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“Missional may well be the best yet from author Alan Roxburgh as he prophetically reclaims theNewbigin engagement of gospel and culture as the key to rediscovering what it really means to bechurch. This engagement is compellingly framed in theological terms from the Luke-Acts texts asreaders are deeply challenged and creatively invited to ‘join God in their neighborhoods.’ A must-readfor anyone who take seriously the challenge and opportunity facing the church in the West in light of ithaving lost home field advantage.”

—Craig Van Gelder, PhD, Professor of Congregational Mission,Luther Seminary, Saint Paul, MN

“I’ve read Al Roxburgh over the years and, taking nothing away from his previous work, this isRoxburgh’s finest to date. His take on Luke 10 is compelling. Filled with stories and theologicalprecision, this book takes us to new places for the future of Christ’s church in North America. It is sureto be a tour de force for the missional conversation. I am not being excessive when I say this book isbrilliant.”

—David Fitch, B. R. Lindner Professor of Evangelical Theology, Northern Seminary; author, TheEnd of Evangelicalism?

“Many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of things called ‘missional,’ but Roxburghdeconstructs our modern strategic orderliness, claims we often ask the wrong questions, and lures usinto Luke’s narratives. Roxburgh posits that our ‘language house,’ our whole imagination about whatGod is up to and how we might participate, needs to be upended through some rather odd activities likelistening to neighbors and rehearing some biblical narratives.”

—Rev. Mark Lau Branson, EdD, Homer Goddard Associate Professor of Ministry of the Laity,Fuller Theological Seminary

“The term ‘missional’ is in serious danger of becoming all things to all people and thereby signifyingnothing. In this book, Alan Roxburgh offers an important corrective to this situation by providing aconcrete, practical, and theologically sophisticated conception of the term in conjunction with a freshimagination around the idea of joining God in the neighborhood for the sake of the world. This is thebest book yet from one of the leading voices in the missional conversation.”

—John R. Franke, Theologian in Residence, First Presbyterian Church of Allentown; generalcoordinator, the Gospel and Our Culture Network

“Roxburgh daringly puts the church in its place . . . literally. Missional invites us to relocate the centerof missional life from churches to our places and neighborhoods. Drawing on a lifetime of missionalpractice and study, Roxburgh brings together missional theology with real world stories of missionalpractitioners. A must-read for any community seeking to live even more missionally.”

—Dwight J. Friesen, Associate Professor of Practical Theology,Mars Hill Graduate School, Seattle; author, Thy Kingdom

Connected; co-author, Routes and Radishes

“Many books are worth reading but few worth absorbing. This book falls into the latter category, and ifyou allow it to, it will take you into a new world and give you eyes to see what God is doing all aroundyou. It will put ‘mission’ into your understanding of ‘missional.’”

—M. Scott Boren, pastor; author, Missional Small Groups

“Missional is a must-read for pastors and church leaders who want a biblical framework and practicalprocess for being the church in our time, not just doing church in the cookie-cutter style of other

churches. Because Missional begins by asking the right questions and not giving the right answers, weare drawn into our own conversations about what it means to be sent, to move back into ourneighborhoods, and to spark the missional imaginations of our church members for the sake of thegospel.”

—Mike McClenahan, senior pastor, Solana Beach Presbyterian Church,board member, Presbyterian Global Fellowship and Amor Ministries

© 2011 by Allelon

Published by Baker Booksa division of Baker Publishing GroupP.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287www.bakerbooks.com

E-book edition created 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or byany means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The onlyexception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

ISBN 978-1-4412-1459-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture is taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973,1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

Scripture marked NKJV is taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used bypermission. All rights reserved.

Scripture marked NRSV is taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989, Division of ChristianEducation of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rightsreserved.

Series Preface

Allelon is a network of missional church leaders, schools, and parachurchorganizations that envisions, inspires, engages, resources, trains, and educatesleaders for the church and its mission in our culture. Said simply, together weare a movement of missional leaders.

We have a particular burden for people involved in new forms of missionalcommunities (sometimes called “emerging”), people starting newcongregations within denominational systems, and people in existingcongregations who are working toward missional identity and engagement.Our desire is to encourage, support, coach, and offer companionship formissional leaders as they discern new models of church capable of sustaininga living and faithful witness to the gospel in our contemporary world.

The word allelon is a common but overlooked Greek word that isreciprocal in nature. In the New Testament it is most often translated “oneanother.” Christian faith is not an individual matter. Everything in the life ofthe church is done allelon for the sake of the world. A Christian communityis shaped by the allelon sayings in the Scriptures, a few of which include loveone another, pursue one another’s good, and build up one another.

As a network of leaders who work with one another, leaders from multiplecontinents are currently working on a multiyear research project calledMission in Globalizing Culture. Through this project they are askingquestions about the formation of leaders in a radically changing context andthe demands of a multinarrative world.

Allelon also collaborates with the Roxburgh Missional Network in itsresearch projects and in providing on-the-ground tools for leaders at all levelsof church life. Through its website and consulting and training processes it isfurthering the missional conversation in many parts of the world.

In addition, Allelon has partnered with Baker Books and Baker Academicto produce resources that equip the church with the best thinking andpractices on missional life. The book you now hold is one of those pieces thatcontribute to the missional conversation and its practical outworking in localchurches. I (Alan) have known and worked off and on with Scott for morethan fifteen years. In that time, he has passionately sought ways in whichsmall groups can be effective structures for the formation of people to be

what Lesslie Newbigin described as a sign, foretaste, and witness of God’sfuture in Jesus Christ. I have watched Scott wrestle with the big issues aroundforming missional groups at the heart of local churches. He understands howmost small groups have been turned into little more than experiences forindividuals and fail to participate in God’s great purposes in creation. Scotthas worked in local churches to produce something very different. This is nota “how-to-guide” as much as a handbook for leaders wondering how toempower and energize a community seeking to witness to the kingdom in themidst of their lives.

Mark Priddy and Al Roxburgh

IntroductionWelcome to an Unthinkable World

The argument of this book is that we have entered a world for which thechurches of North America are woefully unprepared. These churches are, infact, seeking to address this new, unthinkable world with strategies shaped inthe twentieth century and with some of the deepest convictions of modernity.[1]

Further, I will argue that in this unthinkable space we do not need to jumpinto some new, so-called postmodern idealism. Instead we must return tosome of the most basic imaginations given to us in the New Testament. Wewill look at the experience of Jesus’s sending out the seventy disciples intothe towns and villages of Galilee (Luke 10:1–12) and discover clues giventhere about how to navigate in an unthinkable world.[2] The temptation,almost as if it is a default built into our DNA, is either to imagine we cansolve the challenges of an unthinkable world using the categories ofleadership that have worked for us in the past or to believe the new gurus ofthe church who suggest we need to abandon all the things we’ve done andbuy their new visions of how things ought to be. As we begin this journey,some examples of how we tend to engage an unthinkable time will help guideour conversation.

A Lesson from History

In the mid-1930s the War to End All Wars had been over for more than adecade and much had changed since the Armistice in 1919. Following theVersailles Treaty came reparations, the disarmament of Germany, theformation of the League of Nations (to ensure that war could never break outagain in the world), the redrawing of the map of Europe (to say nothing aboutthe maps of the rest of the world, especially the Middle East where in thisperiod so much of our current, indecipherable, international challenges beganto emerge) to satisfy the victors, and a recognition that a new Europe wasemerging in the east, and with it a most potent enemy—Soviet Communism.

Indeed, the Europe of the late thirties was either enthralled with orthreatened by the new Communist movement growing under Stalin and then

Lenin in Russia. For example, the American heiress Beatrice Webb moved toParis, then London, where she and her husband set up salons for the avant-garde who regarded the new Soviet Russia as the vanguard of the future.Others viewed Soviet Russia as an emerging and terrifying threat to the freeworld.

Russia held the attention of leaders in Britain and France. Though the otherEuropean extreme, Fascism, was growing in a resurgent Germany, and Spainwas embroiled in civil war, the biggest concern by far was Russia andMarxism. In this interwar period, while Germany rearmed and few attendedto the voices that cried out about the destruction under Stalin, most of Europewas anxious about Stalin but wanted to placate him to win support againstGermany.

Meanwhile, Germany was militarizing at an alarming rate. Its factoriesmanufactured tanks at a breakneck pace. By 1938 France already hadincontrovertible evidence that Germany was planning a massive tank assault.German military tacticians had written books outlining the details of such anattack along with maps showing the route the German Panzer movementwould take through the forests of Belgium and deep into France. French spieshad witnessed German tank divisions practicing these tactics in Poland andreported their findings to the French military. These spies, placed insideGerman military planning headquarters, had gathered enough information toconfirm that the Belgian forests would be the attack route.

None of this information, however, affected French determination of whatGermany would do. French generals had been shaped by the trauma of 1914–1919, when Germany came so close to defeating France and millions of braveFrench lives were lost in the trenches. They could not forget their ownhistory. The result was that the French planning staff expected and preparedfor a German attack across the eastern frontier and so they built the MaginotLine, a series of forts and defense systems designed to keep Germany at bayuntil the bulk of the French army could outflank them. France prepared onthe basis of the last war; its leaders could not imagine any other scenario butan assault across the Maginot Line.

At the same time, Germany had its own memories of the Great War and itsaftermath. The German imagination was shaped by humiliation and theconviction that its own military elite had betrayed the German people bymaking peace. In Hitler and much of the regular army lay a determination toright the wrongs of 1919 and return Germany to the glory of its past geist

(spirit). Driven by this imagination, the German military chose to plan theunthinkable—a massive tank attack through the Belgian forests into France.They went on maneuvers, created innovative methods for moving betweentrees, and built tanks that could move quickly through forests.

When presented with intelligence concerning German plans, Frenchmilitary and political leadership chose to discount it and focus on theMaginot Line. Not able to imagine the unthinkable, they allowed thememories of the previous war to shape their plans for the next one. But theevents of 1939 would show how disastrous France’s long-establishedassumptions about warring with Germany really were. It was a differentworld, and they could not adequately address the crisis.

This dilemma of using outdated methods to meet a current challenge is nowfacing Christian life in the West.

Seeing Our Situation

A group of pastors were working together with a missional leadership-readiness report our organization had created, based on our 360 Discoveryprocess they’d taken several weeks earlier.[3] One section of the report looksat a leader’s capacity to engage the context in which his or her church islocated—the neighborhoods and communities where members live and work.

I’ll never forget the comment of one of the pastors. Lee, in his early forties,pastors a small church with a long history. He had been sitting silent formuch of the morning but, when he spoke—quietly, pensively, and withoutfanfare—his words were like the live end of a high-voltage wire. A fissureseemed to open in the room and it couldn’t be closed again.

He said, “I’ve just had an epiphany! Our church is across the road from ahigh school and every year at the time of football and basketball games orgraduation, we put on events for the school. It’s really nice, with food andentertainment and so on. Lots of people from the community come; kids andtheir parents turn up to enjoy what we provide. But it just struck me: we canput these events on forever, but these people aren’t going to come and be apart of our church. And I have no idea what to do about it!”

Lee spoke without anger, accusation, or resignation. He simply saw thesituation for what it was. An attractional church (a church where the primaryenergy is focused on how to get people to come to church) will not connectwith growing numbers of people for whom church is nice to have around but

is not integral to the structures or expectations of everyday life. It is stillpossible to attract Christians from other churches to better programs. For a lotof other people, however, their involvement ends after they have enjoyed thedinners and/or special events the church offers them. These folks aren’tjoining. A different kind of church is needed to meet the needs of people likethis.

Disconnected

A call came from a young pastor down the valley from where I live inVancouver. We needed to follow up on an earlier conversation, so we agreedto connect at Earl’s restaurant, a hot spot in downtown Vancouver. When wegot there, all kinds of young adults were crowded around tables with beer andfood, engaged in loud, heated conversations.

The pastor brought along a friend who worked with young adults as asocial worker and therapist. They had gone to the same seminary together anumber of years before. In the course of our conversation, I asked the friend,who wore a turned-around baseball cap, where he was going to church. Thiselicited a familiar silence and momentary awkwardness. Finally, he said, “Idon’t go anywhere! It’s not that I don’t want to be part of a churchcommunity, but I just can’t connect with what happens in those placesanymore. I’ll probably join a house church with some friends and see wherethat goes.”

I wasn’t surprised by this response. I’ve heard it over and over again fromall kinds of people of all ages. I have friends who served effectively for yearsin Young Life; now in their early forties, they have checked out of church.

At a wedding reception I sat beside a woman in her fifties, an executive in afinancial organization, who had been raised a Mennonite and attended churchall her life. When I asked her that question, she looked at me with a painedexpression and said she couldn’t deal with the irrelevance of church anylonger.

After forty years of leadership in all kinds of church contexts, I have neverheard or felt such a level of disconnectedness with existing churches as I donow. What struck me was that the young social worker and older executiveweren’t angry or negative about Christian life. They weren’t carrying on adiatribe against the church. This was something different—there was alonging to be part of something that called for a deep involvement in gospel

living, but there was also a sadness because they sensed that, across a wholerange of church systems, this involvement just couldn’t be found.

The pastor and his friend told me about the seminary they’d attended. Eachwas in a graduating class of sixty to seventy people, all of whom were trainedto enter what they called “the ministry.” Ten years out, only one or two wereactually practicing “ministry” as full-time leaders in churches. This is astunning attrition rate for a conservative denomination rooted in anevangelical missions theology in North America.

I could tell story after story, and I suspect you could too, of people whohave dropped out of church. Something is happening and it’s not justgenerational. Christians are giving up on the church they have known. Theyfeel adrift, having come to the conclusion that it’s impossible to find a placeto practice the Christian life, except in small house or simple churches thatgather informally across the city. We have entered an unthinkable worldwhere we need a different kind of church.

This book articulates what might be involved in rethinking Christian life inan unthinkable world. It comes out of my own wrestling with questions aboutwhat God might be about in our neighborhoods, cities, towns, and villages. Itseeks to address questions about how we can faithfully engage during a timewhen so many of our churches have lost their capacity to engage the peoplein their communities.

1Coral Reefs, Garage Sales, and Other Mind-

Blowing DisturbancesGrappling with a New World

A friend of mine is a marine biologist. Tamara studies the oceans and the lifethat lies within them; more specifically, she studies how food chains interactwith one another. Now teaching at Dalhousie University in Halifax, she’straveled the world, scuba diving in some of the most beautiful waters on thisplanet. When she was home in Vancouver a while back, my wife, Jane, and Ihad supper with her and her folks. As we ate, we could look out across theGeorgia Strait to the San Juan Islands and beyond that to the mountains onVancouver Island. We talked about the oceans, and I recalled a trip Jane and Itook to northern Australia and the Whitsunday Islands in the Coral Sea. Wewent out to the Great Barrier Reef where I scuba dived for the first time inmy life and thought I’d found the meaning of life (for a brief moment). Wetalked about the coral reefs around the world, and Tamara’s comments aboutthem still haunt me.

She said they are dying, all of them, and there is nothing anyone can doabout it. Even if we started doing everything in our power to reverse globalwarming and global pollution, the factors were already in place for thedestruction of these beautiful reefs with their collection of fish.

I recalled swimming among thousands of small, colored fish as they turnedthis way and that through clear water. Awed, I was stunned and silent. Now Irealize I was in the midst of a delicate ecosystem that took billions of years toemerge and that was coming to an end. In less than a generation, it will all beswept away. What a startling thing to hear! I can still go to the reefs inAustralia or the Caribbean and scuba dive amid their beauty. I can continueto swim among them as if nothing has changed, as if they will all still bethere in the future. How do I get my head around the fact that in a generationthey’ll all be dead?

A Slow Death

The predicament of the coral reefs reminds me of the condition of the churchtoday, but the forthcoming death of the reefs is more than just a metaphor.Our planet is dying, and we humans have had a lot to do with it. If wecontinue on this course, certain species will disappear. As the earth warmsup, ice caps melt, weather becomes more extreme, and destructive patternsintensify. How do communities of God’s people care for the earth and honorthe creation as a gift?

I think about those dying reefs when people talk about successful “seeker”churches or the mega churches of North America. When I suggest thateverything has to change, people argue that there are still methods andstrategies to keep this church successful. Their implicit criticism comesthrough: Why are you so negative, always raising questions about the churchand its future? It’s as though people are swimming among the coral reefs, andfrom their perspective, everything looks fine—the reefs will last forever.They can’t see what is happening before their eyes.

I can sense the processes of change gathering momentum all about us, andmore than minor adjustments are needed. Up to this point the church hasdealt with loss of place and identity in the community by trying out bettermarketing, offering a coffee bar on Sunday morning, providing a greatervariety of options in terms of meeting personal taste in worship styles—introducing videos rather than sermons and candles where there had beennone before—establishing strategic planning, creating a multisite ministry,and deciding all we have to do is turn our attention from the inside to theoutside. All of that is window dressing, offering little to a world that israpidly losing its way, perishing in the midst of a sea of change none of uscan begin to understand. And we are silent, complicit in the plan to do morewindow dressing.

The list of issues confronting us is long and raises many hard questionsabout what it means to be the church in this time and what place the gospelhas in all this swirling change. These are the questions that can’t be put off.Yet our response to them is inadequate. Changing forms and establishingprograms are not what is needed. These got us into this mess in the firstplace.

Church leaders in places as far-flung and different as North America,Europe, Australia, Korea, and southern Africa are recognizing that the church

is now a lot like the Great Barrier Reef. We might have strategies for dressingit up to make it look more successful, but there is something wrong at thecore that causes many to wonder if there is any possibility of transforming thechurch in its current forms. I found myself asking these questions shortlyafter I left pastoral leadership more than a decade ago.

Over the past twenty-five years much has been written about the need forthe church to change; however, if we are to hear what God might be doing inthe massively shifting contexts in which we live, we must move beyondconversations about the church, about how to make it work, and aboutpatterns for success. I find most of these conversations are really seeking torestore the church to some imagined place in culture. I believe most of thequestions we keep asking and most of the books on making the church workall point to the wrong solutions. In this book I propose that what I call“church questions,” questions with a primary focus on the church, onlymisdirect us. At this point in our history, we need to be asking radicallydifferent questions: What is God up to in our neighborhoods andcommunities? How do we join with what God is doing in these places?Church questions are a subset of these far more important questions.

Coffee in False Creek on a Sunday Morning

One Sunday in early July, Jane and I drove across the Granville Bridge intothe False Creek area where Aaron, our son, and Sonia, his wife, lived in atownhouse complex. Our grandson, Owen, was just two months old. On thatbeautiful sunny day, the complex at 8th Avenue and Granville was hosting agarage sale.

We arrived around midmorning after everything had already been neatlylaid out on the sidewalk or gathered on separate tables in front of thetownhouse entrance. Neighbors sat in chairs watching over their goods andchatting with one another; others stood around as potential buyers came earlywith their Starbucks in hand to see what bargains might be had. An array ofbric-a-brac was available. Used Ikea kitchen chairs selling for five dollarseach, a lot of hardly used wedding gifts, an assortment of used novels (mostlyby Maeve Binchy and John Grisham) lined the sidewalk beside a huge,framed print of an Orca pod rising to the surface and blowing spouts of waterinto the air.

People were polite as they mingled to look at the cheap goods, engage inconversation, and discuss the assorted dogs they had in tow. And it wasfascinating how normal it all seemed—this Sunday-morning milling about ofneighbors and garage sale nomads.

Just a little farther down was Granville Island Market and then the FalseCreek developments along the water’s edge with their dense communities ofcondos and townhouses, and the seawall walk around the whole inlet thatwent into Stanley Park. Every spot was alive with people. In this city on aSunday morning, it was apparent that most folks were in coffee shops,running on the seawall, buying food at the market, or prowling tree-linedneighborhoods for garage sales and whatever else might be happening.

Apparently very few people were “in church” or even thought “church” hadany relevance. Just up the street, not three blocks away, stood Holy TrinityAnglican. From attending this church from time to time, I knew there mighthave been seventy or so people there that morning but not many more. To thewest another three or four blocks, hidden on a side street, was a littlePresbyterian church with probably even fewer in attendance. In each therewould be wonderful people; each would, in their own way, considerthemselves providing a wonderful “family” experience for any who mightventure into their “contemporary” or “traditional” services. I had learned thatmost of the people attending the Anglican church drive into the city fromother areas. Perhaps the same is true for the Presbyterian congregation aswell. It seemed obvious, however, that on this Sunday morning the real life ofthe city was not in the churches but outside at the garage sales, in the coffeeshops, along the seawalls, and in the markets.

Of course this wasn’t always so. And there still are places where you cansee a different reality. Churches down the valley from Vancouver inAbbottsford, for example, as well as the suburban churches farther south ofthe city in places like Tsawassen are full. I’ve no doubt a few of the mega-wannabes could grow even bigger in the Pacific Northwest. Threads of theold story, when church was a central part of Canadian culture, remain. Peoplewill still drive great distances to find the church of which they want to be apart.

Not that long ago lots of the people in the neighborhood where we sat thatmorning would have thought about going to church on Sunday morning, butthat inclination is pretty much gone. Not so long ago I had pastored a churchfilled with people. But on this Sunday I was sitting with my coffee at a

garage sale, holding my little grandson and watching the steady stream ofshoppers. I and a host of others of all ages had chosen to go to a garage salerather than church.

As I watched the congregating people, they seemed relaxed and happy.They were enjoying each other and seemed to be having the kind of “family”experience that’s supposed to happen in the enlarged foyers of those big,new, seeker-sensitive churches. I wondered about these people and myself.How had we gotten here? What changes had occurred that made us allcomfortable with this way of spending Sunday morning? The way of life wehave known for so long is being reordered by the deep, disturbing changesthat continue to gather force. What is church in this context? What is thegospel in this place, at this time, among these people? These were thequestions I considered that Sunday morning, while at the same time a part ofme wanted to kneel before the table and be fed by the One who said: “This ismy body.”

