was uniquely hard because it faces the only culture born from a percieved rejection of Christianity. On the other hand the post-modern search for community means that the individualistic gospel of the para-church evangelistic efforts falls largely on deaf years and I would say ultimately does not grow authentic disciples but attracts spiritual consumers who believe that God, and perhaps the church, exist to meet their needs.