Like a whole lot of other people, I feel as though I’m in the midst of a greatrolling sea that is sinking and rising all around me. Profound changes areafoot, gathering force, disrupting our habits and comfortable way of life.Climate change is one thing, but the accelerating loss of the Christiannarrative across the emerging generations is quite another. Movements ofpeoples across the globe and global economic forces cause most of us to feellike pawns with no ability to control what happens to us.

These disruptions are huge and disturbing, and their impact will be to makeus very different kinds of human beings. I confess little idea about what thismight mean, but I can sense greater changes coming that will have a majorimpact not only on individuals but on the church. What is God up to in themidst of all this? It is essential for us to understand so that we can bringchange to the church in this world where everything is changing.

Asking Different Questions

The questions we’re asking and the experiences we’re undergoing aren’t new.Christians across millennia have had to ask hard questions about the nature ofChristian life in their times. I remember sitting at a coffee shop one Mondaymorning after a very “successful” Sunday when the worship worked, thechurch was full, and people were excited about their experience in song,drama, video presentation, and the sermon.

While sitting in the coffee shop, I overheard a conversation between a manand woman about a retreat he had just been to on one of the San Juan Islandsoff the coast of Vancouver. They were talking about finding spiritualmoorings in a world that was ever more complicated and unmanageable, aconcern that never seems to be on the radar of the people crowding into thechurch on Sunday morning, who often come just to experience contemporarymusic and a service that makes them feel good. I knew that the raw stories Iwas overhearing could be describing a lot of people who had been in mychurch the day before. The struggles my congregation faced were no differentfrom the concerns of those two people, yet the people in my church nevertalked about their struggles.

I started asking: How might we create the kinds of safe spaces where thereal stories shaping people’s lives become the ones we own and address inour churches? How do we do church better on Sunday so that it is morerelevant to where these people are? How do we get these people in the coffeeshop to church on Sunday? Then I realized my questions were all wrong.They were my default questions, church questions. I hardly ever stopped longenough to listen to the people, because when they voiced their concerns, Iwas busy trying to come up with strategies to get them to come to my church.Too often church questions reveal the “seeker church” mentality and result ina search for successful techniques to draw people to the church as if thechurch is the answer to every question.

I remember being near a national pastors conference a few years ago, whichis to say I was speaking at a different conference meeting in the samebuilding. As I was walking toward an elevator, a Mennonite pastor waswalking toward me—his conference nametag gave away his identity. As wegot on the elevator together, I asked him, “What’s a Mennonite pastor doingat a conference like this?” He asked me what I meant. I responded, “Well,these conferences are all about pragmatic programs and solutions to make thechurch work and get people into the pews. You come from a tradition with avery different understanding of church.” He looked at me and said, “That’swhy I’m here. Because it works.” My heart sank.

From the beginnings of the church, Christians have needed to figure outhow to ask different kinds of questions about what the Spirit is up to amongthem. Over and over again within the pages of the New Testament, we seewhat seemed like a settled issue of the gospel’s place in a particular time andamong a particular culture suddenly become something that could no longer

be taken for granted. Questions that seemed settled had to be asked all overagain. Luke-Acts is a case in point. In Acts the Spirit continually upended thesettled assumptions of Jewish and Gentile Christians in terms of what itmeant to be God’s people in their time and place. In the midst of hugechallenges, we too are confronted with questions about what it means to beGod’s people.

At that garage sale, sitting with little Owen in my arms, sipping my coffee,and watching the people around me, I knew our time for addressing thesequestions had come. I knew the answers were not new methods for gettingpeople to come to church or even plans for reaching seekers. These answerslead us down all the wrong paths and miss the point of the gospel. When weare truly seeking to know what it means to be God’s people, we will want toknow what God is up to in our neighborhoods and communities and what itmeans for the gospel to be lived out and proclaimed in this time and place.The matter of getting someone to church is utterly secondary to theseinsights. Now we are in a place where ecclesiology isn’t the issue.Missiology is.

Heirs to the Reformation

A problem we face is that since the sixteenth century our questions have beenshaped by the Reformation. While a momentous upheaval in the Westernchurch and a turning point in the self-understanding of human life at thedawn of the modern era, the Reformation resulted in a focus that still controlsour imagination—a focus on church questions that are no longer helpful inthe missionary situation that confronts us.

Irrespective of the theological creativity that might have framed theReformers, both Magisterial and Radical, as they thought about the nature ofgrace, the role of Scripture, or the human capacities to respond to God infaith, they assumed that the church should be at the center of culture and thatthe right forms of teaching, liturgy, and the ordering of ministry were ofprimary importance.

This is not a criticism of how late-Medieval and protomodern forms ofreligious life in Europe were institutionalized. Protestant life emerging inEurope post-Westphalia, and later in North American denominationalismexported around the world, was about the proper forms of church, the rightforms of clergy, and the right understanding of the gospel for a specific

church group. Perhaps without intention but certainly in practice, Protestantlife was largely about getting these things right.

This is illustrated in the ways in which the basic tenets of Protestant lifewere put into place after the Reformation. Take, for example, basic notions ofclergy. Overall, the fundamental change that occurred was in the nature of theclerical role, and the Protestant resolution was to turn a fundamentallysacerdotal, priestly role into a teaching role—removing priestly vestmentsand replacing them with teacher’s robes.

This was consistent with the new definition of the church as a place wherethe right teaching of the Word took place and the right administration of thesacraments occurred and the right forms of discipline were carried out. Overthe centuries some of these basic images may have shifted and changed (suchas more focus on the pastoral-therapeutic role or the manager-entrepreneurialrole), but the basic orientation has been toward getting the church “right” andensuring that the right forms and functions of church be carried out by theright (credentialed) people in the right places.

The sixteenth-century Reformation bequeathed us a set of questionsconcerning the Christian life that were largely church questions, and they stillshape our imagination. Whether in a traditional denomination or one of thenewer, supposedly more culturally sensitive groups—such as seeker orsimple or emergent—the same basic question directs conversation andpractice, namely, What kind of church do we need and how do we make thatkind of church work? By centering on such questions we remain captive to animagination that is the direct heir of a pre- and post-Eurocentric Reformationculture.

Looking to Luke

Where can we turn to find a different way of addressing the challenges of thisunthinkable world where the expected and assumed narratives about howthings ought to work have failed? Where are the examples of how Christianshave wrestled with this situation and responded to it in radically differentways from that of the Reformation heritage? The New Testament is, in fact,an example of diverse groups of Christians addressing unthinkable worlds butlearning to ask profoundly different kinds of questions. One of the mosthelpful theologians, interpreters, and historiographers of the early church isLuke. He demonstrates how to ask questions that are more fundamental than

the European–North American, post-Reformation, ecclesiocentric questionswe’ve been asking. Most important, he is addressing how to discern whatGod is up to in this world.

Of the four Gospel writers, only Luke was not a Jew. He’s writing topeople living outside the geography of Palestine after the period in which theevents of the Gospels and Acts are narrated, probably toward the end of thefirst century. By the time he writes, immense shifts have already taken placein the life of the young Christian movement. Assumptions about its focus anddirection have been shattered. The Jewish/Jerusalem-centered community,shaped so profoundly by its long narrative history of God’s dealings withthem, has been displaced. Luke’s audience is people who have learnedsecondhand the events recorded in the Gospels and Acts—eyewitnesses aregone. They are Gentile Christian communities living in a world in whichmystical spiritualities flooding in from India and Egypt are competing withthe Greek and Roman gods, who seemed to have lost their power to holdpeople’s loyalties.

For some, in the swirl of these tides, Jesus and the God of the Jewishpeople seemed small, alien, and irrelevant. Luke’s two little volumes, Lukeand Acts, are addressed to young Christians who aren’t concerned aboutworship style or musical type. These are confused people questioning whatGod is up to in their world. They wonder why so many of the promises of thisnew gospel have failed to materialize, such as Jesus’s return to Jerusalem andthe Roman Empire bowing its knee to the Lord. They found themselves in anunthinkable time. What had happened to the Christian story? What were theyto do about it?

Who were the people Luke addressed? He writes to one named Theophilus—a man who knew about the events of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection,and who also knew that Jerusalem had been destroyed and its citizensscattered over the earth. By the time Luke wrote his two volumes, the Jewishpeople had clearly rejected the claims of the Jesus sect, branding it asincompatible with their tradition and faith.

Luke told Theophilus that his volumes would be an “orderly account” ofthe events of Jesus’s life and what had resulted from the movement that hisdeath and resurrection birthed (Luke 1:1–2 NRSV). Luke is intending to setout a history meant to assure Theophilus that these events are true andtherefore a story on which a person can base his life. Theophilus must havebeen a Greek-speaking believer who, like many of his background, was

struggling to make sense of the massive shifts that had so quickly andcompletely overtaken and transformed the early Christian communities andtheir expectations.

As we read Luke’s writings, let’s listen attentively in ways that will seemquite strange and counterintuitive to much of how we ordinarily read him.Luke addressed people shaken out of settled assumptions about the Jesusmovement and what God is up to in the world. These were men and women,much like many of us reading this book, who had been cast into atumultuous, pluralistic world that turned settled assumptions upside down.Luke does not write a generic book but one that addresses specific, smallcommunities of Christians who were struggling to make sense of their faith.

In this book I will focus on several sections of Luke’s Gospel (particularattention is given to Luke 10:1–12) and some of the early events in the bookof Acts. In these texts there are clues to how we might respond to ourquestions.

2A Parable of Three Friends

Coming to a Right Understanding of Newbigin

Once there were three friends who grew up together. From childhood theirlives were intertwined in play, at school, on the street, and in their dreaming.Their relationship made them inseparable. They had different personalitiesand even their approaches to life were quite divergent, but they were boundtogether like the Hobbits in Lord of the Rings.

At college they shared a rich intellectual and social life and on many a longevening they would talk at length, sharing their hearts, listening to eachother’s dreams, and making plans to change the world. Amid laughter, hardwork, confusion, and sometimes pain, they experienced moments ofexhilaration when friend listened to friend or celebrated what the other hadaccomplished. Through all those years they learned to connect in ways thathardly required words. Their relationship was their strength; it shaped theiridentities. Sometimes they were very close, at other times distant, sometimesargumentative, other times partners in projects. But they were bound as one.

As with many relationships of youth, when they grew older, they graduallymoved apart. Following college, each married and found jobs in differentcities; their times together became more sporadic and episodic. They wouldstill connect by phone and internet; it was easy for them to become Facebookfriends, but the long conversations became rare events.

Every few years they’d meet for a weekend, and then it was as if they’dnever been apart. Once again they shared the dreams and longings of theirhearts. In the brief hours of a weekend, they heard and understood each otheras no one else could.

But time has a way of changing so much. Life, through its rhythms andpatterns, shapes us in ways few of us ever expect or plan. Somehow we losetouch with those who’ve been so important to us. It’s never intentional but it

happens. And this is what the three friends experienced. They grew awayfrom the relationships that had once been such a vital part of their lives.

Then one day, quite unexpectedly, two of the friends received emails fromthe third. The email came as a wonderful surprise. The third friend invitedthem to spend a weekend at his home on the West Coast, offering a few longevenings of food, wine, and conversations like the ones they remembered. Itsounded perfect.

The two made plans to travel west. They looked forward to being able totell each other the ongoing stories of their lives, picking up from where theyall left off years before.

When they arrived at their friend’s home, their host welcomed themeagerly. The evening began with catching up about families and jobs. Theyjoked about weight and age and they talked about old times. The food wasgreat and obviously the host had learned a lot about the vintages and pairingof wine.

But sometime during the evening the atmosphere changed. It was hard topinpoint the moment, but the two invited friends began to sense somethingwas wrong. They couldn’t put their finger on what it was at first, but eachsensed an unease and disquiet entering the conversation. An unspokenawkwardness set in as if two sets of in-laws-to-be were meeting each otherfor the first time and the conversation became strained.

The host began doing the talking and it was all about himself. Each time thefriends spoke, the host cut them off and turned the conversation back to hislife, his questions, and his needs. He asked lots of questions to elicitinformation that would further focus on his own interests and plans. Hemined them for information that could make him look better. He seemedpreoccupied with how to become more successful.

For him the evening was a wonderful, enjoyable, successful time. He feltgreat! The other two felt like objects being used to meet someone else’sneeds.

As soon as they could, the two invited guests said they needed to get backto their hotel. They thanked their old friend and departed, perplexed and sad.What had happened? How could their friend have become so self-absorbed?

Each time I share this parable with church leaders, I get strange looks andlots of silence. “Who are these three friends, and what do they have to dowith the question of what it means for the gospel to be lived out andproclaimed in this time and place?” they ask.

Several years ago in Australia I began a lecture series with this parable andcould tell immediately I’d created a lot of anxiety in the room. Few of the twohundred pastors assembled there seemed to understand what I was getting at.I confess my sadness at the response. I needed someone to let me know theyunderstood, that I wasn’t alone with the questions that keep shaping myimagination. But that day it wasn’t to be.

Following the telling of this parable I said to the pastors gathered at theconference that I would not be speaking about the church and would notanswer any questions about church. As they headed for their tea break, adisquieting murmur filled the hall. In fact, as the lectures went on, I becamemore and more aware of how few leaders actually understand the nature ofthe crisis we face. Few leaders recognize, despite all their conversationsabout a post-Christian and missional church, that they are deeply embeddedin some of the most powerful imaginations of modernity.

The Journey of Lesslie Newbigin

What is the parable about? To answer that question I need to share somethingof how my thinking has been shaped over the past decade. Ten years ago Iparticipated in writing the book Missional Church.[4] The book’simagination was shaped by the work of Lesslie Newbigin. This parable is aresponse to a conviction in me that, when the book was written, I failed tohear fully what Newbigin was saying. Subsequently, as I have watched,listened, and read the ways people have engaged the missional conversation, Ihave realized the depth of my captivity to the functional Christendom thatMissional Church critiqued.

By now Lesslie Newbigin’s story is a familiar one. Even so, to explain theparable, it’s important to trace some of the contours of that story. For morethan thirty years, Newbigin was a missionary in India, where he served as afounding bishop in the Church of South India.[5]

He left for India as a missionary in the late thirties when the English churchwas still focused on the question of how to put back together a kind ofChristendom world. Following the end of World War I, Christians harboredanxiety about the loss of the Christian narrative from the center of culture.Conferences were assembled, papers given, and books written on how toremake Christian England. In the midst of this hand-wringing and ferment,

Newbigin was completing his university training and preparing for life as amissionary.

From the beginning of his time in India, Newbigin knew he was an outsiderwho needed to listen to and learn the cultures of that vast country’s peoples.He would do this by sitting in villages with local religious leaders and theywould read each other’s sacred texts. Then Newbigin made a discovery: heneeded to relearn the gospel itself. He realized he hadn’t come to India just toconvert the Indian people. As he lived among these people, he realized thatthe gospel was converting him; it was questioning some of his most basicassumptions.

This need to relearn, or rediscover, the gospel was not about some liberal-conservative conflict, nor was it a crisis of faith. Because he was constantlycompelled to read the gospel from the perspective of the other, he was beingtaken ever more deeply into its implications. Newbigin was always a deeplyevangelical, orthodox Christian, but in India he came to understand the extentof his captivity to the canons of modernity and the West and his assumptionthat these canons were the right and only ways of reading the gospel. Hediscovered he could not simply arrive in India, learn the language, and then“give” the gospel as if it were some disembodied, abstract set of propositionsthat, like a Lego piece, can be plugged in anywhere. India required him tohear and read the gospel all over again in ways he would not have discoveredhad he stayed in the United Kingdom. Sitting with learned Indian spiritualleaders, as well as ordinary village people, Newbigin was driven ever moredeeply into the study of the Scriptures to relearn what was there. In thissense, he was dwelling in the Word as he dwelt among a people.

In the seventies he returned to an England radically altered from the one hehad left so many years earlier. In the twenties and thirties at Oxford, he hadbeen shaped in and by a Christian England where all about him people livedinside the assumptions and habits of a Christian tradition. In the seventies heencountered an England that had left that narrative behind, except in some ofits external trappings and traditions. For all practical purposes the life ofordinary English people was no longer even vaguely Christian. His countrywas now a pervasively pluralistic society, with a variety of religious andethnic groups. The shock of this sea change after almost thirty years awaycaused Newbigin to ask disturbing questions about the nature of the gospelbecause the country that had once sent him out as a missionary had itselfbecome a mission field.

Newbigin had already experienced this changed reality in very personalways. Paul Weston, in a biographical introduction to his Newbigin reader,describes the two-month land journey the Newbigins took on their returnhome from India. They traveled through Pakistan, Russia, and Turkey, thenover into Cappadocia, once a center of Christian intellectual and cultural life.Weston describes their experience:

[It] turned out to be the only place on the entire trip where the Newbigins had to worship on theirown on Sunday because they could find no other Christians with whom to share fellowship. Thishad a profound effect upon Lesslie and helped to energize his reflections on European culture, forit brought home just how completely a once-strong Christian heritage could all but disappear.[6]

Newbigin describes some of this shock in one of the first pieces he wroteafter returning to the United Kingdom. The Other Side of 1984 begins with adescription of Western youth in India:

Before we left India in 1974 we had become accustomed to the sight of young people fromaffluent homes in England, France and Germany roaming the streets in tattered and unwashedIndian clothes, having turned their backs on Europe in the hope that—even as beggars—theymight find in India something to make life worth living. . . . In subsequent years of ministry inEngland I have often been asked: “What is the greatest difficulty you faced in moving from Indiato England?” I have always answered: “The disappearance of hope.”

He then summarizes these observations with this statement: “It is, no doubt,easy in every age to point to its obvious weaknesses. What is in questionhere, however, is something more precise. It is the dramatic suddenness withwhich, in the space of one lifetime, our civilization has so completely lostconfidence in is own validity.”[7]

During his career, Newbigin worked as a missiologist with World Councilof Churches. He was well acquainted with the dominant theological figuresof the twentieth century (Karl Barth was an attender at numerous meetingsand theological conferences held by the WCC), as well as the massivetransformations in the Western understanding of the missiological task.Confronted with a United Kingdom so radically different from the one he’dleft, the shock raised for him a startling but fundamental question: Can theWest be converted? This question shaped the rest of his life until he died inthe late nineties.

Part of Newbigin’s legacy is that his best, most creative work occurred afterhe was sixty-five. Retirement was the beginning of a new vocation as hesought to understand and engage his own country from the perspective of across-cultural missionary. His whole life to that point, it seemed, was

preparation for those last twenty-plus years. He wrote his best and most lucidwork in those years. Even after going blind, he spoke with such a propheticlucidity, people knew they were hearing words that spoke to the core of ourtime. Someone would sit with him each day reading complicated works ofphilosophy and social theory; then he would dictate the pages of the book TheGospel in a Pluralist Society. It was the mature work of an aged man thatgave many Christians intellectual and theological bearings with which tounderstand the challenge of Christian witness in our time.[8] Professor ColinGreen, who knew Newbigin during that period, tells of attending a meeting atwhich Newbigin spoke, only four or so months before his death. Withoutnotes he described accurately the situation of Christian life in the West.Green describes how leaders of the church in the United Kingdom sat silent,riveted, with tears in their eyes, knowing they were listening for the last timeto a man of God who saw the reality of the times and framed it in a powerfuland compelling manner. He was a prophet in our time.

Across the generations Newbigin was loved and heeded. In old age he wasa luminous guidepost for many. In the eighties I attended a LausanneTheological Study group in Uppsala, Sweden, on the question ofpostmodernism, the gospel, and culture. Newbigin was one of the presenters.By then he was known around the world. He was slowing down and didn’twant to be away from his wife for too long, but he was engaged in all thatwas going on at the conference.

One evening he asked to come to supper with a group of us. At that suppertable, we saw the grace of one who receives, welcomes, and blesses the other.Newbigin spent the evening asking us questions and listening intently to whatwe had to say, wanting to learn from a younger generation. I was struck byhis grace and desire to learn.

I’ll remember that evening for the rest of my life, how such a gracious andjust saint sat with me, asked questions, and listened to me. I have much tolearn from his spirit and I thank God for those few hours with him inconversation. It was a meal I wasn’t ready to leave.

Newbigin’s Agenda

In his writing from the mid-sixties forward, Newbigin asked a question aboutWestern culture from the perspective of a missiologist. It can be stated asfollows: What is a missional encounter with this culture? He too needed to

struggle with the question of Christian life in the strange new world wherethe Christian story no longer shaped people’s lives. As a cross-culturalmissionary to India, he was able to see the Christian crisis in the West as aninsider with the eyes of an outsider. He argued that the gospel wouldreengage the West if the church and its leaders became “cross-cultural”missionaries in their own cultures. He sought to answer this question: Howdoes the gospel engage a culture that is radically different from one’s ownwhen that culture is now one’s own?

In this light I want to address three of Newbigin’s books, because theyillustrate the point I want to make, the meaning behind my parable. Thebooks are The Open Secret, Foolishness to the Greeks, and The Gospel in aPluralist Society. I will discuss them in the order of their publication becausethey represent some thirty years of dialogue Newbigin had as a missionary inthe country that once sent him to India.

In these books we encounter a critical theme I missed until a few years agoin my reading of him. I think I understand the reason I missed it for so long,as I read these books at one level, not getting what he was saying toChristians in the West. I will hold off discussing that reason until aftersummarizing some themes in each book.

The Open SecretThe Open Secret[9] was written early on when Newbigin taught at Selly

Oaks in Birmingham. It was a training manual in biblical theology formissionaries preparing to go overseas. Put into its current form in theseventies, it is simple in outline but profound in its argument that a missionalimagination is at the heart of the God of the Bible. The primary theme is thework of God in the world, and underlying it all is the paramount notion ofelection as the key to understanding the nature of the kingdom of God and itsmission in the world. For Newbigin, election meant that we as Christianshave been called to a vocation in Christ for the sake of God’s world.

Foolishness to the GreeksFoolishness to the Greeks[10] was based on Newbigin’s 1984 Princeton

Lectures on the challenge of mission in the modern narrative. It is a tract—aresponse to the “shock” of reentering a culture no longer one’s own. Here themature missiologist is firing well-aimed arguments across the bows ofmodernity. The prose is deceptively simple, but the argument is sustained and

perceptive. Behind this book is the mind of a practical missiologist shaped bythe intellectual currents of the twentieth century. In it a bishop of the church—a faithful, practicing theologian—enters deeply into the intellectual milieuof his time. Too many leaders today have a hard time understanding thisbook. They struggle to follow its argument and grasp its basic ideas. Mosthave never been given the basic foundations for understanding theintellectual and cultural history of the modern West that represents a hugechallenge to forming communities of the kingdom in our context.

I’m writing this in a little mountain village in Tuscany calledRoccatederighi, twenty miles from Siena, one of the main cities of theRenaissance. Siena, with its ringed walls around the great piazza and the twoduomos, is a treasure of history. Earlier I was standing in the baptistry of oneof the duomos with its amazing ceiling frescos used to teach people theApostles’ Creed. On the walls were paintings that taught the gospel stories. Inthe center of the room is a beautiful baptismal font created in the fifteenthcentury. The drama of salvation is inscribed in Latin around the font. Theseimages and symbols were once a normal part of a young person’s educationin the West. When Newbigin went to school in the early part of the lastcentury, it was simply the air one breathed. When he left Oxford, he wassteeped in the Western tradition. Newbigin’s shock was, in part, that, whenhe returned to his homeland, this tradition had, in so short a time, all butdisappeared from people’s imagination.

On a hot mid-August afternoon, the duomo baptistery was filled withtourists from Europe and North America. I was aware of how few had anysense of what was in the room—their history, tradition, and past. Listening toconversations, it was clear to me that these were simply tourists seeing allthey could see, snapping a few more photos before moving on to the nextattraction.

Newbigin must have had a similar experience when he returned to theUnited Kingdom from India. He recognized that the Christian story had allbut been lost to most English citizens, and he knew what an immense lossthis was. Foolishness to the Greeks is a Tractarian accounting of the forcesand beliefs shaping recent Western imagination and a critique of its failure. Inthis book he wrestled with his culture as one who needed to understand whatcaused it so quickly to remove the Christian story from its center.

The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

The Gospel in a Pluralist Society was published in 1989. It moves beyond aTractarian moment into a critical conversation with basic sources of theWestern tradition. Newbigin names key challenges the gospel must nowengage in the West, going into detail about the new culture of pluralism. It isa wonderfully sustained argument and a deeply reflective book, importantbecause of what Newbigin is up to in its pages. Again it reflects a missionaryworking hard to understand his cultural context with all its tradition andhistory so that he can engage that culture in a dialogue concerning Scriptureand the Christian story.

If we are to get a handle on the challenges of the multiple pluralisms facingus today, we will need to listen to people in places like the garage sale withthe passion and energy Newbigin used in his own context. I imagine that, ashe wrote The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, he spent time walking through thestreets of his familiar Birmingham, listening to the sounds of change.

Little more than a century earlier, just around the corner from whereNewbigin had taught at Selly Oaks and now lived in his retirement, was theoriginal Cadbury chocolate factory founded in the nineteenth century by theCadbury family, who were devout Christians. Cadbury, out of his Christianconvictions, built the model town of Bournville where most of his workersand their families lived. It was a community of small cottagelike homessurrounded by parks and green space with a town square occupied by libraryand church. It was a model imagination for a Christian world of work, home,and worship. Just a five-minute walk from where Newbigin lived, it musthave been in his thoughts as he observed his own community, a radicallychanged world with its multiplicity of nations, peoples, and religions. We’reall in a similar world.

What I Missed

I want to return to the parable in relationship to what I missed for too long inthese books because I was preoccupied with the wrong issues and asking thewrong questions. First, I’ll state it positively, then negatively, to get at theparable’s meaning.

PositivelyAs a missiologist, Newbigin’s consistent focus in his writing over thirty

years involved a continual wrestling with the question of how the gospel

engages the culture of the modern West. He was in a constant dialogue withthe culture, in which he lived, and the gospel, which he loved. It was a back-and-forth dialogue, not one-way. Reading these books is to know one islistening in on someone who has spent time immersed in, listening to, andloving this culture in which he is embedded. It’s striking how Newbigindoesn’t use this culture to get somewhere else—he indwells it and throughthat indwelling reads again the biblical narratives to ask how the gospel couldreengage his culture in his time.

I don’t think most Christian leaders in North America do anything like that.This is why Newbigin was such a gift—he practiced a different conversationthan do most of us who are in the church.

NegativelyThe church is not the focus of Newbigin’s attention and questions.

Questions about being the church are, in Newbigin’s books, secondary to andfollow from the question of a missional engagement of Scripture with thecultural context in which we are located. Again, it sounds so simple as to beobvious and not requiring comment. But this observation is crucial to what Iwant to say.

In making this point I’m not suggesting the church was unimportant forNewbigin, but it was not the primary category that engaged his imagination.Let me illustrate. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society contains the oft-quotedchapter “The Church as the Hermeneutic of the Gospel.” When I discuss thisbook, church leaders immediately quote the chapter title, believing this is theprimary illustration of what Newbigin is doing in the book.

This chapter is part of the book’s conclusion, coming at the end of a seriesof questions about the relationship between Scripture, the gospel, and thisculture of late modernity. Because the church is not the focus of the book, thediscussion about the church comes at the end. This was the point I missed forso long. I kept coming to Newbigin’s books with “church” questions lookingfor “church” answers, and by so doing, I missed the genius and energy of hiswork.

Scripture, Church, and Culture

Newbigin understood and modeled the engagement between Scripture,gospel, and culture in ways most church leaders still have difficulty

recognizing. The attention of too many leading writers and thinkers is stillfocused in one of two directions. On the one side are attempts to fix thechurch under the rubric of renewal or transformation. There appears to be anoverwhelming conviction that if we, first, get the idea of the church right interms of descriptions, organizational systems, and definitions, the rest willfall into place. The problem is that we won’t address questions about thenature and function of the church by starting with questions about the church.In the changed contexts of our time, starting with church questions (whethermultisite churches, the renaissance of the church, the whole church, churchmorph, sticky church, or church turned inside out or whatever) takes us in allthe wrong directions because they are the same old kinds of questions we’vebeen asking since before the Reformation.[11]

On the other side are those who want to set aside the church as it exists (ofcourse there is no other kind of church) as being irrelevant or past botheringwith. This is never expressed directly, but some of those who use themissional conversation and seek to articulate ways of following Jesus are partof this antichurch stance.

Each of these is mentioned to make it clear that the argument of this book isnot antichurch. In fact, my argument is born out of a passionate desire forlocal churches to embrace the missio Dei in their neighborhoods andcommunities.

The heart of this book is to address these questions: What is God up to inour neighborhoods and communities? What is the nature of an engagementbetween the biblical imagination and this place where we find ourselves, atthis time, among these people? What then will a local church look like whenit responds to such questions?

Notice the focus and direction of these questions. They are not primarilyabout the church, its inner functions and processes, or its ideal identity andnature. They are about God and how God relates to our neighborhoods.Focusing on church questions, on what it means to be the church, is akin tothe search for happiness. Just as one will not get far on the road to happinessby predefining the characteristics of happiness and then going to look forthem, we will not grasp what it means to be the church in our time bybeginning with church questions, even if they are questions about thechurch’s health, effectiveness, or its natural development!

Newbigin moved in a different direction. This book proposes that part ofthe reason Newbigin has never really been understood or his insights

accepted by the church in North America is because people have assumedthat his focus was on issues of ecclesiology and the question of how to makethe church more effective in a late modern culture. This is a profoundmisinterpretation. As I have said, in the formation of a missional movementof the people of God, questions about the church cannot be the starting point,but this is the propensity of Christian leaders. This preoccupation suggeststhe continuing depths of our colonization to a Christendom imagination.Christendom was, in part, about the church at the center of the conversation.We haven’t realized the extent to which we continue to live there.

I read book after book sent to me by publishers for examination. Too oftenwhat shapes them are these questions of how to make the church work, howto move churches from inside to outside, how to . . . This is our norm. It’show most pastors and ministers are trained to think, and it represents aproblematic captivity that must be addressed if we, like Newbigin, are towrestle with the nature of the gospel in and for and with and, at times,against, our culture. In the interplay between Scripture, church, and culture,our predisposition is to think first and foremost in terms of church questions—Scripture and culture have become secondary to and a function of thechurch effectiveness questions. Like a frustrating computer program, we keepreturning to the preset position, assuming it’s the correct place to be.

Martin Robinson, the director of Together in Mission in the UnitedKingdom, has reflected on this situation from the United Kingdom–Europeanperspective in a series of conversations we have had together with Dr. ColinGreene. Martin and Colin cowrote the book Metavista,[12] which is awonderful framing of the challenges to mission being faced in that context.Martin described something of the trajectory that has been followed by theProtestant churches in the United Kingdom and Europe. The following is asimplified outline generalizing his assessment of what has taken place sincethe beginning of the twentieth century.

1914–1945

Repairing ChristianityThe shock of WWI and the intervening years brought aboutnumbers of major conferences (for example, Oxford in 1937)and books seeking to engage the crisis of Christianity byrepairing what seemed broken to put the church back on track.This was perceived as a need to repair and return, not makefundamental adaptations.

1950s–1960s

“We Have Succeeded”The postwar euphoria briefly created a moment during whichthe church was put back on track. But this was only the calm atthe eye of the hurricane; it was a brief time before the full furyof culture change hit.

1970s–2000s

Can We Survive?Loss of faith in the Christian narrative post-WWII alongside therising tides of nominalism and secularity resulted in a massiveloss of confidence in and commitment to the church. Thequestion was answered, finally, by a whispered, “Yes, but onlyas a minority.” This was the church to which Newbigin returned.His attention, however, was not on the church as much as it wason the cultural forces that had created this situation.

2000s

We Have to Reengage Our Culture(s)A growing recognition that without a willingness to move ourfocus from church questions to radical listening in engagementwith the culture and to biblical imagination, there will be nomissional life. This is more than a tactical shift of focus; it is afundamental change in social imagination. In the UnitedKingdom and Europe, the issue is now about the reconstitutionof culture, not the fixing of the church.

It should be noted from this simple overview that right up until veryrecently the focus of conversation remained on the church question. Only asChristians began to grasp that the issue was no longer about fixing the churchbut about the reengagement with a culture that had birthed the Christiannarrative in the West could there be missional engagement. The story inNorth America is quite different from that in the United Kingdom andEurope, but the issue is the same. One can create a different but parallelsummary of the North American church over the same period of time.

Church as Consolidation and Expansion ofDenominationalismIn North America the church grew and thrived. The focus was

1914–1945

on organizational rationalization to be better equipped tocontinue the growth coming from immigration. Thedenominations are largely a Euro-tribal culture reflecting thedemographics of the continent. It was a clericalist church, withgrowing emphasis on the proper credentials in terms ofeducation and identity.

1950s–1970s

Church as Corporate DenominationDenominationalism is at its height. The church has succeeded inengaging the suburbanization of culture and the postwargeneration with cradle-to-grave programs through a corporatist,franchise-based organization run by managers and professionals.

1970s–2000s

Church as Rationalized Technical SuccessThis is an era of religious winners and losers as mainlinechurches fail to grasp the cultural shifts of the sixties andevangelicals and charismatics win the culture wars in terms ofgrowth. The primary approach to an emerging cultural upheavalare technical, rational approaches to adjust, renew, and fix thechurch through such movements as church growth, churcheffectiveness, and church health.

1990s–2000s

Awakening to the Shifts in CultureThere is a gradual recognition that the culture has shifted.Attempts are made to address this with new methods of beingthe church, such as the emergent movement and the missionalchurch. This shift, however, is mostly a change in form ratherthan substance. The focus remains on how to fix the church in achanging culture. Church questions continue to shape theenvironment.

The Parable Explained

This brings us, finally, back to the parable. The three friends are Scripture,culture, and church. For some fifteen hundred years they grew together,becoming deeply intertwined in the Western imagination. At times one wasmore dominant than the others, but they remained connected to one another.

They’ve been sundered—so far apart have they grown that they hardlyrecognize each other anymore. Each has shaped its own life, now often overagainst the other. And when the three come together, there is a profounddisconnect, because one of the three has lost any sense of perspective orunderstanding of importance and place. In its effort to avoid being left outand its need to look relevant, one sees itself as the most importantconversation partner.

The only questions the church asks of the culture are church questions:How do I get information and data about this culture to make the churchsuccessful? And when the church comes to the biblical narratives, it is thereonly to ask church questions: What are the biblical criteria for a successfulchurch? What does the Bible say about the church and its purpose? What arethe guidelines for church health? What are the principles, values, andtechniques for making the marriages of our people successful? and so on.When we engage Scripture and our cultural contexts, it isn’t a dialogue; thechurch is always holding up a mirror that reflects back its own image. Thisecclesiocentric obsession means that primarily we mine both Scripture andculture for our own needs. We’re so preoccupied with church questions thatneither biblical narratives nor culture can become the places where Godaddresses us and challenges us to be converted.

Newbigin was never preoccupied with church questions. This is the reasonhis books are such a breath of fresh air—he indwelt both Scripture and thecultures in which he lived, not to use them as ends but out of a deeplyincarnational engagement.

How will we indwell both the gospel and the people in neighborhoodswhere we live and work so that we hear God speak to us in and throughthem? Before moving too quickly to answers, I want to share a little more ofthe journey that has brought me to realize that church questions can onlymisdirect.

3How It All Came to Be

A Brief History of the Missional Conversation

A Movement Is Born

In the late seventies and early eighties, a new movement was formed in NorthAmerica around Newbigin’s question: what is a missionary engagement withWestern culture in our time? The Gospel and Our Culture Network (GOCN)was the creative, energetic child of a group of younger American seminaryeducators and church leaders aware that Newbigin’s observations in Englandwere becoming the reality of the North American church. While the contextswere not the same and the development of denominational life in NorthAmerica was significantly different, it became clear to these leaders that thiscontinent had also entered its own missionary situation. They recognized thatNewbigin had named the conversation in terms of a dynamic, cross-culturalengagement between the church, gospel, and culture. The North AmericanGOCN formed around this agenda but determined that it would initially focusits energy on the ecclesiological side of that three-way dialogue.

In the late seventies I had just completed eight years of pastoral ministry ina small town outside Toronto. By all the established measures it had been asuccess. I had gone to the congregation following their unpleasant experiencewith the former pastor and I saw the church grow back to health with lots ofyoung families coming. We did some adventuresome things together, such assponsoring fifty Southeast Asian refugees. We invited them into our homesand helped get them established in jobs and homes of their own.

Some members formed a nonprofit corporation, bought an apartmentbuilding, and gradually turned it over to a group of single moms and othersstruggling economically. We learned from Mary Cosby, of the Church of theSaviour in Washington, D.C., about the inward and outward journey. At thesame time there were forces wanting to return the church to what they

considered a more “normal” and “traditional” way, which meant filling pewswith people who thought and acted pretty much the way they did.

I was aware of a new dynamic all about me in this small town. It wasgrowing rapidly with young couples who couldn’t afford the high prices ofhousing in Toronto. The old town was becoming an exurbia for these youngerfamilies. As this happened, the experience of an old market town(Newmarket was the name of the town) was disappearing.

I was aware that by the late seventies in Canada it was still easy to grow achurch, but the growth came from people moving from other churches thatdidn’t meet their needs. I struggled with this recognition, knowing that mygeneration had pretty much written off the church as an irrelevant institutionwith nothing to say to an emerging culture.

Canada experienced this shift in the seventies. It was, for me, a period ofsearching for direction and conversation partners who knew that the mostboring thing in the world was to grow churches filled with Christians comingfrom other churches. I looked for conversation partners who could help mecome to terms with the fact that those of my generation were no longerinterested in or had any real memory of the Christian story. How could I get ahandle on this reality that, if taken seriously, meant all the questions we wereasking as churches had to be changed?

I found few conversation partners in my denomination. Returning tograduate school, I studied for three years with Jesuits, working hard atunderstanding the intellectual roots of the crisis I saw developing between thechurch and my culture. The Jesuits gave me the gift of intellectualframeworks rooted deeply in the traditions of the church. I also connectedwith people like Craig Van Gelder and George Hunsberger, who wereforming the fledgling GOCN. Getting to know Craig and George was a greatgift that came at an important point in my life; their insights and thecommunity of the new network felt like coming home. I found conversationpartners on this journey of understanding what it meant to be a cross-culturalmissionary in one’s own culture. I owe a huge debt to people like George andCraig as well as Wilbert Shenk, who was leading a transatlantic study groupon Newbigin’s work. This was a period of rich dialogue and learning with acompany of men and women who lent their imagination to the emergingconviction that we are in a new time and must learn again how to be onmission in our own culture.

Early on, GOCN developed a helpful framework for the conversation abouta missional life within the changing context of religious life on this continent.It called for a trialogue (a three-way conversation) between gospel, church,and culture.

Its intent was to communicate that the way forward involved the cultivationof a series of dialogues that moved back and forth among the three points ofthe triangle. A helpful element of the diagram is that it doesn’t giveprecedence to any one of the three over the others. It demonstrates that wecannot comprehend the gospel without engaging in an honest conversationwith Bible and culture. Through the interaction of the three elements, webelieved it was possible to hear the ways God was calling us to a missionalengagement with our time and context.

Implicit in this model is a real and humble recognition that we cannot claimsome a priori, privileged position in which we already “know” what thegospel is as we enter into dialogue with the culture and the church. Whileconfessing that the Spirit bears witness to us in the midst of where we liveand the culture(s) within which we are shaped, we acknowledge that thefaithfulness of God through the Spirit has to work continually in, for, with,and against our specific cultural contexts. Through this model we wereseeking to have a genuine three-way conversation.

In retrospect I don’t think I (let me speak for myself, not the others towhom I may not have adequately listened) was at a place where I could havesuch a conversation. I didn’t have the tools or resources to know how to goabout it. But, more significantly, I remained locked into one side of thetrialogue—it was the church questions that focused my attention. Because ofthis blinder, I simply was not capable of a genuine trialogue. I was the friendinviting the others to dinner to use them for my own ends.

GOCN created a conversation about a missionary engagement with NorthAmerican culture through a series of publications. First, there was TheChurch between Gospel and Culture. Its title and structure were built aroundthis three-way conversation. Next came Missional Church: A Vision for theSending of the Church in North America, written by a team, including myself,over a three-year period. In this book we believed we were beginning toshape an ecclesiological conversation and offer important hints about a wayforward. Then came a book comprised of a series of papers and articles calledConfident Witness—Changing World, based on a conference we held in

Chicago in 1997. The book and conference presented thought pieces aroundeach of the three areas of gospel, culture, and church.

By this point, Missional Church was taking hold in the imagination ofleaders in the United States, and the “missional church” language wasbecoming the lingua franca of conversation about the church. Other booksemerged from various members of GOCN that demonstrated the rich,creative environment of the eighties and early nineties. I wrote Liminality,Leadership and the Missional Church as well as Crossing the Bridge. Bothwere books on the church and its leadership, picking up and developingthemes found in Missional Church. Craig Van Gelder wrote The Essence ofthe Church, the first of a three-volume work on the nature and function of thechurch. Darrell Guder wrote The Continuing Conversion of the Church andanother GOCN writing team published Treasure in Clay Jars: Patterns ofMissional Faithfulness, focusing on congregations where elements ofmissional faithfulness at work could be seen.

Circling the Cul-de-sac

As I look back over those wonderfully invigorating years of dialogue,research, and experimenting in GOCN, I realize that, without any of us reallyreflecting on it, we ended up spending most of our time on church questions.Perhaps I am the only one who now sees it this way and I may have misreadthe emerging shape of the movement, but I think we ended up doing the verything Newbigin did not do—we turned a trialogue into a monologue aboutthe church. This monologue was about trying to understand the reasons thechurch had become captive to modernity; it was about the wrong turns thechurch had taken and the ways in which polity and structure had misguidedthe church; it was about alternative forms of leadership for the church; it wasabout how to understand the current malaise of the church in terms ofsystems and change. The focus of the conversation became the church. Ibelieve this took us into a cul-de-sac as a movement, and now many use themissional language to describe anything they are doing in the church.

The focus has been on one side of the triangle at the expense of the othertwo. The ecclesial element, the conversation about missional church, hassubsumed the other two within its agenda, so we see gospel and culturethrough the lens of church. This focus misses what is happening in thebiblical narratives, and unless we turn away from this focus, we will not

engage the people of our time and place—all the different cultures that nowcomprise our radically pluralistic society.

I don’t want what I’m saying to be misconstrued. I’m not saying the churchis unimportant. Quite the opposite! The church is vitally important to themission of God. I’m saying we’ve not shed what others call a Christendomimagination where the church is basically the center of activity andconversation. Church questions are at the forefront of our thinking, so wedefault to questions about what the church should be doing and what thechurch should look like. This is a huge impediment to the development of amissionary people of God. This is not something that can be “fixed” withprograms or discussions on church health or by appending the word missionalto old habits.

Of Diets and New Directions

Most of us hear people talking often about the new diets they’re trying forweight loss. My wife, Jane, bought a copy of O magazine (Oprah’s monthlyadvice on how to get the right life for yourself) to read on the plane as weflew to London. She told me about a tongue-in-cheek article in which dietswere determined according to one’s Zodiac sign. There’s no end to themindless ways people look to cookbooks for ways to fix their bodies.

We all know that many people buy diet books, and most of the advice theyoffer is accurate and excellent. So the question that must be answered is, Whyare so many people overweight if they’re reading all these excellent dietbooks? The problem is that diet books can’t do the one thing that’s required:change the way we think about food and ourselves.

I connected with a dear friend in the United Kingdom over Skype after notseeing him for a while. I was struck by how much weight he had lost. He toldme he’d lost several stone (a whimsical Briticism wonderfully based onhuman-sized measurement rather than the abstract metric system). What hesaid next caught my attention. He told me he started to lose weight only whenhe came to terms with the reality that he lived in and was part of a culture ofconsumerism in which to be is to consume. Only when he recognized this andchose to resist this narrative did he start seriously to lose weight.

Weight loss requires a deep change in our habits, attitudes, and actions overan extended period of time (one’s whole life); it is about changing somefundamental beliefs about the focus of one’s life. Without this, all the diet

books in the world are a waste of time. Similarly, putting the word missionalin front of all the church work we do will never get at the real challenge. Weneed new habits, attitudes, and actions around our relationship andengagements with the gospel and our cultures.

We have to stop talking about and asking church questions for quite awhile. Only by doing this, as strange as it sounds, do we have a chance ofdiscovering a church that can engage our time. Having said that, let me repeatagain, as strongly as possible, the church is vitally important and at the heartof God’s mission in the world. I am not church bashing. I love the church andam a part of a very concrete community of Christians in the AnglicanChurch. This is not about ganging up on the church but something radicallydifferent. The next chapter explores this perspective.

A picture held us captive. . . . And we could not get outside of it, for it lay in our language andlanguage seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who createwith words are the guardians of this home.

Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism

The parable of the three friends described in part one is about the captivity ofthe church in the West to an imagination about its own place and role in theworld. The word imagination expresses the fact that we do not go aboutarticulating as a value the perspective presented in this parable. Indeed, agood many church leaders would be strongly averse to this articulation. Thepoint here, however, is that beside, or beneath, our public declarations andtheological confessions about the nature of the church, there lies a whollydifferent imagination about who we are and how we act in the world. As willbe discussed in this part, some call this a “social imaginary” while others usethe phrase “language house.”

Stories That Shape Our Lives

Mark Lau Branson is a friend and associate who teaches at Fuller Seminary.We coteach a DMin cohort in missional leadership. Mark spent many years inOakland, California, as part of a community of Christians who sought tomake sense of being the church in their neighborhood. One of the things hehad to address was how each person in this church and its surroundingcommunity had been shaped.

[We were] formed during late-modern consumerism . . . shaped by such priorities as individualchoice, personal affectivity, and expectations (imaginations) that emphasized the pursuit ofcareers that should supply meaning and resources for our lives. We shared a growing convictionthat these traits were being—or should be—questioned. In conversations, study, and prayer, webegan a long journey of seeking alternatives.[13]

Mark’s comments illustrate how we all live inside a particular story thattells how the world works and how we ought to live in it. In this case a groupof Christians that began with the idea of shaping their church around theirneighborhood quickly discovered that they were actually shaped by anotherstory that cut through this ideal. This other story had to do with beingindividuals who, first, make their own personal, private choices and, second,determine how church might or might not impact these primary choices.

None of us decided at some point in our childhood or young adulthood thatwe would live inside a certain story of individualism or consumerism orcareerism. We were born into a culture that was already shaped by these storyelements and we simply assumed them as the normative way of being humanand living with one another. In other words, we are all born into some kind ofstory that already exists, one that shapes us from the moment of our birth.Some describe this as a cultural story.[14]

Charles Taylor and Social Imaginaries

The Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor uses the term social imaginary torefer to the ways in which we are shaped by these basic kinds of stories thatlie in the background of our lives like the props in a stage play.[15] Herecognizes that often we seek to live out of a conscious set of values andprinciples that we articulate to one another.

For example, many Christians who are part of local churches are committedto the value of being a community. Indeed, the language and structures of

church life seek to express and embody this voiced commitment to being acommunity. The word is often written into mission or values statements of alocal church and then embodied in such things as small groups. At thisconscious level where we articulate our convictions about life, it would seemthat Christians are shaped by the value of community. Mark Lau Branson andthe other Christians who formed the church in Oakland began to discover,however, that things just aren’t that simple or straightforward.

Charles Taylor argues that behind such public expression of who we arelies another, more elusive but much more critical self-understanding. A socialimaginary is about “the ways people imagine their social existence, how theyfit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, theexpectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions thatunderlie these expectations.”[16] He is referring to the ways in which peopleimagine their social existence, the common understanding people have aboutthe way things are supposed to work; social imaginaries are about how wemake sense of our world. Social imaginaries create a taken-for-granted set ofcommon assumptions about our normal expectations and commonunderstandings around how things work and how we’re supposed to act in theworld. The social imaginary is “the largely unstructured and inarticulateunderstanding of our whole situation, within which particular features of ourworld show up for us in the sense we have.”[17]

Mark Lau Branson and his friends in Oakland, while motivated bycommunitarian ideals of the New Testament, discovered that a whole otherimagination was also at work. Mark described this other imagination as“consumerism . . . shaped by such priorities as individual choice, personalaffectivity, and expectations (imaginations) that emphasized the pursuit ofcareers that should supply meaning and resources for our lives.”[18]

Taylor describes a social imaginary in terms of what seems to us as justself-evident ways of living. This assumption of individualism is an exampleof a social imaginary. We don’t go around claiming we are self-actualizingindividuals. In fact we use the language of community with one another asChristians. We use this public discourse as if it actually shaped our liveswhen, in reality, a whole other “operating” system of individualism is at workdetermining our choices and actions.

In the parable of the three friends, in the way the missional conversationhas been shaped in North America, we remain captive to a social imaginarythat puts the church at the center of our focus and actions. Such a social

imaginary misses what God is up to in the world in our day. All the talk aboutbecoming externally driven or missional churches only intensifies a captivityto a social imaginary contrary to the movement of God.

Living in Language Houses

One of the primary ways a society or group carries forward their socialimaginaries is through language.[19] Branson states it this way:

A community’s imagination, its stories and practices, its history and expectations—these arecreated and carried by words that interpret everything. We are constructed by and live our lives inand through language; not language as we have come to understand it as a tool, as positivism orpropaganda, but more like a “house of language.”[20]

Just as the house in which we live provides us with the symbols and basicelements that give identity, meaning, and the resources for our life (my homeis set out in a certain pattern shaped around my needs and my perspective onwhat is important for thriving as a human being), so the ways we live,understand how the world works, and act inside social institutions (like thechurch) are shaped by this notion of a language house.[21]

But language is not simply a construction, something we build out of rawmaterials to suit our needs or place us in a shelter of meaning. Language isn’tlike inert brick or construction timber. It is far more! It is the house where ourhumanity is formed and continually made over; it gives expression to ourdeepest senses of who we are, the mystery of what it means to be human in aworld that does not go on forever—where we create and die. Language is therealm of the poet, of desire and hope, of the search for and expression ofinfinity. Through language we search heaven and earth for meaning.Language is indispensable to being human. This is the reason stories recitedfrom traditions or novels wrestling with aspects of our humanness are soimportant to us. Living in a house of language is at the heart of what makesus human.[22]

We do not live in a simple world comprised of a singular story about themeaning of the world. We all live in very complex houses of language,shaped out of multiple, competing stories about what it means to be humanand what are the true sources of the self. It is naive in the extreme to believethat we have some clear access to the truth of the world that removes from usthe problem of living in a multistory house filled with rooms and closets,passageways and alcoves, basements and attics filled with many conflicting

stories that are continually shaping and reshaping our lives. Charles Taylorand Mark Lau Branson make it clear in their different accounts of socialimaginaries and houses of language that we can be shaped by our ways ofseeing the world that are largely out of our sight, even while we arearticulating another set of beliefs.

Part two introduces a language house and social imaginary that isfundamentally different from the one described in the first part of this book,where the ecclesiocentric nature of the missional conversation wasintroduced. The language house of the churches in North America continuesto make the church the center of its social imaginary even as it uses newwords, such as missional and emergent. The captivity to this social imaginarygoes deep. It is not amenable to simplistic techniques, such as becomingoutwardly focused churches. Something far more radical and transformativeis required. To get to what that might mean, we need to listen intently toanother, very different language house and enter a radically different socialimaginary. This journey takes us into the twin texts of the Gospel of Lukeand the book of Acts.

4Finding God in the Concrete

Locating Our Stories in the Here and Now

A language house predetermines how one sees the world or reads a text. Wealways bring our language house to the task of interpreting the world andunderstanding how to navigate our way. In part one I describe one way myown language house shaped the ways I interpreted Lesslie Newbigin andshaped the missional conversation as an element of ecclesiology. I wasshaken by the recognition that I participated in writing a book on missionalchurch, spoke at conferences on the subject, and was a core member of amissional network yet blind to my own captivity to this monologue. I livedinside a dominant story—the church as the subject and object of God’sactivities—that shaped the ways I read the biblical narratives and how Iresponded to my cultural contexts. While hard to accept, when I recognizedthis language house, most of the books about the missional church that I wasnow seeing were, for me, not just wrongheaded, but I came to believe theywere fundamentally misdirecting the work of the church in North America.

We need a radically different language house and social imaginary if weare to reflect faithfully the nature of God’s missional vocation in our context.A first step is the recognition that we’re not in a three-way conversation but amonologue in which the church dominates, using the other conversationpartners (the biblical narratives and our culture[s]) as objects in its visions,values, plans, strategies, and goals (we use the Bible to proof-text our visionstatements and turn our contexts into objects of the ends of church growth,health, effectiveness, and so on). The power of this language house/socialimaginary is evidenced in how a good many leaders actually celebrate thesuccess of this monologue, assuming faithfulness to the gospel in our cultureis synonymous with their church’s vision, mission, and values statements.When I propose our captivity to an ecclesiocentric language house, suchleaders sigh in frustration, asking with consternation: “What’s the issue? Our

values, vision, and mission statements are ‘biblical,’ and, besides, they work!How can you be against growth and success when our programs to get peopleinto church and believing the gospel are so effective? Aren’t we supposed tobe growing the church? If we can use the best marketing practices to attractseekers and do things so that people feel their needs are being met as theycome to church and join our worship, then aren’t we effectively growing thekingdom?”

It’s hard to argue against successful results in our culture! Nevertheless,this monologue is the furthest thing from a Christian imagination. It can onlymisdirect us as God’s people when so much is being questioned about themotives of the organizations of our society. Recently a friend sent me anemail describing his own wrestling with something he senses happeningacross North America. He said: “This will come as no surprise, of course, butI’m encountering more and more people who describe themselves as being‘between congregations,’ without giving much indication that they’re eageror hopeful about finding a church in which to pitch their tents. I think‘Christian but not churched’ is the rapidly emerging ‘spiritual but notreligious’ for our time—and the ones I talk to about this are often those whoare most, not least, serious about their faith. They read, think, practicespiritual disciplines and works of service and justice, but don’t ‘go’anywhere. And if my anecdotal conversations with a variety of people inrecent days is any indication, this isn’t a trickle; it’s a torrent.”

This is like the canary in the mine, the early warning system that thelanguage houses of our churches with their ecclesiocentric focus on their owngrowth and values are no longer able to hold the imagination or passions ofmore and more people who identify themselves as Christians. We need aradically different language house.

When I talk about this concern with church leaders, I get blank looks.Speaking at a conference for young leaders, I began by saying we wouldn’ttalk about the church during our time together. I indicated that I wouldn’t beresponding to questions about the church. The response was stunning! Theseyoung leaders, in their twenties and thirties, were angry with me for most ofthe first day. They shouted, stormed out to caucus, came back in, and arguedwith me about changing the agenda. I didn’t!

For a time I doubted myself, becoming discouraged by their fierceresponses. I was challenging and disrupting their language houses. The nextday, however, some began to catch on to what I was up to. The focus of

conversation shifted; they were talking together about the meaning of thegospel amid the varied cultures they lived in. Those were wonderfulconversations as more and more of these young leaders started to engage thegospel stories in ways they had never imagined before. On the last day wereturned to the church question, but now their responses were very differentbecause they had been invited into another language house for a brief periodof time. They were now struggling and wondering if the leaders of the localchurches to which they were returning could ever get the shift in imaginationand thinking they had just experienced.

My desire is to shape a conversation that attends to the biblical engagementin the shifting cultural settings in which we find ourselves. The issue is notabout being for or against the church—that is a nonsensical choice. I amutterly for the church in all its ordinariness and localness. I am arguing for adifferent starting point, a different language house so we can understand andpractice what it means to be God’s missionary people.

One of the primary ways we can discover and be invited into a differentlanguage house is by reconnecting with the social imaginaries that are beingconstructed in the biblical narratives. In this part we will focus on the writingof Luke in both the Gospel and the book of Acts.

Bible and Story

Scripture is filled with amazing stories that go to the heart of the issues we’refacing in our crazy, pluralist, consumer-driven cultures focused on self-actualizing individuals living in instrumental relationships (in which peoplerelate to each other out of roles or what each can get from the other). InVancouver, where I live, there is no longer a majority ethnic group. Ahundred years ago Scottish Presbyterians and Chinese workers formed thecity, which included British citizens, those from other parts of Europe, andnative peoples who were largely considered not a part of the citizenry.

Europeans (Scots/English) were in charge, setting the rules, while theChinese kept their heads low, and the native peoples were hidden. Today allof that has been swept away in a radically new cultural mosaic in whichChinese descendants are the ascendant majority with growing segments ofIranians, Russians, Sikhs, and peoples from every part of the globe.

Christians in Vancouver can no longer read the story of the good Samaritanas a nice, sentimental moral story about caring for people across the street or

at the rescue mission who are like them but less fortunate. They cannot hearthe question, Who is my neighbor? without the disruptive awareness thatneighbor now means another who has not been a part of their languagehouse. In this story of the stranger who stops beside the road to care for aJew, Jesus was challenging the language house of his own people, whichclearly delineated who was accepted and who wasn’t, who was in and whowas out. This parable is a radical deconstruction of their language house, andthe fierce opposition toward him is an illustration of how hard it is for anygroup of people to have their language house deconstructed. The response isresistance and accusations of betrayal or ignorance. In that story the languagehouse of a group of Christians (in Vancouver that of a European, ethnotribalchurch) who have assumed they were dominant is radically decentered. Youcan’t go to a monocultural church in this kind of city and even begin toimagine you can hear the gospel.

This struggle to engage and transform language houses runs through somany of Jesus’s encounters in the Gospel of Luke. When the disciples seeothers healing and claiming to do this in the name of Jesus or observe a townrefusing hospitality to Jesus, they seek permission to deal with these mattersout of their current social imaginary of what God was up to in Jesus (theywant to bring judgment and destruction on the people involved). Jesus’sresponse shows the extent to which their language houses needed to bedeconstructed before they could enter into the future Jesus was forming.

Jesus sought to address these language houses as a storyteller. His storieswere about what ordinary people were doing in their ordinary lives. Theywere about farmers building barns, women cleaning houses, people injuredon roadways being attended to by strangers, tiny grains growing into hugeplants, businessmen making profits, young radicals ready to give away alltheir upper-class privileges until it was time to actually take the plunge, andso on. The Gospel writers took these stories and put them together to tell theirown stories of what Jesus was doing and how the good news of God’s in-breaking future was affecting the cultures in which these early Christianslived. To recover the conversation between the biblical narratives and aradical engagement with our culture(s), we need to understand something ofhow these early Christians saw themselves in relationship to the larger storyof God’s actions in their world.

A Continuing Conversation

The early Christians to whom Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were writingtheir Gospels understood they were part of something that did not begin withJesus or at Pentecost. They knew they had been brought inside a bigger story,one that began long before they came onto the scene. The Gospels were, infact, part of a continuing conversation; they were written from withinpowerful memories. From the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, for example, thereis direct and indirect allusion to the Jewish Scriptures and the promises ofGod. It’s impossible to understand the aim of any of the Gospel writerswithout this awareness of the larger narrative that shaped them. What Luke,for example, does with Old Testament narratives about God’s promisedfuture and how it is being worked out in Jesus represents, as we shall see, aradical reinterpretation of how texts had come to be understood. In otherwords, Luke was seeking to reconstruct the language houses of these earlycommunities in the light of Jesus and the unfolding events these earlyChristians needed to navigate.

The ways local churches would take form and understand their place inthese cultures was not in their being Platonic, ideal churches with well-crafted vision and values and mission statements, but through the existentialwrestling with the story of Jesus in these shifting local contexts. Luke’scrafting of the stories in his Gospel and in Acts can’t be understood as saying,“Just go and be Jesus in your culture.” This is pure romanticism. Lukeillustrates how this early church was wrestling mightily with its tradition andthe social contexts in which these young Christians were living at the end ofthe first century. Again, questions about the church—its shape, order, forms,and mission—come out of this primary wrestling. Those who make themissional question about the church miss this and thus continually fall intothe ecclesiocentric trap.

We will discover, in fact, that by the end of the first century manyChristians were struggling with the language house they had created toexplain the Christian story. There was a massive amount of confusion andanxiety among these young, struggling communities of Gentile Christiansspread across the fringes and centers of the Roman Empire. The languagehouse they had been given to make sense of the stories of Jesus and the birthof the church simply didn’t make sense of their experience. Things hadn’tturned out as promised or expected. People were wondering what had gonewrong. Luke turns to his project of writing for Theophilus to retheologize the

story of Jesus’s coming in the light of failed expectations. He intended tocreate a new language house.

It is this kind of journey that the churches of North America must againembark on if they are to discover the ways of God in a world that no longerseems to fit the plans and expectations written into their mission, vision, andvalues statements. Those making this journey must understand how radicalthe transformation of imagination is that is demanded. It is a journey thatmoves from a primary focus on the church to the place of making the churchwork again in the neighborhoods and communities where we live so we canask what God is already doing ahead of us in these ordinary places.

Discovering the Concreteness of the Ordinary

Luke crafts a story to help Gentile Christians find the language andimagination that would reorient their understanding of what God was doingin the world and, therefore, who they were to be in their community. As weshall see, he addresses people’s questions about what had gone wrong bygiving them a different social imaginary. He presents a language house thatgives a theological and contextual description of what God was up to in theworld through Jesus. He achieves this by reframing the story in terms of amissionary God continually calling people to go on disruptive, unthinkable,risky journeys for the sake of the kingdom. This is the story I want to look atin this part.

The One revealed in Jesus, if Luke is to be trusted, addresses us over andover again through particular, concrete dealings with a people, Israel. In theconcreteness of the stories of these people, God is known. Likewise, in Jesus,we learn that we can encounter this God only by listening in on the specific,concrete narratives of ordinary people in little communities we come to callthe ecclesia.

We don’t encounter this God through universal principles, formulas,visions, and values but through the concrete, grounded stories of God’s life inthe ordinary. Luke takes pains, for example, to locate Jesus’s birth in theconcreteness of place at a specific time to particular people with names andaddresses. Only through his indwelling place and time is this God known.Luke’s Gospel, and his account of Jesus’s birth story, begins in this way:

Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, justas they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the

word. Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, itseemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus so thatyou may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.

Luke 1:1–4

These brief sentences are Luke’s equivalent of a marketing announcementfor a book launch telling people what it’s all about. Luke is going to retell anarrative. He will give an account, choose events, organize a trajectory to tellthe people that, out of all the stories competing for ascendancy and controlover them, this is the one they can commit themselves to, because, unlike allthe other stories, this is God’s story.

This is a tall order for Luke, because already many of these youngcommunities of the gospel are wondering about the story they’ve taken upand suspect that it may not be as clear and trustworthy as they were led tobelieve.

We should make no mistake about what Luke is up to here. He has toaddress the language house of diverse Gentile communities who arestruggling with the story they have received, which just doesn’t seem tocohere any longer. Luke is determined to convince them that in the midst of aworld of competing narratives, this is the one about Jesus and the good newsof God that is worth giving their lives to because it is God’s. But the storieshe will tell, stories of conflict with neighbors, stories of widows and ordinarypeople, will turn expected ways upside down. In the language house of theirexpectations, they will make no sense.

The beginning sentences of the Gospel have the character of stubborn factabout them. Eyewitnesses handed down the story. This story is rooted inevents; things took place that needed recording for someone who requiredcertainty after hearing it from others. Can it be true? Is this something onecan believe? Even then, right at the beginning, despite the eyewitnesses, itwas still amazingly strange that these events could be true.

Today, however, the strangeness is that we continue to read these narrativesthrough language houses that are primarily about meeting our needs andshaping our own self-actualization. We have a whole language house aboutwhat the Christian story is intended to do. I am aware of how often over thepast year I have listened to sermons and religious leaders turn the biblicalnarratives into a useful handbook for making one’s life work moresuccessful. I’m aware of how this Oprahization of the Christian narrative hasturned us ever more quickly into anxiety-laden, functional atheists needing

ways to use God to make our lives work. We seem to have become more andmore Peter Pan–like, driven by childlike expectations that if we just close oureyes, imagine what we want, and believe God has this for us, then Jesus willhelp us have the better future we want to create for ourselves.

This way of hearing the narratives of the Bible has come to be called“spirituality”—an indulgent process of imagining that betrays the languagehouse in which we live. Gurus, like Tolle Eckhart, have instinctivelyconcluded that if the dominant narrative is all about the self and itsfulfillment, you don’t need this religious stuff about God and Jesus. Whycarry the religious baggage when you can do it for yourself? Eckhart is onlypursuing what is already the functional atheism in the language house of ourchurches, the make-yourself-better-through-positive-thinking-and-vitaminscrowd.

Luke has a radically different agenda because he understands that God hassomething in mind that is far more expansive than self-fulfillment. And thisagenda of constructing a new language house will involve engagement withthe concrete ordinariness of the local.

We know God in the concreteness of particular stories that have occurred atspecific times and places. We come to know the nature of the gospel, notthrough some form of romantic universalizing, but in the social constructionsof our lives, through the social imaginaries of our time and place, and throughthe concrete encounters we have with the people and communities about us.[23]

5Texts That Propose a World

Discovering a Different Way to Enter Scripture

The Scriptures propose a world to us. They invite us into a way of readingand understanding who we are as human beings, our ends, and the intentionsof God.[24] This idea of Scripture proposing a world may seem like a strangeidea to us at first. What does it mean?

Currently I am reading a new biography of Samuel Johnson, written incelebration of the three hundredth anniversary of his birth.[25] The bookbegins in Johnson’s birthplace of Litchfield near Birmingham, England. Thecareful research of the author, Peter Martin, takes you into the world ofJohnson and this small town at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Oneonly has to read a little to recognize that Johnson lived in a radically differentworld from the one any of us reading this book live in. To come near toJohnson, one must be ready to work at entering his world as much aspossible.

My wife is reading the novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog.[26] She is sodrawn into the story of the women who inhabit a world shaped around asmall Parisian apartment building that she will actually read me sections. Theauthor invites the reader to reflect on his or her life through the lens of livesthat seem without meaning. Into this world comes a Japanese man who willturn the managed lives of the people in the novel upside down.

I am also reading The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends ofthe Earth and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America Its Name.[27] Itis about sixteenth-century explorations that led to the creation of the map thatgave this continent the name the Americas. Reading this book is like beingled by its author into a world nothing like ours, not just in terms of life habitsor practices but in terms of its assumptions about how the world worked andthe place of human beings in it.

Each book illustrates the fact that human beings live in worlds. WalterBrueggemann makes the same point in terms of biblical texts. Writing aboutour own time, the world in which we live as Western, North American peopleat the beginning of the twenty-first century, he states, “The core of our newawareness is that the world we have taken for granted in economics, politics,and elsewhere is an imaginative construal. And if it is a construal, then fromany other perspective, the world can yet be construed differently.”[28] Hegoes on to propose that the biblical texts present to us a counterimagination.He suggests that if we are willing to listen long and hard enough, whatemerges from the biblical texts is a different world. Then he makes clear hisown conviction about this listening and attending: “The proposed worldoffered in the text runs dead against my presumed world.”[29]

The first part of this book described a specific aspect of the NorthAmerican Christian “world” that is massively problematic to the project ofbeing God’s people. In this part we are seeking to enter and listen in on theworld Luke was describing for Gentile Christians across the empire for whomthe Christian story was no longer making sense. Luke proposed to them aworld and in so doing sought to reshape their language house. He wanted tore-form their social imaginaries to help them grasp again the nature of God’sactions in the world.

Colin Greene and Martin Robinson describe Scripture as texts that create aworld, “opening before us a host of imaginative possibilities” forreconfiguring our own language house. They ask how we can “actually learnto indwell the story and so find ourselves within the world that the text opensup before us.”[30] The point they make is that wherever the church learns toreenact the world that Scripture opens before us, “a fundamentalreconfiguration takes place that creates a new world, a new history, a newpossibility of fresh adventures, a new imagined opportunity.”[31]

A World Proposed in the Concreteness of the Ordinary

The world proposed in Scripture is about a way of being in the world thatattends to the concreteness of everyday life rather than romanticizedidealizations of what the church or a culture ought to be. Scripture roots us,physically and materially, in, for, with, alongside, and at times against theordinary people in our communities. The world the biblical texts propose is

not about the selling or marketing of a product but the re-forming of a worldin the midst of the ordinary.

The Johannine prologue isn’t some neo-Romantic ideal when it describesthe coming of God into the world in terms of “pitching tent” beside us, or, ina more colloquial interpretation, moving right into the neighborhood. This isthe re-presenting of a world in which the God of Scripture is known in theordinary and everyday. The Bible is not a book of ethics filled with rules andguidelines about how to live effective lives. It is not the rulebook from whichwe extract the right vision and values we then apply like a template in ourtime. It is not an ancient Chicken Soup for the Soul or Seven Habits of HighlyEffective People. It doesn’t invite us to find personal, psychologicalguidelines for living. On the contrary, the Scriptures challenge and turnupside down some of the most basic and cherished assumptions we haveabout what God is doing in the world.

If the biblical texts propose a world that reads and deconstructs thelanguage houses we have created to manage our world, it does this by callingus back to the local and ordinary. In terms of the relationship between gospel,church, and culture that has shaped the missional conversation, thisperspective of locality and ordinariness is critical. What besets the NorthAmerican church, even in some of the new proposals being offered to make itmissional, is a pervasive romanticizing of the church or an idealism thatbelieves we must frame the “true” church in its “intended” forms before wecan function properly as the people of God.

It is in this context that leaders labor over mission, vision, and valuesstatements. These documents are not shaped by the world of the biblical textsbut more by eighteenth-century Romanticism and pre-Christian Platonism.This point can be illustrated by Raphael’s sixteenth-century painting TheSchool of Athens.[32] The center of the fresco depicts Plato (on the left) andAristotle (on the right). Plato is pointing upward toward the heavens andAristotle downward toward the ground. Their bodily expressionscommunicate several interpretations to the painting. At one level one couldimagine the Renaissance artist wanting to express a certain kind of symmetrythat gives due place to both the philosophic worlds these two great thinkersrepresent. Each is holding a bound, leather copy of his own writing, Plato,Timaeus; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. Yet we see that Aristotle, lookingyounger and more vigorous than his mentor, is standing slightly forward of

Plato, signifying a place in the emerging understanding of sixteenth-centuryEuropean thought.

The two men represent two differing worlds, two opposing readings of howto understand and interpret the world. Plato, in pointing up toward theheavens, is indicating that truth is to be found outside this world in the forms,the ideal types, which, when known, can then be brought down to earth sothat the world can be ordered after the true forms in the heavens. In contrast,Aristotle points down to the earth, emphasizing that the world is known in thepractical, concrete particularity and ordinariness of the everyday.

These figures are a powerful image of a basic struggle that continues topermeate the imagination of Christian leaders into the twenty-first century.Part one of this book has argued that the language house of the church, interms of its own ecclesiocentricity, including its notions of leadership andplanning, is fundamentally Platonic in nature. It further argued that thisidealism has created a language house that continues to misguide andmisdirect almost all attempts in North America to address the missiologicalquestion raised by Lesslie Newbigin more than a quarter century ago,namely, What is the nature of a missionary engagement with that culturalcomplex we have come to know as late-modern culture in the West?

Part two is proposing that the biblical texts invite us into a radicallydifferent language world than that represented by the figure of Plato inRaphael’s fresco. The biblical texts depict a world much more like that of theAristotle figure, who, with hand pointing to the “earthbound” nature of ourreality, suggests that we know and discover only as we are deeply engaged inthe local, ordinary, and concrete particulars of place and time. The worldconstrued by the biblical texts tells us that this is the only place where we canencounter the God who has come to us in Jesus Christ. We shall see thatLuke, in the Gospel and Acts, is reframing a world that we must rediscover ifwe are to form communities of the gospel in our time.

Dwelling within Biblical Texts

For those of us trained in a modern seminary context, engaging Scriptureinvolves mastering texts through the use of grammatical, syntactical, andlanguage tools. These are, and will continue to be, important hermeneuticaltools for everyone involved in Christian ministry. But if we are to follow thewisdom of such brilliant biblical interpreters (men and women skilled in the

use of the tools named above) as Walter Brueggemann, then these methodsare neither sufficient nor primary. Letting the biblical texts re-form ourlanguage house is not primarily about abstracting principles that are thenapplied, in some claimed objective form, to our current situation. Somethingradically different is required.

We are invited inside the biblical texts not as miners crushing rock toextract its essential minerals but as travelers ready to be surprised in waysthat unfold the unspoken assumptions in our stories, calling them intoquestion in ways that disorient us so that our stories of what God is doingmight be transformed.

We are people formed inside a specific kind of language house. When wecome to Scripture, we do not come from nowhere but from particularsomewheres. We are, for example, those who live deeply inside the narrativesof late modernity; we are shaped by the narratives of consumerism andindividualism; we expect that with the right formulas we can make the worldwork for us in our own chosen ways. All of these are stories already deepwithin us, continually determining how we read the world and what webelieve about how to be Christians.

Our underlying story remains that of power and control; it is the story ofhow we, as human beings, wrestled from the world the keys to the mansionof knowledge and understanding so that we could open all the doors, go in,and get for ourselves everything inside. Our narrative is still about being incontrol. This is the reason we create measures and metrics and demographicsand so on—we believe that control is the answer to almost every question wehave as human beings. We are convinced that we can get the skills andtraining we need to be in control of environments and texts to get what wewant. Inside this story we remain unchallenged and unchanged, living in theillusion that we make the world according to our own powers. This is how weapproach the biblical stories. They are to be mined for our own purposes.

Scripture invites us into a radically different world. Jesus turns to twoinquisitive men and says, “Come and see” (John 1:39); in so doing, like Alicein Wonderland, they hurtle down a hole into a topsy-turvy world where theyhave little or no control. In Jesus’s world we enter a story that turns upsidedown the ways we have understood our world and ourselves. It is as if thesestories are about a counterintuitive way of life that, at first, makes little sense.

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat. “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”[33]

To understand what God is about in the world, we must enter texts that willnot be mastered and controlled. In the Old Testament there are textsdescribing a people who become continually a question to themselves. Theystruggle with what it means to be inside God’s story, while they have to livein the midst of all the other stories around them, demanding attention,offering order, control, and security.

Jacob must wrestle with God all night. In the end he can only participate inGod’s story as he is wounded; he must limp for the rest of his life. But theman, Jacob, receives a new name, Israel, meaning he who strives with God.This was Israel’s experience of being inside God’s story, as it must be for allwho are drawn to it.

Why would it be any different for us? We are those schooled to believe wealready have the story; we are in control of the text and so we know the worldconfigured by the Bible. But the stories of God’s engagements with us are notpropositions and truths we can, with enough study and training, master (manyof us are, after all, masters of divinity). We have been schooled to stand at adistance from the story, outside, as trained observers looking down fromabove. But these stories cannot be known in this way. Those who enter themwill have their language houses turned upside down.

The Way of Jesus

Jesus’s stories came out of his listening to and comprehending what washappening among people with whom he lived. One imagines that for manyyears as a carpenter he watched and listened with the eyes and ears ofsomeone who loved the people around him. He sought to know them, not turnthem into the objects of his plans. One suspects that’s the reason his storieswere so powerful. He did not turn people into objects he would use to achievehis goals. Rather, his stories invited people to let the drama of God’s workingamong them impact their own stories.

But I have to keep emphasizing this over and over again—it is tooimportant to miss—he didn’t do this to make them objects of some newchurch. He was inviting them into the adventure of God’s story because thisis where life is discovered.

There was this freedom in Jesus’s stories. I can’t believe those who heardthem felt that Jesus had some other agenda going on underneath, that he wasonly interested in how they could fit into his plan. In Jesus’s hands, storiesopened worlds for people whose imaginations had collapsed down narrowtunnels with little light. Often Jesus’s stories became landmines. At first, theyseemed innocent enough, but once a person got inside the story or parable, itwould explode unexpectedly, crack open little worlds, disorient a taken-for-granted life, disrupt practiced scenarios, and overturn assumptions so that thebrightness of God’s future could be seen.

Scripture is full of these stories that chronicle God’s everyday dealings withordinary people. Scripture isn’t a textbook of information or moral direction;it isn’t a formula for making life work or a religious Dr. Phil handbook forpeople who want to improve their lives, expand their bottom line, or ensuretheir kids get the right start in life. It is full of stories that invite us into thedrama of where God is moving creation. Christians are invited to embody thisdrama.[34]

Performing Scripture

Christopher Lash uses a helpful word to capture what this kind of Christianlife is about. The word he uses is performance. Here’s the way he illustrateswhat this means. To experience a Beethoven symphony or Shakespeareantragedy, it’s not sufficient—if we are to enter the drama of the music or theplay—merely to read notes or memorize lines. While important, it’s notenough just to read the historical background of the works or absorb theevaluations of music or drama critics. At the heart of engaging Beethoven orShakespeare is the performance of the score and the play—you need toexperience a symphony or a theater group actually performing it. Only in theperformance do Beethoven’s music and Shakespeare’s plays assume life.

When my wife, Jane, was the principal of a private school in downtownToronto, our three children, Paul, Sara Jane, and Aaron, were students there.Very early on, from about grade 6, Jane would introduce Shakespeare to herEnglish classes. They would read the play together. Then during the summerat Shakespeare in the Park, a professional theater group would performShakespeare’s plays. We would pack a picnic supper (it was more like amajor five-star meal, truth be told), call some friends, and head for the parkwith blankets. We’d find a great spot in the large bowl-like natural

amphitheater in the woods, eat supper as a gang, and await the beginning ofsomething wonderful, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, presented under thestars in the middle of the city. This was our chance to engage in theperformance of the play. To this day, our kids can enter those plays with joyand energy because they didn’t simply read the play in a classroom; theyentered the play through its performance.

In a similar way, Scripture can only really be engaged as it is performedwithin a community of God’s people. Don’t jump to conclusions here! I’mnot back into the old church questions; I’m not doing the very thing I’vespent so much time saying is the wrong direction. I’m going to argue that oneof the most critical ways of performing Scripture and entering the world ofGod’s story today is by discovering how to perform together the world thatLuke unfolds to the Gentile Christians he is addressing.

The Gospels are written to help diverse and rapidly changing groups ofhouse churches spreading throughout the empire make sense of what ishappening to them. Luke-Acts tells a lot of the same stories as Matthew andMark, but Luke tells them in different ways as he engages young churches insituations for which they have little experience or preparation. Luke’s storiesare drawn from “all that Jesus began to do and teach” (Acts 1:1). They’re anaccount of things eyewitnesses had handed down (see Luke 1:1–2). Lukeprovides a type of chronology of what had been happening. But he also wrotehis two volumes to address house churches struggling with huge questionsabout their identity and future. They needed help to understand what hadhappened to the first generation of Christians and why so much had changed.Luke’s stories invited these second-generation Christians into anunderstanding of what had taken place that would help them confidentlyperform the gospel in their own context.

6Shifting Worlds

The Need for a New Text

Luke wrote his two-volume work toward the end of the first century. Itaddresses small, dispersed communities of Gentile Christians who foundthemselves in a radically different situation than that described in the earlychapters of Acts after Pentecost and the outward missionary impulse of Pauland others. The world had changed dramatically in the intervening years.Time had passed. Now Luke is engaging a second generation of Christiansfor whom the founding stories were secondhand.

Little clusters of household churches in what is now modern-day Turkeywere confused about the Christian story they had received. They neededsome fundamental reorientation in terms of the gospel and what God wasdoing in the world. The assumptions that had shaped their embrace of andcommitment to the Christian story had been undermined. They felt at oddswith a lot of what they’d assumed the gospel was about and wouldaccomplish in a brief period of time.

One is drawn to these texts because they describe a situation not dissimilarto our own. It seems that at different times in the life of the church, particulartexts stand out like guideposts pointing the way for its life; these texts are likebarometers that show the temperament and environment of the church at agiven time. From the late nineteenth century right up to the latter part of thetwentieth, it seemed that the paradigmatic text for Christians in the UnitedKingdom and North America was that of Jesus’s charge to the disciples inMatthew, otherwise known as the Great Commission:

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of allnations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, andteaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, tothe very end of the age.

Matthew 28:18–20

The lines are inscribed into the memory of almost anyone who attended aSunday school or had even a passing acquaintance with a church. Hugemissionary movements and conferences (such as Urbana in North America)were built around the robust, muscular sense of call and destiny built into theinterpretation and proclamation of this text in the last century.

The social context of the church from the mid-nineteenth century well intothe latter part of the twentieth was the expansion of the West in terms of itscivilizing and Christianizing moves across the world. The mantle of empirefirst belonged to the British with their Victorian-era sense of Christiandestiny. It was on the back of this powerful narrative of empire, of Europeancivilization with its economic and military might, that the outward movementof the church took place. The rallying text that captured this movement ofGod and country was Matthew 28:19–20 with its command to go out to allthe world and make disciples.

By the midpoint of the last century this mantle of empire and Christiandestiny had moved from the United Kingdom to America, but Matthew 28continued to be the text that galvanized Christians to action, shaping theirsense of call and fueling a truly amazing output of missionary energiesaround the world. In many ways this bold, muscular, manifest-destiny formof Christian life in the West had as its underpinnings the sense that the Westwould be dominant in the history of the world and the purposes of God.There was a powerful sense of being in control of the world—for good,honorable, and God-given reasons. And in a parallel way, there was a strongsense of being in the current of God’s purposes, as understood and interpretedin Matthew 28.

The environment has changed so dramatically over the past twenty or thirtyyears that the sense of a special, privileged place in the world is beingquestioned. The conviction that God has special purposes for the West, firstBritain and then America, is quickly eroding so that we carry about thisawkward sense that our picture of who we’ve been as Christians no longerfits the reality of the world in which we live. Confidence in our identity andvocation as Christians in the West has weakened in a postcolonial world. Theemergence of a new, globalizing world in which a multiplicity of culturalnarratives vie for place has come about with such rapidity that we don’t knowhow to make sense of it. After the fall of Communism, when the final ascentof the West had been achieved, we were supposed to be living in the end ofhistory.

All of this has proved to be a chimera as political and economic powerseems to be shifting elsewhere and religious pluralism and multiplefundamentalisms take center stage. The economic meltdown and a “jobless”recovery leave many confused about what happened to the dominant story ofmanifest destiny and a nation under God. Few imagined this kind of world atthe beginning of the last quarter of the twentieth century.[35] It no longerfeels like the confident era of the West when it was so simple to defineChristian identity in terms of Matthew 28 and know that pretty mucheveryone understood and agreed with this robust confidence in WesternChristianity.

We find ourselves as Western Christians in a place where we are no longersure of our identity, no longer sure of where we fit into the overall scheme ofhistory or the unfolding purposes of God. The increasing sense that themantle of Christian vitality and mission has been removed from the West,that the energy of Christian meaning and future now lies in the southernhemisphere, all of this is creating a different ethos among Christians in theWest in which we are less and less sure of ourselves and feel less and lessable to articulate with confidence the nature of our call.

One result of this anxiety about our identity and the meaning of the gospelhas been the turning of Christian life into little more than private personalexperience—going to church and attracting other people to our church. At thesame time many Christians are experiencing anxiety because the Christiannarrative seems less and less connected to people’s growing sense ofeconomic, social, environmental, and spiritual dislocation.

In such a context there is a struggle to articulate what it might mean to livethe gospel. What starts to emerge is that the paradigmatic nature ofMatthew 28 in the social, economic, and geopolitical framing of the lastcentury and a half may no longer have the capacity to frame a Christianimagination in this new space. The language house of empire, power, andcontrol with which Matthew 28 has been invested is an imaginary that can nolonger provide us with the resources to understand what Christian life andwitness might be in this new place. This is not to denigrate or deny theongoing vocation of mission in the world. It is to ask some basic questionsabout the ways in which we will need to let the biblical texts read us in ournew situation. The proposition being made in this part is that Luke’sengagements with these second-generation Christians can provide us with the

language house we need to reframe our own situation and reimagine thenature of Christian life in the West.

Addressing a Whole New Reality

Those second-generation churches to whom Luke wrote were facing a crisisof meaning because, as we will see below, many of the assumptions they hadmade about the direction of the Christian movement had not come about.Luke is seeking to reorient the thinking and imagination of these Christians.

Our situation in North America today can be seen as very similar. For manyof us the promises and expectations of the gospel seem to have failed. Just asLuke does not offer the Gentile Christians forms of adjustment, so our owncrisis of meaning as Christians will not be addressed with one more set oftactics. Much of what is being offered today as “missional” are tactics formaking the church more successful or effective. There is, for example, a gooddeal of talk about becoming “externally focused” churches. But this is merelya new tactic to make the church work again. The challenge facing Christianlife today in North America is not going to be addressed by switching focusfrom some “inside” to “outside” engagements. The crisis of the NorthAmerican church is about its language house (where the conversations aredirected and where they are not directed).

Something more fundamental than new tactics to make the church effectiveis required. Many church leaders still find this hard to accept. They assumetheir understanding of the gospel is perfectly in order and are, therefore, notopen to hearing what Luke has to say, namely, that the need of our time is toallow the story of what God is doing in the world to re-form us all over againin a different way. Asking church questions and developing new “missional”church tactics will not address this.

These Gentile Christians for whom Luke wrote were invited to discoverthat the gospel wasn’t a finished conversation, that, indeed, their languagehouse was preventing them from perceiving what God was doing in theworld. In our own time, the church is again filled with leaders who assumethey already know what the gospel is all about. It’s all been worked out aheadof time in their seminary training; they have written and passeddenominational exams or completed fill-in-the-blanks church-plantingworkbooks. The thought that the biblical texts might propose to us anotherworld within which we might need to re-form our understanding of the

gospel sounds like nonsense or heresy. It feels like being placed on the edgeof a slippery precipice where everything solid is changed into air. But wemust go there! Unless, as leaders, we are willing to enter this in-betweenspace that disrupts our settled assumptions and threatens our formulas andexpectations, we will remain locked into a monologue of church questionsand strategies.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. At worship when I stand to say theApostles’ Creed, I’m confessing what I believe most deeply; when I kneel toreceive the Eucharist, I’m confessing that here in the bread and wine is thefood that gives us life. I am not saying that the church is unimportant orirrelevant! The argument I am making is that we have shaped the gospel inour churches around a whole set of cultural assumptions that we don’t evenrecognize anymore—we need to have our worlds turned upside down beforewe’ll become any good again as God’s witnessing communities.

Luke’s stories are like mines exploding in the middle of assumptions aboutthe nature of the gospel and the location of Christian life. He proposes a wayof understanding what God is about in the world that can invite us back intothe trialogue Lesslie Newbigin was continually involved with and keptpointing us toward. The next chapters will examine the context and crisis thatwas faced by these second-generation Christians and why Luke needed toretell the gospel narratives in a way that retheologized the purposes of God ina confusing world. Then we will look at the specific ways Luke did thisretheologizing in the early sections of Acts and we’ll look at one specific textin the Gospel, Luke 10:1–12, to understand how he addressed the questionsof these Christians concerning the way to know what God was up to in theworld and what, therefore, it means to be the church.

A Pastor’s Epiphany

A pastor, Tom, was trying to understand how he was perceived as a leader ina congregation in the American South. Tom was interviewing a series ofpeople in the congregation as well as other ministry peers in the area. Abouttwenty-five people had completed a questionnaire about him, and he wantedto discuss their responses concerning specific areas of his leadership. Here’sa synopsis of Tom’s report on one of those phone interviews:

“As we began the interview I thanked [the interviewee] for being willing tocomplete the questionnaire and now provide some further feedback on what

the overall report was saying about some of my leadership skills andcapacities. I explained to her again that these skills and capacities were notthe ones we would usually associate with pastoral leadership (preaching,teaching, visitation, counseling, and so on) but were about the ability to leada group of people through significant adaptive change within processes thatwere bottom-up rather than top-down. A long silence issued from the otherend of the line. My anxiety grew. The person I was interviewing was amember of our congregation. She was now a seminary student and wasserving as a Sunday school teacher as well as a volunteer for a program thatreached into the community. The silence continued. I waited!

“‘From what I’ve seen,’ she said finally, ‘the church is closed to thecommunity. We push the annual denominational missions offering. To someextent we push Samaritan’s Purse. But when it comes to a local child in thecommunity, we’re less likely to help.’ She added, ‘I visit a lot of the churchesin this area through my volunteer work, I think ours, like most, is self-absorbed.’

“I found myself growing defensive. ‘What about our visitation ministry?’ Iasked. Did this not suggest some interest in connecting with the people of ourcommunity?

“‘This church is comfortable visiting people on the Sunday school list whohaven’t attended church recently,’ she replied, ‘but they’re not really open topeople in the community unless they’re just like them.’”

Tom was not ready for this feedback, but, as he listened, he knew thisyoung woman was telling the truth about the church. It was turned in on itselfand the people related to those outside their church only if they were likethem or interested in becoming like them by joining with them. This was thenarrative of Tom’s congregation. They were preoccupied with churchquestions, wondering how they could increase attendance and reach“seekers.”

In this experience Tom had encountered the deep concern of most churchesin North America: getting others to come to them and be a part of their lives.The monologue remains powerfully present, but in Luke 10 a different storyand a different imagination are at work.

7The Context and Crisis

The Shattered Hopes of Luke’s Readers

David Bosch states that Luke had a crisis situation in mind when he set out towrite his two-volume work. Gentile Christian communities spread out acrossthe northeastern parts of the Roman Empire faced a crisis of identity. Theywere asking fundamental questions about who they were and what it meant tolive as Christians in the midst of this empire.[36] Bosch saw this crisisemerging toward the end of the first century. It was characterized by afundamental questioning of the nature of God’s mission in the world, themeaning of what had been taken for granted as the self-evident nature of thegospel, and unfulfilled eschatological hope.

These concerns compelled Luke to write his two volumes, not primarily asa piece of straightforward historiography (which might be construed from theintroduction he writes to Theophilus in the Gospel), but as the telling ofhistory to address questions and reframe assumptions about the nature andpurpose of these nascent communities of Jesus.[37] What then was thecontext and what were the sources of the crisis that caused Luke to writethese two volumes?

A Perilous Minority

Theologian Barry Harvey describes part of the crisis among these earlyChristians in this way:

During the first three centuries of church history, the followers of Christ constituted a minority ina world that viewed them with suspicion. The Romans widely regarded them as self-righteous andfanatical, worshipers of a capricious deity, atheists, the enemy of humankind and of a just socialorder. . . . Rome classified this new movement as a political society primarily because itsadherents regarded it as fundamental that their allegiance to Christ cut across any allegiance toCaesar.[38]

These were people trying to work out the meaning of their existence in atime when the imperial power was demanding their allegiance. As we shallsee, the first disciples of Jesus (especially those centered around Jerusalem)had specific expectations of how the gospel would engage the empires of theworld. These expectations had not materialized. Gentile Christians foundthemselves in political and social contexts radically different from that of themovement’s founders—those first-generation apostles and prophets were alldead and their understanding of how the gospel would work itself out in theworld had been swept away after the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70.

A friend sent me a paper summarizing the work of a group of Canadianleaders in a denomination addressing the question, How does thisdenomination understand and live out its missional identity in Canada at thedawn of the twenty-first century? I wondered what kind of narrative theywould weave in imagining how we might answer this question in Canada,because it is much, much further down the road of secularization than theUnited States. The Christian story is now a small, insignificant sideshow inCanada. The churches in this postmodern country face a profound crisis ofidentity.

The paper began with a discussion about the meaning of the word ecclesia,using biblical citations and the Greco-Roman cultural context to develop acertain kind of definition. Next, with the right definition set in place as acontrol mechanism, it engaged a series of books and resources on the themeof missional church to develop a series of characteristics of a missionalchurch. This method, while recognizing the crisis, illustrates an ongoingcaptivity to the language house of modernity and, therefore, to the monologueof the church with both culture(s) and Scripture. They began with an abstractdiscussion of meanings, definitions, and characteristics of the church. Thechurch, therefore, remained the beginning place, the focus, and the issue.

It seemed these leaders believed, if they could get the church question right,the rest would follow. But by asking the church question first, the questionsof what God might be doing in the world and how the biblical narrativesmight reconfigure our imagination became subsets of church questions. Theassumption of those who wrote the paper is that, once they’d developed theright definitions and established the right list of characteristics of a missionalchurch, they would be in a position to establish strategies, vision and valuesstatements, measurements, and goals for evaluating their churches in the lightof these definitions. The next step would be to design programs to move

these churches from where they currently are to this new description of whatthey should be like.

Luke does not address the crisis of Christian communities in this way. Hetakes a fundamentally different approach, paying careful attention to theactual questions and underlying narratives shaping the imagination of thepeople in these house churches. These are a people who feel the gospel storyhas somehow failed to match up to its promises. They’ve committedthemselves to a way of life that promised a hopeful future, and now they findthey are increasingly a harried minority living tenuous lives in an empire thatis more and more suspicious of this new faith. What had happened?

Unfulfilled Hopes

Joel Green describes the social world in which Luke wrote as rampant witheschatological expectation.

[E]schatological hope in its myriad forms focused preeminently on the coming of God to rule inpeace and justice . . . that eschatological hope in the Lucan narrative must be read against asociopolitical backdrop. This is true inasmuch as the coming of God would bring an end topolitical dominance and social oppression.[39]

Those to whom the gospel had come received it in the context of thiseschatological hope. The resurrection and ascension of Jesus as the Christsignaled the coming of God’s kingdom, the reign of God over the wholecreation. This hope was now indissolubly tied to the promised return of Jesuswho would bring to completion the kingdom of God. These expectationswere part of the essential narrative of the gospel as it spread across theRoman world. The liberating Messiah, Jesus, would change the way theworld was ruled.

This eschatological hope was rooted in the expectations of the HebrewScriptures. Recalling the words of the prophets, there was an expectation thatJesus would return to Jerusalem, and, specifically, to the temple from wherehe would initiate the peaceable kingdom of God. It would be from the templethat waters would flow out spreading to the four corners of the earth.Wherever these waters flowed, the earth would turn verdant with the lushproduce of the earth. All the nations of the earth would be drawn towardJerusalem and the temple where they would finally bend their knees and givetheir swords to the Lord and King of the whole creation.

These are the antecedents, in one form or another, of the eschatologicalexpectation undergirding faithfulness to the gospel. The sociopolitical rootsof the gospel in its spread across the empire cannot be set aside through somemodern rereading of the texts in terms of a purely internal, personal, privatesalvation event. In the time of Luke’s writing, the expectation was theconsummation of God’s reign in the coming of Jesus as Lord. Thisconsummation would radically change and realign the sociopolitical andeconomic realities of the world. It is in this context that Mary’s song in Luke1:46–55 and Jesus’s own Nazareth inaugural in Luke 4:16–30 are to beunderstood.

Crisis of IdentityYet none of the promised events had taken place. It wasn’t just that

everything was delayed and more patience was required. Rather, by the latterpart of the first century, the possibility of their coming to fruition seemedbeyond hope. So much had taken place in these intervening years that thiseschatological expectation, based on the promises in the narratives ofScripture for the reign of God, had been shredded in the realpolitik of Rome’smighty and cruel response to any group that refused to accept the totality ofits narrative. The crisis these realities created could not be met simply bycoming up with a fresh set of tactics, but called for a fundamentalretheologizing of what God was about in the life, death, resurrection, andascension of Jesus and the outpouring of the Spirit in the world.

It wasn’t as if there were no story whatsoever to look back on. The stunningspread of the gospel from a small subsect of Judaism to a movementthroughout the world could not be set aside. The ways in which the GoodNews of Jesus brought hope, transformation, and liberation to those cast asideon the garbage heap of the empire, and the ways in which these house churchcommunities so often demonstrated and lived out the reality of a new socialorder that crossed ethnic and cultural divides could not be easily dismissed.The gospel of Jesus brought a new dynamic into the world, causingundeniable transformation in people. The radical nature of this gospel thatPaul and others proclaimed as they spread across the empire was, indeed,good news for many. All of this was true. But it was wrapped in the contextof the expectations outlined above. These narratives of transformationoperated within a specific language house of eschatological hope. By the

latter part of the first century, that hope seemed completely out of reach.These Gentile Christians faced a crisis of identity. What had gone wrong?

It would seem, on the face of it, that a lot had gone wrong. In Judeaeschatological expectation over the reign of God reached such a pitch that inAD 70 a revolt broke out against Rome, with the full expectation that in thisprecipitant event God’s armies would break in on the side of the rebellion,defeating Rome and establishing the kingdom of God on earth. The result ofthe long, protracted rebellion was utter devastation. Nero sent his armies,under the command of Vespasian, to crush the revolt with lethal Romanefficiency and vengeance. While resistance to Rome continued at Masadauntil around 74, the city of Jerusalem was quickly taken and its citizens put tothe sword. As a city in revolt against the empire, it was razed to the ground.The temple was destroyed; the city and its environs were salted, symbolizingthat nothing was to grow or flourish around it from that time forth. A newJewish Diaspora was begun as Rome refused any Jew permission to live or bein the vicinity of Jerusalem. These events were a devastating blow toexpectations of the kingdom of God.

By the late seventies these events, coupled with a spreading suspicion andRoman antagonism of the Christian communities within its empire, hadcreated the crisis of identity described by Bosch. Without Jerusalem and thetemple, what was to be made of the gospel story with its word of hope in thereign of God? Given that the basis for this eschatological hope had beendestroyed, what was the meaning of Jesus’s coming, and what was God up toin the world? Rome was supposed to bow its knee to this Lord and Christ, butnow, it seemed, Rome had proved the superiority of its iron fist through theraw power of its armies.

Hard RealitiesBy the eighties, Emperor Domitian was reacting to revolts across the

empire with increasing cruelty. He was solidifying Rome’s power andauthority by declaring himself, as emperor, to be the divine source of God’sbeneficence. Thus the reign of God and eschatological hope were confrontedwith a new, virulent Rome that would tolerate no counterclaims to its power,including a God who promised a different kingdom. It must have felt to theseearly Christians that something quite fundamental had gone wrong with thegospel and its message of hope to which they had so openly giventhemselves.

Added to these hard realities was the fact that even the Jewish people hadrejected Jesus as God’s Messiah, the fulfiller of the promises of Scripture.This fact, coupled with the sociopolitical realities summarized above, couldonly have deepened the confusion among Gentile Christians. Theirconsternation and confusion around the response of Jesus’s own people weresources of much wrestling among the writers of the New Testament. John’sprologue reflects this in the words: “He came to His own, and His own didnot receive Him” (John 1:11 NKJV). Much of the book of Romans representsPaul’s wrestling with the question of why Jesus’s own people had rejectedhim as the Promised One of God. By the latter part of the first century, thisseparation between a diasporic Judaism and the nascent communities of Jesusacross the empire was established. Indeed, in synagogues of the Diaspora,liturgies in one form or another were developed as a means of keeping anywho professed Jesus as Lord from their midst. David Bosch summarizes theoverall situation in this way:

The Christian church, which began as a renewal movement within Judaism, had, during thepreceding four decades or so, undergone an almost complete transformation. . . . It had, in fact, forall intents and purposes become a Gentile church. . . . Yet the heyday of missionary expansion andof Paul’s energetic outreach in all directions already lay a quarter century back and a degree ofstagnation had set in. The church was now a church of the second generation and revealed all thecharacteristics of a movement that no longer shared the fervor and dedication of recent converts.The return of Christ, which was so fervently expected by the first generation of believers, did nottake place. The faith of the church was tested in at least two ways: from within, there was aflagging of enthusiasm; from without, there was hostility and opposition from both Jews andpagans. In addition, Gentile Christians were facing a crisis of identity. They were asking: “Whoare we really? How do we relate to the Jewish past. . . . Above all, how do we relate to the earthlyJesus, who is gradually and irrevocably receding into the past?”[40]

Important points of contact exist between the context of our discussionabout the nature of the missional challenge being faced by the churches ofNorth America and the crisis of identity among first-century GentileChristians. Still shaped by a Eurocentric Reformation, Christians of NorthAmerica address a deepening identity crisis by continuing to wrestle withfundamentally ecclesiocentric questions about how to make the church workin the midst of a cultural space of multiple narratives where the dominance ofa settled, denominational, Eurocentric ecclesiology has less and lessrelevance.

Questions

In the context of this conversation, the questions being raised by the GentileChristians to whom Luke was writing can be stated in the following terms:

1. What’s gone wrong?

2. What is God up to in the world?

3. What, then, does it mean to be the church in this new space?

This is not to suggest Gentile Christians had compiled just this list ofquestions or that Luke was sitting down to write a two-volume response.They are, however, in the mix of the crisis that had to be addressed.

The proposal of this book is that these are precisely the questions that liejust under the surface for a North American church still lost in a monologueabout its own health, effectiveness, style, growth, and future. The followingchapters look at the ways Luke responded to these questions as a means offraming what a missional engagement of the gospel with our culture(s) mightinvolve.

8The Boundary-Breaking Spirit

Seeing Luke-Acts through a Language House Lens

One can imagine how easy it would have been for first-century Christians towonder what had gone wrong. The language house within which theseGentile Christians had lived was one shaped by a particular set ofexpectations around the ways their eschatological hope was to be fulfilled(the imminent return of Christ and the overcoming of Rome as it bowed theknee to this new Lord of all creation). With these expectations dashed, it wasclear that the language house within which they had lived was not sustainablein this new reality. What were the alternatives? How does a social group goabout discovering, constructing, and living in a different language house?

Luke turns his attention to these questions because he understands that untilthese small communities can discover a different narrative, a different way ofunderstanding what God was about in Jesus, they would be stuck in theseother narratives and, therefore, unable to enter the new space of Christian lifethat had emerged by the end of the first century. Luke’s approach toaddressing this crisis was to retheologize the events of the past fifty-oddyears. He would tell the story of Jesus and the birth of the church fromJerusalem onward to provide these Gentiles with a different language housefor seeing what God was doing in the world and how to be a faithful peoplein this new space.

This and the following chapters will sketch out how Luke went about thiswork of retheologizing and will frame the ways in which the churches ofNorth America might also respond to the new space where so many of themnow find themselves. These chapters are not meant as a commentary onLuke-Acts but as a reading of some ways in which this creative theologiansought to reorient communities back to the ways of God in the world.

Jesus, Judaism, and Eschatological Hope

The way we tell stories says a lot about the language houses in which we live.In two distinct events early in Acts, the young church is challenged to explainwhat is happening in Jerusalem as, literally, thousands of people onpilgrimage from all over the Diaspora are drawn into this new movement ofJudaism that sees Jesus as the Lord who fulfills Scripture.[41] The first eventis at Pentecost when the Spirit comes on the crowds gathered in the city forfestival in such a way that each is hearing, in his own language, the words ofthe apostles.

Peter is compelled to respond to the social imaginary of the cultured GreekDiaspora Jews, whose immediate response was to label the disciples asignorant, babbling Galileans. Peter’s address in Acts 2 is not just a defense ofthe disciples’ sobriety but an argument for the gospel, constructed fromwithin the narrative expectations of the Jewish Scriptures. His response isfilled with direct quotes from and allusions to the promises of what Godwould do “in those days,” an allusion to the eschatological hope of Israel.

Peter addressed the hope and expectation of the Diaspora in terms of thekingdom of God, locating that expectation in the life, death, and resurrectionof Jesus and the resultant pouring out of the Spirit as the sign of “those lastdays.” The point here, however, is that Peter’s interpretation and framing ofevents is all done within the language house of Israel and Judaism. Nothing inhis presentation suggests a bigger picture. When, for example, he quotes fromthe prophet Joel: “In the last days . . . I will pour out my Spirit on all people”(Acts 2:17), this is not a reference to the universal movement of God in andfor the whole world. It is an argument for why seemingly ignorant Galileanscould be expressing the purposes and actions of God in such a way that allthose from the language worlds of the Diaspora could understand.

How to account for this is straightforward for Peter. In the new era of theSpirit, promised with the coming of God’s Promised One, this is preciselywhat is to be expected. The new era brought about in Jesus and through theoutpouring of the Spirit results in an egalitarian community that no longerdiscriminates between man and woman, servant and free. The coming of theSpirit in Jerusalem, declares Peter, has created this radically new situation.

In his announcement, however, it appears that for Peter, and the disciples asa whole, the community of Jesus in Jerusalem expresses the fulfillment ofIsrael’s hope for God’s reign. It is the fulfillment of God’s promises within aJerusalem-centered (Jewish) movement. There is no hint of a radicallydifferent imagination that would involve the whole world. This observation is

intended not as a criticism but as a description of the language house shapingthe church from its beginning. There may not have been another way forthose disciples to frame the meaning of Pentecost—but the point is that, atthe start, Pentecost was interpreted within a specific set of ethnic, nationalassumptions.

This focus is further evidenced in Stephen’s speech to the Sanhedrin, whichplaced Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection at the center of Israel’seschatological hopes and showed how the hardness of previous generationsand the present leadership blinded them to what God was doing for Israel.Again, given the context and the situation, the focus of Stephen’s apologeticis to be expected. What is absent from his speech, however (and bear in mindLuke is writing to Gentiles struggling with questions of what has gonewrong), is any reference to the meaning of the gospel for those outside thehouse of Israel.

The community of Jesus, founded at Pentecost, is one that frames itself asthe fulfillment of Israel’s hopes. In this sense its self-understanding waswithin the context of Judaism. It did not have the global perspective thatwould emerge out of hard, bitter conflict. Just as many North Americanchurches still assume the Reformation, in terms of its theologies and ecclesialformations, to be normative and the primary interpretive grid for the Christiannarrative, so this young church assumed its Judaism was the interpretive gridfor all that God had set loose in Jesus and the Spirit.

Parallels to the Reformation

The parallel between the early church and the church following theReformation is instructive. African missiologist Jehu Hanciles, who nowlives in North America, in describing the sixteenth-century Euro-tribalmovements that came to be known under the generic title Reformation, states:

The sixteenth century Protestant reformations shattered the structural uniformity of medievalCatholicism . . . and paved the way for national Christian identities. But the Protestantreformations left the underlying construct of Christendom intact. . . . The Protestant movementmay be regarded as the “renewal of Christendom.” . . . Europe would henceforth, to all intents andpurposes, be a continent characterized by two dominant forms of faith, each adopted as the officialreligion within the territorial limits of particular nation-states. Protestantism was now “confinedchiefly to the Teutonic peoples,” or peoples of Germanic origin . . . and it was mainly through theefforts of these people that the Protestant forms of Christianity would be “propagated bymigration and conversion.”[42]

It was in this sense that the Protestant mission was the westernization ofother peoples, from the perspective of a deeply ethnocentric outlook, as if tobecome a follower of Jesus required becoming in a whole series of ways anadherent and convert to Western ways of life. In a similar way this was themovement of the young communities of Jesus birthed and gathered inJerusalem. The movement of Jesus was the fulfillment of an ethnocentric,tribal religion. Movement into the community of Jesus was a movement into,a grafting into, this ethnic tribe.

Luke’s Invitation

Luke writes his narrative about the birth and development of the church withthe background of Gentile communities in the late seventies, who will bereading these texts, in view. They know that everything has changed sincePentecost. How was Luke crafting these stories to answer the questions ofwhat had gone wrong and what, therefore, God was doing in the world? Inbrief, Luke addresses these questions with a single response: nothing hasgone wrong! He does this not out of some naive optimism or because he isshaped by the power of positive thinking but because he dwells in a differentlanguage house from his Gentile readers. Luke grasps the crisis of identityconfronting these Gentile Christians but understands it as a failure ofimagination; the narrative framework into which they have put the stories ofJesus and the expectations of God’s reign were too confining, too narrow intheir scope.

His intention is to retell the founding stories of the young church in order toconstruct a radically different language house for his readers. In Luke-Acts heis inviting these little communities in the midst of the empire into a differentimagination. Luke’s basic approach is to write the story of everything thatJesus began to do and teach to show that, right from the beginning inJerusalem, God was up to something much bigger than the little boxes intowhich these initiating communities had placed him. The way of expressingthis is through an accounting of the acts of the Holy Spirit. One of thepurposes in this way of writing the story is to suggest, by implication, thatthese second-generation Gentile Christians were, likewise, putting themovement of God in too small a box and, thereby, missing what God wasaccomplishing in the world.

Persecution and Dispersion

“Nothing has gone wrong” is a bold statement in light of the previous thirty-odd years and the eschatological hope that had seemed so central to themissionary spread of the gospel across the empire. Yet this is precisely whatLuke is saying. How was Luke interpreting those generative years? Severalevents in the early chapters of Acts help us see the ways Luke frames thispart of his response to the question of what had gone wrong.

First, there are a series of events that cluster around the stoning of Stephen.Emboldened by this killing, a broader persecution breaks out against thecommunity of Jesus in Jerusalem and spreads into surrounding cities. This isa period that must have come shortly after Pentecost, when Saul, threateningthe slaughter of believers, asked permission to go to the synagogues inDamascus and root out any who were of the Way and bring them bound toJerusalem and prison (Acts 9:1–2). This reference to Damascus so early onsuggests how quickly the Way was dispersing and moving out into thebroader Jewish communities away from Jerusalem. Damascus was a fullweek’s walk—no small distance for the period—but already there weresynagogues that must have been shaped by a new belief in Jesus as the Onewho fulfills the promises of Scripture, just as Peter and Stephen had said.

Then the concern of official Jewish leadership must have been about thefact that Jerusalem had been filled with Diaspora Jews who were returning totheir home cities and towns across the empire carrying with them the virus ofthis new movement. This would have resulted in high anxiety, as exhibitedby Saul’s zeal. One can sense the urgency. Like national health organizationsaround the world in 2009 trying desperately to control H1N1, the Jewishleadership sought to stamp out this virus as quickly as possible. Saul’srequest to the Sanhedrin indicates what was going on—these people of theWay were going to synagogues in other towns and cities telling Jews in theregions about Jerusalem and beyond that Jesus was the One who had come tofulfill the eschatological hopes of Israel.

The movement of Jesus was spreading quickly out from Jerusalem throughto Judea and Samaria and, most important, it was understood and practiced asa movement within Judaism. There’s no indication or mention of movementacross the boundaries of Judaism to Gentile believers. Luke uses Acts 9–13as a pivotal shift in this dynamic to show that the language house of thedisciples at this point wasn’t sufficient to contain what the Spirit was doing.

Acts 9 reports that there’s a period of peace when the young church seems tohave a good reputation with Judaism and is growing. At the same time thereare also reports of persecution in Jerusalem that forces many of the Christiansout of the city toward the coastal regions. These stories of persecution seemto be told in the midst of a new tension around the place of Gentiles in themovement of Jesus.

In Acts 11:19 we are told Christians have been scattered out of Jerusalembecause of the stoning of Stephen. This must have been connected with thepersecution that involved Saul and Damascus. Luke picks up this thread ofthe story even though it probably happened some time earlier. In themeantime Peter, for example, had the freedom to go to places like Lydda,Joppa, and then Caesarea to heal the sick and teach about the Way. What isimportant about the scattering from Jerusalem is the description of what theseJewish Christians did and by implication didn’t do. They traveled out as faras Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch but “they spoke the word to no one exceptJews” (v. 19 NRSV). It’s hard to escape the circumscribed context withinwhich the movement of Jesus was expected to operate. Even in the movementout from Jerusalem, this understanding of Jesus as fulfillment within Judaismdirected the actions of the church.

Boundary Breaking

Within this context, Acts 9–11 takes on new meaning. Peter travels northwestfrom Jerusalem to Lydda, a Jewish town, where he heals a Hellenistic Jew.Then he goes to Joppa where there is further healing. With Peter in Joppa, thecontext is correct for his dream about the clean and unclean food. Three timesin the dream, God invites Peter to eat the food being offered. Each timePeter’s response is the same: “By no means, Lord; for I have never eatenanything that is profane or unclean” (10:15 NRSV). The dream is the preludeto Peter’s meeting with Cornelius. It establishes the clear, inviolableboundary within which Peter’s (and hence, the whole church’s) languagehouse had been set. There is a clear, nonnegotiable boundary to followingGod and, by implication, there is a clear, nonnegotiable boundary aroundwhat it means to be a follower of Jesus. Peter knew that, just as you don’t eatanything unclean, so you don’t go around speaking the word about Jesus tothose who are not Jews.

This is the point Luke is making. The imagination and language house ofthe Jerusalem-formed church were bound within these lines of meaning. Lukeis making it clear that these are the ways in which the young church isforming and circumscribing its life. It is against this background that Lukeshapes an alternative narrative, addressing the question of what’s gonewrong.

Not according to Jewish LawThe action of Acts 11 is written in sparse, tight, fast-paced narrative. A lot

is happening that is disrupting the expectations and settled rhythms thatseemed to be characterizing the early Jerusalem community. Opposition andpersecution from the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem are becoming moreintense and focused. At the same time the tight boundaries of the Jesusmovement are pushed apart by fresh developments that are really outside thecontrol and planning of the church’s leaders, like Peter and James. Herod hasa hand in the opposition (chap. 12). James, the brother of Jesus, is killed.Peter is seized and thrown in jail. The ground is shifting quickly. Alongsidethese events that are related to Jewish leaders are other, even moredisquieting happenings.

To understand Acts 11:20, we must first look at the events that shapePeter’s encounters a little earlier in verses 12–18. Immediately after Peter’strance in Joppa, he is brought to Caesarea to meet with a Roman (read“Gentile”) centurion named Cornelius. It is too facile to describe these eventsas some natural, linear movement of the church from one stage to another.This would miss the dynamics of Luke’s developing response to the questionof what had gone wrong. As part of Luke’s answer, we see Peter broughtface-to-face with a Gentile. Cornelius is described as a “God-fearer,” whichmight be read as an indication of a developmental, progressive movement ofthe gospel as it now connects with Gentiles who were considering conversionto Judaism. In Luke’s hands, however, this event is a radical break thatinvolves Peter but over which Peter has no control.

Luke writes that, even as Peter struggles to speak to Cornelius, “the HolySpirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning” (v. 15 NRSV).Luke is establishing that this conversion of a Gentile to the Way of Jesus wasnot as a result of Peter’s decision (he is wrestling with what to do evenstanding before Cornelius). The narrative unfolds in a way that suggests it is

the Spirit who makes the event happen and so crosses the boundaries ofJewish law.

Beyond Neat CategoriesIt is in this context that we are invited to read those other events in Acts

11:19–22 where these Jewish Christians (likely of both Jerusalem and theDiaspora), who had been speaking the Word only to other Jews, suddenlycross a huge boundary. Being led by the Spirit, they jump the Jewish/God-fearer barrier, and “a great number became believers and turned to the Lord”(v. 21 NRSV).

We know that significant conflict broke out over the admission of Gentilesinto the community of Jesus. The leaders in Jerusalem sent Barnabas toassess the situation because events seemed to be moving beyond theircontrol. What had happened in Joppa and now in far greater numbers inAntioch didn’t fit their language house and threatened to undermine some oftheir most basic assumptions about the nature of this Jesus movement. All ofthis would lead to ruptures both in relationships and, eventually, betweenJudaism and the church.

Long after these events had happened, Luke was weaving together thestories of conflict and rupture to create a new language house for GentileChristians. He was providing an interpretive framework to address the largerquestion of what had gone wrong.

At a fundamental level, nothing had gone wrong. From the beginning, theyoung church had located the movement of Jesus entirely within the languagehouse of Judaism as its fulfillment. The eschatological expectations wereshaped around this narrative. It is clear from the way Luke tells these storiesthat the movement’s leaders, people like James and Peter, saw themselvesshaping a Jewish movement that would graft in some Hellenizing God-fearers. But in these passages something else is going on. The Spirit of Godcomes to break the boundaries. The boundary-breaking work was not anormal, natural development nor was it the result of any leader; it was theSpirit breaking into the settled assumptions and established rhythms in a waythat reframes the meaning of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection.

The subtext present here is that God is doing something through Jesus thatis much bigger than all the small, neat categories and boxes in which themovement of God had been placed, boxes such as Jerusalem, temple,synagogue, and Jewish followers of the fulfilled Messiah. These language

houses had to be shaken and taken apart. So the Spirit came to break theboundaries. Nothing had gone wrong except that the Spirit of God would notallow this sedimentation of meaning nor the practices that follow.

This boundary-breaking work of the Spirit creates conflict, consternation,and confusion. It leaves people struggling to figure out how the things theythought normative to the gospel fit into this shifting of boundaries, which atone time seemed so clear and well-defined. The reason for this boundary-breaking work of the Spirit is that God is about something in the world that isfar bigger than the confines of an ethnotribal religion even if that ethnotribalreligion is the Judaism of the Scriptures. There is a cosmic scope to thisgospel, and the Spirit will not leave the church forever sitting inside its well-defined boxes that try to determine what God can do in the world.[43] Hence,in these early days the boundaries are crossed, the assumptions are broken,and the church is set on a whole new journey as the agents of God’s future.

Implications for the North American Church

Luke has given a theological reading of what happened to the post-ascensionmovement of the church. He provides a theological reading on the events thatwould tear apart the boundaries of God’s people. In so doing he is invitingthese late-first-century Gentile Christians into a different language house withthe narrative understanding that the Spirit of God will continue to come andbreak the boundaries of our small, narrow, confined assumptions about whatGod is up to in the world. God is out there ahead continuing the work ofbringing all things together in Jesus Christ.

This retheologizing of the events of the young church has importantimplications for the life of the North American church in our time. Acrossdenominations and long-established church organizations is a deepeninganxiety about what it means to be God’s people in our day. For many inchurch leadership in the West, the question lurks just beneath the surface:what’s gone wrong?

What if the answer to this question is similar to the one Luke gave in Acts?What if the life-giving Spirit is saying to us that nothing has gone wrong butthat he is breaking apart the five-hundred-year-old boxes in which we have soconveniently placed the movement of God since the European Protestantreformations? What if the period we are in is another one of those times whenthe boundary-breaking Spirit is pushing apart the settled, managed, and

controlled ecclesiologies that came out of a specific period of Europeanhistory with its nation-states and the emergence of its hegemony over theworld? What if the great shifts of global populations, which have changed theface of continents, are all elements of this boundary-breaking work of theSpirit in our time? In the midst of these shifting worlds, what if the ending ofthe ecclesiological monologue is another part of this boundary-breakingwork? Nothing has gone wrong! The God of Jesus Christ is still shaping thenew creation. What then do we do when the Spirit breaks the boundaries?

9The Strange New Ways of God

Sending the Seventy—a Guide for Our Times

In Acts and then in his Gospel, Luke is writing a narrative about God’sactions in the world to fulfill eschatological hopes that had energized Israeland, then, the young church. He is shaping an account of God’s redemptivepurposes for the entire world in a way that shows the faithfulness of God.This is intended to invite Gentile communities facing a crisis of identity totrust the actions of God in the face of what appears to be a failure ofexpectation. Luke will show that the issue is not God’s faithfulness but thenarrow ways in which the gospel had been understood. In Acts he does thisby emphasizing the boundary-breaking actions of the Spirit in the midst ofresistance and conflict from religious and civil authorities as well as fromwithin the young community.

The backdrop within which Luke writes, therefore, is one of conflict. Fromthe birth accounts to Jesus’s struggles with the Jewish leadership to his arrestand crucifixion, this motif of struggle and conflict shapes Luke’s work. Theyoung community fares no better. Too quickly it is propelled into similarconflicts that run through Acts; in the final chapters the outcome is far fromclear and nothing is wrapped up and tied with a neat bow.

In both Luke and Acts the conflict continues and the ambiguity about theoutcome is not removed, but through it all Luke’s story line shows that Godis at work shaping a whole new world. Some of the conflicts internal to theyoung community in Acts were born of expectations and assumptions of howand where God was going to work, especially the taken-for-grantedconviction that the Jesus movement, as a completion of Judaism, was anessentially Jewish movement. In describing the work of the Holy Spirit as theboundary-breaking presence of God who will not permit these Christians todefine, settle, and manage the little boxes into which they placed themovement of Jesus, Luke is inviting his Gentile audience to embrace an

alternative narrative and language house to the one they had been given interms of eschatological hopes.

I want to suggest this same pattern of events is at work among NorthAmerican Christians today, and the Spirit has continued to be boundary-breaking. The churches formed from the Euro-tribal religious reformations ofthe sixteenth century established forms of ecclesial practice and theologiesthat have been assumed determinative not just for European–North Americancultures in a specific time but for all cultures in all times and places.

This sense that the important questions about the church and itsrelationships with the cultures have been addressed in the reformations of thatperiod created a situation, described in part one, that assumed the primacy ofecclesiology to the point that all else (gospel and cultures, for example) areabout the development of tactics to adjust and engage changingcircumstances. This is the language house in which churches continue to live.

Part two has been looking at Luke-Acts as a means of assessing how wemight find fresh ways to understand our own situation. We can understandour own time as one in which the Spirit of God is breaking the boundarieswithin which the Christian movement has operated in the Western context.Not only is this boundary-breaking about a reductionistic preoccupation withthe church as the central idea we have to get right (the so-called “essence” ofthe church issue), but it is also about the tradition of theologizing that cameout of the sixteenth-century reformations in Europe. In a rapidly globalizingWest, now characterized by new and massive people movements from manyother parts of the world, this “Reformation” boundary may also be one theSpirit is breaking.

In Acts, Luke is reorienting the hope and expectation of Gentile believers.In the midst of confusion and a crisis of identity, it is possible to read thecircumstances in a very different manner. The established language house forunderstanding eschatological hope in terms of Jerusalem, temple, Jewishness,and the empire’s embrace was too small a box in which to place the radicalannouncement of good news in Jesus and the birth of the Jesus community.The good news is that God is doing something far bigger and moreimaginative than can be placed in these small, parochial categories. The crisisof identity is not a crisis concerning God’s purposes but comes as a result ofthe narrow ways in which early Christians experienced and structured God’spurposes after Pentecost. Luke is inviting his Gentile readers into a differentlanguage house. While it opens up a new space for hope and a radically new

context for theologizing and practicing the gospel in towns and villages, italso raised a whole new set of questions.

Raising New Questions

Within the old language house of expectation, certain questions could beeasily answered in terms of the Jerusalem/temple/empire narratives. But inthis different economy of God’s actions that the Spirit has burst open for thefirst-century Christians, how does one know what God is doing in the world?How does one decide what it means to be the church in this new languagehouse—where the old explanations of how things work no longer cohere?These were questions that needed answers if the Gentile churches were toaddress their crisis of identity. They are also the questions we have to answerin our day.

If it is the case that God’s Spirit is breaking the boundaries of ecclesial lifein the Western churches because they can no longer contain the ways inwhich the Spirit is at work in the world, then these nonecclesiocentricquestions of what God is doing must be addressed. If the ecclesiocentricity ofour conversations is now, in fact, a barrier and boundary the Spirit is in theprocess of breaking apart, then it is urgent that we answer these otherquestions.

The boundary-breaking Spirit is making it clear to a growing number ofpeople that ecclesiocentricity has little future. The hope in this difficultdiscovery is that there are also new, strange questions we haven’t needed tothink about before. When the church lay at the center of the conversation, itwas relatively simple to name what God was up to, and we had endless booksthat defined and described what it meant to be the church. In this new space,where the church is not the central focus or question, how do we go aboutaddressing these new questions? How will we know what God is doing whenthe answers can’t be taken for granted? How do we know what it means to bethe church when the church is no longer the central preoccupation?

The rest of this chapter proposes that we can discover answers to thesequestions in Luke’s Gospel. Rather than engage the whole Gospel, thischapter will focus on Luke 10:1–12. The proposal is that in this text we candiscern a way in which Luke continued to frame a response to GentileChristians faced with their own crisis of identity, and it can, therefore, offerus a way of understanding how to be faithful to the gospel in our time.

A Proposal for Reading Our Time of Crisis

As I have said, the Spirit breaks boundaries, a work that can be for usdisorienting and disturbing. The well-worn patterns of Christian life thatshaped the once dominant European-immigrant churches are eroding as ourwhole world enters a new and as yet undefined space.[44] The patterns ofChristian life that shaped and gave meaning to Christian life in NorthAmerica for much of the twentieth century, especially convictions about theplace of the church, are breaking apart. How do we figure out what God isdoing in the world? It is only as we focus attention on this primary questionthat we can ever ask what it means to be the church in this new space—butthis is a secondary question at this point.

Luke may not have had just these questions in mind when he wrote hisGospel. He did, however, write with an eye toward Gentile communities incrisis that needed help in reorienting their imaginations. The followingsections of this chapter imagine what Luke’s response would have been tothese questions as he tells the story of the sending of the seventy to all theplaces Jesus intended to go as he set his eyes toward Jerusalem and hissuffering. Luke’s readers already knew the outcome of this journey with itsrising opposition toward Jesus and then the post-Pentecost communities.What I propose is that in retelling this story, Luke is retheologizing for theseGentiles the question of what God is doing in the world and, therefore, howto be the church.

The proposal offered in the following sections is that Luke 10:1–12describes a way of breaking the church monologue and opening up to us aradically different way of being God’s people. It is an example of whatLesslie Newbigin meant about becoming cross-cultural missionaries in ourown culture. Such a missionary steps out of the monologue. He or she isn’tpreoccupied with self. When entering a different culture, this missionaryknows that he or she can’t begin the conversation with church questions.Even as a young missionary in India, Newbigin, who had gone with all theeducational training and culture of British university life, realized he wouldbe of no good to the kingdom unless he learned to enter the culture and dwellamong the people to whom he had come. He made a practice of living withand sitting among the people in the towns and villages to which he had beensent. This sitting in their midst was one of the ways he sought to be present tothem and attend to their stories, for he knew that until he did this, he would

not be able to understand the gospel in this new place. In the midst of theselistening dialogues, he learned to be present to the other, to hear, read, andperform the gospel in ways he couldn’t have imagined.

Dwell in the StoryLuke 10:1–12 speaks into our crisis in a similar way. The text is presented

below—it’s important to read the Scripture, because we might assume wealready know it. When working with communities of Christians, I invite themto read this text as often as possible, over and over again, until it starts to liveinside them. Dwell in this story, seeking to hear what the Spirit might besaying to us through the text.

After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to everytown and place where he was about to go. He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workersare few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field. Go! I amsending you out like lambs among wolves. Do not take a purse or bag or sandals; and do not greetanyone on the road.

“When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ If a man of peace is there, your peacewill rest on him; if not, it will return to you. Stay in that house, eating and drinking whatever theygive you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house.

“When you enter a town and are welcomed, eat what is set before you. Heal the sick who arethere and tell them, ‘The kingdom of God is near you.’ But when you enter a town and are notwelcomed, go into its streets and say, ‘Even the dust of your town that sticks to our feet we wipeoff against you. Yet be sure of this: The kingdom of God is near.’ I tell you, it will be morebearable on that day for Sodom than for that town.”

The ways this text shapes our responses to the questions of what God is upto in the world and what it means to be the church surprise us. This narrativeasks us to turn away from deep patterns of response.

Radical DiscipleshipThe narrative begins in the context of discipleship. In other portions of

Scripture, we read of numbers of people coming up to Jesus and asking whatthey need to do to become disciples. His responses were so counterintuitiveto their expectations and desires that they turned away from Jesus. (Forexample, he tells a rich, young ruler to go and sell all he has and then comeback and follow him.) This discipleship is more radical than anything anyonehas imagined. It is not about fixing something or adjusting small areas ofone’s life. This discipleship requires a very different kind of response and itwill probably not align with our expectations or fit with the categories ofmeaning that have shaped us to this point in our lives.

It is after these encounters with would-be disciples that Jesus sends outseventy followers ahead of him to all the towns and villages where he intendsto go in Galilee of the Gentiles.[45] This story is set in the midst of Jesus’sjourney down to Jerusalem where he will lose his life. Almost the entireGospel from this point forward is built around the journey south, its results,and the resurrection. While we now know the story well, for those listening toits first readings, it was filled with huge surprises and turns that no one couldhave imagined. The events that were foreseen in the story were unexpected;nothing seemed to fit the established norms.

For Luke this had to do with the why and way these seventy are sent out.For the second-generation Gentile Christians spread across the empire whowere reading the Gospel, what must it have meant for them, as they werereading about their Lord’s journey to Jerusalem and death, to come on thisstory? What would it have been saying to their questions about the crisis ofidentity and meaning they faced?

In Luke 9:51–56 Jesus and the disciples encounter opposition from aSamaritan village. They were not welcomed because “he was heading forJerusalem.” Old animosities flare up. The disciples respond with the same oldformula from a language house that viscerally reacts to Samaritans: “Calldown fire on the village and blot out these no good Samaritans! Teach alesson of power and authority; show them who’s in charge once and for all.”Jesus will have none of it; he will not get embroiled in the fight despite hardopposition and no recognition of who he is.

Luke is helping his readers understand that opposition is the norm when theSpirit breaks the boundaries of expectations and predictable ways of relatingto people. At each turn of this story, Luke is providing these second-generation Gentile Christians a radically different language house from whichto reframe their imagination about the promises of God and their place in themovement of Jesus.

Following this encounter with the Samaritan town, a foretaste of Jerusalem—it’s not just Samaritans who don’t get it and resist—Jesus talks to thedisciples about the cost of discipleship (vv. 57–62). There are going to be lotsof people who want to follow the Jesus movement as long as it fits in withtheir settled assumptions of how things should turn out. But when thedirections Jesus takes diverge from the expectations of what God is doing inthe world, resistance is prompt and fierce. Luke does not pull his punches inorienting these Christians as they look back over half a century of the

church’s young life and wonder why it’s no longer working the way it did forthe first generations. This is the context in which he sets the story of thesending of the seventy.

At the conclusion of this story, immediately following their return from thetowns and villages, Luke tells a very different story about Samaritans. Thisstory, that of the good Samaritan, asks questions about welcoming thestranger and who is my neighbor. Luke is pointing to and anticipating that,apropos to the experience of the seventy, the Spirit is working even amongthe Gentiles; it means we have to be open to the strange new ways of God asboundaries are broken and expectations have to be reoriented.

Luke writes these stories of the sending of the seventy and the Samaritan onthe road to suggest that what God is doing in the world has a lot more to dowith being the stranger and receiving hospitality than being in control of theresources and the answers. Here expectations are turned upside down as itturns out that the strangers who need to be welcomed are those being sent.What could this mean for those of us asking disorienting questions aboutwhat God is up to in the world and what it means to be the church? We needto unwrap the story further.

Leaving Baggage Behind

A number of elements need to be explored for us to understand what isprobably happening in this passage. In the first place, the number of disciplesJesus sends gives us clues about Luke’s intention. In Jewish tradition it isseventy elders who are commissioned to translate the law from Hebrew toGreek; in Luke’s hands this is an allusion to the mission of God to the wholeworld. In other Jewish texts, such as Genesis 10, the number of nations in theworld is seventy. So the context of the sending is the anticipated mission ofthe gospel to the whole world (in the book of Acts).

Jesus’s instructions to his disciples strike readers as peculiar. He says, “Go!I am sending you out like lambs among wolves. Do not take a purse or bag orsandals; and do not greet anyone on the road” (Luke 10:3–4). They were notto take a lot of baggage with them on their journey. In essence they were notto depend on their own resources. In the context of the first century, thesefollowers were sent out on their mission as strangers who would be in needof hospitality from people of the towns and villages. Luke is suggesting thatthe mission of God moves forward in the world when disciples of Jesus

choose to become like strangers in the towns and villages so they will bedependent on the hosts.

The story of this sending, therefore, is not only to illustrate the mission ofGod to the whole world but also to show the manner in which this mission isto be carried out. It is radically different from the conceptions of mission thatcharacterize the Euro-Protestant churches of our time. In the ancient MiddleEast, strangers were an important part of the overall cultural matrix. Theywere the outsiders who, for one reason or another, were dependent on thehospitality of others for their survival, and there were strict laws about howthe stranger was to be treated.

But this was a two-way street. In such a culture, the village people took inthe stranger because they knew that at any time in the future they or theirchildren might become strangers themselves and need to be taken in. Therewas a deep mutuality in this relationship to the stranger. It is important tounderstand what lies behind the allusion here if we are to have an idea ofGod’s intention. It appears there is a connection, a link between being in theplace of the stranger in need and being able to discern God’s working in theworld. The story is suggesting that the one is a precursor of the other.

In the Old Testament story of Elijah, this dynamic is at work (see 1 Kings17). After Ahab and his Baalist wife, Jezebel, kill the prophets of Israel,Elijah flees to the Kerith ravine where he is fed for a time by ravens (note theconnections that we will need to pick up later—being in the place of astranger in need and finding the place where food is given—these are alsoconnected in Luke’s story). Elijah must move on because there is no water inthat part of the desert—he is genuinely a man outside his own context and inneed of help from someone. The Lord directs him to the city of Zarephath (aGentile city of Baal worshipers—Jezebel’s own people), where he meets awidow who provides hospitality to this Jew (see also Luke 4:25–26 whereJesus references the widow of Zarephath and Elijah in response to oppositionin Nazareth). Elijah, with nothing, dwells in the house of the widow and, inthat context, discovers again what God is calling him to do. Elijah must dwellwith the other to discern God’s purposes. It meant that this Gentile womancould not be construed as the “enemy,” the outsider who has nothing to give,but as the one who will provide the table around which Elijah mightreimagine his vocation. It is boundary breaking.

This is the way in which Luke frames Jesus’s sending of the seventy. Thefascinating characteristic of Elijah’s story is that he finds himself pushed

outside his own community. He becomes a stranger because the world inwhich he functioned as a prophet of Israel has been taken from him. In thisnew and precarious space, Elijah is compelled to ask difficult questions aboutGod and about the relationship between God and Israel.

This was also the situation of the Gentile Christians to whom Luke waswriting. The parallel can be made in this way. Elijah’s world wasfundamentally disoriented when the assumptions he had about what God wasdoing were undermined. This also happened to these Gentile communities towhom Luke was writing. Elijah found answers to these questions ofdisorientation as he was forced outside his established world and placed insituations where he became dependent on the hospitality of those who shouldhave been in need of his ministry. Is it the case that the boundary-breakingSpirit is placing these Gentile Christians in similar contexts? By extension, inour own time, will Christian communities in North America discover answersto their crisis of identity as they become willing to enter a similar experienceof becoming like strangers who, without baggage, must enter the towns andvillages to receive hospitality from the other?

Leaving baggage behind is a key part of what Luke is saying. This leavingbaggage behind is about a radical reorientation of how to answer the questionof what God is doing in our world. This is alien to and far away from theways in which most churches “send” people into the towns and villages inwhich we live. Take evangelism programs as an example. Church evangelismor planting schemes call for very different ways of engaging people inneighborhoods and communities from what Luke is describing. Usually theseprograms set up some kind of category or measurement into which the peopleof a community are placed, including how close or distant they are fromknowing Jesus on a scale of understanding or readiness for the gospel, howmany contacts someone may have already had with a church prior to thisencounter, and where a person is on a scale of openness or resistance toChrist. These plans seek to answer certain questions: What particular“seeker” type of program does the church have that outsiders would beinterested in joining or attending? What needs do people have that a churchprogram or Saturday night service might address? And so forth. In all thesecases, the church sends people into the neighborhood fully armed withmarketing research, methods of assessing the readiness of someone for a nextstep, and programs to offer. In other words, churches send out people withplenty of prepacked baggage.

We go into towns and villages with a huge amount of baggage. All of thisbaggage will continually blind us to what God is doing in the towns andvillages where we live, because when we take the baggage, we assume wealready know who the people are and what they need. All the questions ofwhat God might be doing are already answered, catalogued, and turned intosellable programs and strategies.

When we send people out with baggage, we lose two things—the ability tosee people and their needs as they really are and an openness to what God isdoing. We objectify people. They are not the other who, like Newbigin, wemust dwell among and be present to, but they are a category, for which wehave plans. When this is our focus, we can’t listen to the person who standsbefore us as a human being—he or she is the object of our plans. That’sbaggage of the worst kind.

In the second place, we have already determined what God is up to and,therefore, what needs to happen. But in the boundary-breaking work of theSpirit, this is precisely where we need a different approach. We cannot askthe questions of what God is up to in our neighborhoods and communitieswhen we think we already know. It seems that Luke is trying to tell ussomething of critical importance in these brief instructions. In a time ofboundary breaking, when settled assumptions of how God ought to work andwhat the church is supposed to be are undermined, when our assumptionsabout how it was all supposed to turn out are no longer viable, then we musttake a radically different road. We must leave our baggage behind and bewilling to become like a stranger in need of the welcome and care of the otherif we stand any chance of answering the question, What is God up to in ourworld today?

Most of us are trying to figure out all the best, seeker-friendly ways to getsomeone to come to something we are offering. Our plans and what we wantto achieve are all-important—another huge piece of baggage, which preventsour listening to and receiving from the other. Luke points in a differentdirection. This is a text that helps us sketch a new map of the road ahead. Thelanguage house of Eurocentric churches cannot provide the dominant storyfor being God’s people in a post-Christendom, globalizing world.

“Journeying Sentness”

For Luke the faithful God sends the boundary-breaking Spirit to formcommunities of Jesus characterized by journeying sentness. This means thatLuke, in writing his two volumes, used the mission of God in the world asone of the primary lenses for interpreting events to these Gentilecommunities. In one sense this is part of the question with which theseChristians were wrestling, namely, What had gone wrong with the mission ofGod? Telling about the sending of the seventy is part of Luke’s vigorouscounter-narrative, which says that the mission is still central but not in theways anticipated.

The overall sense of this story is that Jesus sends his followers out on acounterintuitive journey of mission for the sake of the kingdom. This wasprobably a difficult metaphor for these second-generation Gentile Christians.Eschatological expectations had faltered. The heroes of the church’s birthing,leaders like Paul and Peter who drove the mission of the kingdom across theRoman world, were gone from the stage, creating anxiety about who wasleading and what the next steps might involve. Most would have grown up inhouse churches linked together by the stories of an expanding movement inwhich they had seen lots of people coming into the faith. Toward the end ofthe first century, as David Bosch points out, the situation was changing.These Christians probably didn’t share the fervor of the earlier generation, sothey were characterized by a loss of energy and enthusiasm for the mission ofGod. In the light of these realities, Bosch sees Luke returning to the foundingstories of Jesus and the disciples to provide these Christians with a new basisfor being faithful communities of witness.[46] And this would meanreshaping their imagination about how the Spirit was moving this witness ofJesus forward.

The metaphor of journeying faithfulness in the midst of opposition musthave been a struggle for them to hear. By this juncture they may well haveexpected Jesus to return. By now God’s future should have been wrapped uprather than this situation of crisis, conflict, and confusion. They were mostlikely communities that had been waiting, expecting; they had apredetermined conviction that there was but a short period before theeschatological future dawned. What would these changes in expectationmean for their formation as communities of witness? How could they goabout discerning what God was doing? Luke’s metaphors of discipleship andconflict, of journeying and entering communities without baggage, painted awildly different interpretive framework from the one into which they had

settled. The implication is that in the context of crisis and identity, it is ajourneying people who are ready to risk entering the ambiguous andvulnerable spaces of mission that follow the contours of God’s engagementsin the world.

Ordinary People

By the latter part of the first century, the heroes of that initial outburst ofmissionary fervor were gone. What happens when the heroes, the greatfigures of the faith who pioneered an immense movement of the Spirit, aregone from the stage? Where do you turn to find new heroes who can lead intothe crisis-ridden future? Luke’s answer is different from anything that couldhave been expected. His message was that God’s kingdom is announced andlived in the midst of ordinary people, not the heroes, the professionals, or thestars.

The seventy who are sent out are nameless, but that doesn’t mean they’reunimportant, just used to make a point. I think Luke is saying somethingimportant to his little church communities about the nature of the gospel inthe midst of their confusion and lostness. These people are looking back tothe first generation of Christians and to the stories of the apostles, their bravedeeds, and their amazing miracles. But these heroes of the faith are all gone—that era is over and this new generation feels lost and a little adrift.

In the nameless seventy, Luke is saying something about how the gospelindwells a time and a place as well as the nature of the community and itstasks. It is among ordinary men and women, whose names will not berecorded or remembered, that God shapes a future. Contrary to the way weset everything up in the modern West, it will not be from the stars andprofessionals, the so-called great leaders and gurus, that the direction ofGod’s future is discovered. It will not be through some who get to the top ofsome proverbial mountain and come down with the directions and solutionsthat the answers to the questions of what God is up to in the world emerge. Itis through the ordinary people of God, the nameless people who never standon stages or get their photo in the newspaper, that the gospel will indwelltheir space. This is the strange, counterintuitive imagination Luke seeks togive to these Gentiles and, over the millennia, to us.

Taking Stock

In these last sections I have set a context and presented an argument abouthow the people of God shaped by a dying Eurocentric church in NorthAmerica discern what God is up to in this world. I have not given a fullresponse to this question but provided some of the key background elementsthat must frame our response. Before completing the response to thisquestion, it is helpful to summarize the argument so far and the map that isemerging:

1. God is faithful—but the mission-shaped movement formed by Jesus isbigger than the ethnocentric boxes within which we have tried tocontain it.

2. The Spirit is at work in our turbulent world where the categories andmaps that once gave us power and control no longer function.[47] TheSpirit is breaking the boundaries we have set around the movement ofGod and calling us out onto a different path.

3. The road onto which we are being called is counterintuitive; it calls usto leave behind our bags filled with methods and models of how tomake the church work by creating programs that will attract and catchpeople. The way of the Spirit involves going on the road as a stranger,needing to receive hospitality from the other. This is a strangeinversion of categories and actions—it does not fit with the way of lifewe have developed as middle-class individualists living in a “makeyourself” capitalist culture. Our language house presumes we must bein control of outcomes and methods, but the new language house ofLuke 10 takes us in a significantly different direction.

4. There is a link between taking on the nature of the stranger in needand our capacity to discern what God is up to in our world today.

5. In a context of crisis around our identity as Christians in the West, wecan discern the shape of God’s engagements in the world by becominga journeying people who enter the ambiguous and vulnerable spaces ofmission.

6. It is among the ordinary people of God, the nameless people whonever stand on stages or get their photo in the newspaper where God’sboundary-breaking future will emerge. The local and ordinary are keysto how churches in North America will reform themselves to join

again with the mission of God in the world. This is not to deny theimportance of global mission or the connectional nature of ourchurches, but it is to say that centralized and overarching theories orprograms cannot help.

10A New Set of Practices

Themes of Luke 10

This chapter argues that Luke provides a concrete response to the GentileChristians for whom he is writing his Gospel. It can be stated in these terms:the primary way to know what God is up to in our world when the boundarymarkers seem to have been erased is by entering into the ordinary, everydaylife of the neighborhoods and communities where we live.

Framing this in terms of the way churches function in our time, we can say:in these times of huge transition where our language houses are beingoverturned, we will not know what God is up to in the world by huddlingtogether in study groups, writing learned papers, or listening to self-appointed gurus. The normative means of figuring out answers in the oncedominant Eurocentric churches has been to do study and analysis (forexample, look at the biblical nature of mission, do studies on the essence ofthe church or the forms of evangelism, and so on), then come up withstrategies and programs. Denominational systems have spent huge amountsof money on assessments of what makes for a healthy church or the “sevensteps” to turning a church inside out and so forth.

All of these activities, though, are focused on the church and how to makethe church work, which is the wrong focus. If one could risk restating Luke’sretheologizing in a somewhat radical manner (that may be misunderstood andwill be misinterpreted), the point of this text for our Eurocentric churches is:If you want to discover and discern what God is up to in the world just now,stop trying to answer this question from within the walls of your churches.Like strangers in need of hospitality who have left their baggage behind,enter the neighborhoods and communities where you live. Sit at the table ofthe other, and there you may begin to hear what God is doing.

The seventy were sent out into the towns and villages where Jesus would becoming. A part of Luke’s response to the question of identity is that

discerning what God is doing is tied to entering and becoming present to thepeople of the neighborhoods and communities where we live. The way thisentering is to be done is critical. Those of us who are part of the churches thatonce held a dominant place in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century religiouslife of North America are being invited to become like strangers, willing toenter the world of the other to receive hospitality from our neighbor.[48] Itseems that in this act of becoming like the stranger and being willing toreceive hospitality, we stand a chance of discerning what God is up to. Wemust explore the meaning of this strange inversion.

Luke is articulating a gospel insight we have largely lost. If these second-generation Christians are in towns and villages all over the Roman world thathave little or no idea of the gospel and if these Christians are now confusedand anxious about both the speed and depth of the changes in their situation,then part of Luke’s response to them is that they are going to rediscover themeaning and shape of the gospel as they enter into the towns and villageswhere the Spirit has sent them to live.

God’s Unexpected Direction

Is Luke 10:1–12 an echo of Jeremiah 29 where the prophet sends a letterfrom the Lord to the Jerusalem exiles? These are also a people who assumedGod would act in certain ways and history would have an outcome thatsupported their reading of reality. All of that had been shattered by thedestruction of Jerusalem and the first temple. Jeremiah’s letter instructs theexiles to stop seeking a return to Jerusalem. They are given strange, hugelycounterintuitive instructions that would have made little sense to Jewishpeople—they were to settle in the city of Babylon (its name means “the gateof the gods,” implying that this city is the place in all the earth where thegods—of the other—come down; one can only imagine the shock of this cityon the exiles).

Jeremiah’s letter suggests that the only way for these exiles to rediscovertheir identity as God’s people is by dwelling in the very place where theyimagined God could never be. This is a stunning reversal of their languagehouse. Nothing could have prepared them for these instructions. Yet there itwas—a word from the Lord telling them to embrace and enter this city theyhad learned to despise.

In a similar manner, is Luke suggesting here to Gentile Christians that theymust take their focus off what Jerusalem represented and live among peopleswho know nothing of the gospel story? Is this the only way the Christianswill be able to answer their questions about what God is doing? Is this whatLuke would be writing to us as North American churches, who are confusedand disoriented by the massive implosion of our Eurocentric church systemsthat seemed to work so well for so long? Could it be that this is the Spirit’sboundary-breaking invitation to us today? Even while there’s still a lot offocus on trying to make our churches work again (making them “healthy” orturning them “inside out”), is the Spirit inviting us to reenter theneighborhoods to discover what God is already doing there? For many of us,this is as shocking and as radical an invitation as the one Jeremiah sent to thecaptives in Babylon.

Is God calling us to enter deeply into the neighborhoods and communitieswhere we live and/or where our churches are located (the parish system offerssome powerful images of what it could mean to be God’s people; surelycommuting to church is a radical denial of the Incarnation)? Perhaps Luke issuggesting that a primary way of discerning God’s plan is when, like theexiles, we reenter the life of the local people, listen to their stories, and lovethem deeply without feeling the need to “sell” or make a “pitch” or assumewe already know what they need and what the gospel ought to look like inthis time and place. What would happen if we started in this way rather thanwith the prearranged designs and assumptions about how church ought tolook?

I’m just not convinced anymore we can do this if we are genuinely to enterour local neighborhoods as cross-cultural missionaries. I am not suggestingwe don’t or shouldn’t have traditions or forms around that we will live asChristians. I am not proposing we should throw away our traditions. Not for amoment! These traditions carry with them a rich heritage; they shape us inthe ways of the gospel. It is these traditions that give us a language housewithin which we live, and we can’t pretend or deny that this isn’t the case.When I am shaped in the language house of the Apostles’ Creed; the dailyand weekly reading of the Gospel, the Old Testament, and the Psalms; andthe regular gift of the Eucharist, I don’t enter the neighborhoods andcommunities where I live as a blank slate. I am who I am because of all thesepractices of Christian life within a tradition. We shouldn’t give these up.

When the exiles found themselves in Babylon, they didn’t give up thereading of the Torah or the practice of prayer. They didn’t fail to gather at thegate or around the fire and practice midrash. But in this new space thatchallenged so many of their assumptions about what God was up to, theycould discover a way forward and a new way of being God’s people only byentering into that place. It was in the entering and the listening that a newdiscernment, a new language house, a new imagination of what it wouldmean to be God’s people emerged.

Entering the towns and villages where Jesus intended to go was not anaggressive evangelism strategy. Quite the opposite. It was a willingness toenter and be present as the stranger in need of hospitality. Then it waspossible to announce the kingdom of God and heal the sick.

A New Text for Our Time

Our language houses are constructed around some primary images. In thetwentieth century, for example, when Christians from the Euro-tribalchurches thought about the word home, their imagination was shapedprimarily by the idea of a single-family dwelling with two parents and anumber of children. Think of the television series from the seventies throughthe nineties that primarily depicted this kind of home and family. Even today,when members of these churches are interviewed and asked for metaphorsthat describe their church, they will more often than not say it is “a caringfamily”; the idea is similar to the one just described.

This is a powerful language house that comes out of the early nineteenthcentury and the industrial revolution in England and Europe. But it has littlecorrelation with the reality of North American life today, where the largestpercentage of adults lives alone. The ideas of home and family are beingradically reshaped, but too often the language house of the churches remainslocked into an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideal.

The same can be said about the idea of being a people on God’s mission.North American churches have lived in a language house that may no longerbe adequate or appropriate in terms of the interpretation of a specific text andits meaning for our time. As I wrote in chapter 6, in the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries the paradigmatic text that shaped the missionarymovement and much of the formation of evangelicalism was Jesus’s messagein Matthew 28:18–20:

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of allnations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, andteaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, tothe very end of the age.

Western Christians took up this text in a time of political, economic, andglobal expansion and empire building. The language of power in that contextwas one that matched the sense of place, privilege, and requisite authority.There was then a sense of moving out with the right answers for all otherpeoples because it was through the West that God was shaping the kingdomof God on earth.

This is not to diminish in any way the passionate, courageous work of somany missionaries. It may be that many of these missionaries went out withthese notions of power and position, but the most creative ones had learned adifferent story and a different way. They let go of their power and their senseof position and entered the towns and villages as strangers in need ofhospitality so that the gospel could be heard in fresh, meaningful ways.

Overall, however, the interpretation of Matthew 28 came directly out of thesense of power and authority that we in modern, Western culture have. Whydid this text become so central to our imagination? Could it have been, again,that for most of the twentieth century, when evangelicalism was in adefensive posture in the culture, this text seemed to endow us with power andauthority from God, actually affirming what we already had? We read thistext, not as a challenge to go out into all the world, but rather as anaffirmation of the power and authority we believed God had given us.

What might it mean to us if this rendering of Matthew 28 can no longer besustained? What would it mean if we simply no longer have the power andauthority to know how and what the gospel must look like among the peoplesof a radically changed time and place? Here’s the question I want us toexplore: what if God is saying to us that the imperialism, authority, andcontrol that have been behind our use of Matthew 28 are over and that theways in which we will rediscover the gospel is by becoming a Luke 10people? If we believed this, it would transform us from a one-way-dialoguepeople into those who reenter the conversations with the gospel and ourcultures without needing to ask “church” questions all the time. This means amassive culture shift for many churches and their leaders. It involvespracticing Luke’s description of entering houses.

Entering Houses

Luke 10:1–12 uses the language of a stranger who receives hospitality. It’simportant here that those who go two by two are the ones who receivehospitality and the gracious goodness of those who live in the towns andvillages. Luke repeats the injunction to enter and stay, along with the parallelinjunction of eating what is set before them, indicating this entering andeating lie at the heart of his message. Those sent are not to enter a house justfor some coffee and conversation; they are to stay in the same house and notjump from place to place.

Several things seem important. First, let us say those being sent, in terms ofour situation, represent the churches seeking to make sense of theirdisorientation, as boundaries are broken and the Spirit is doing things overwhich we have no control. In this Luke 10 context the location of the“church,” if you will, is in the homes and at the tables of the people in thetowns and villages, and the stance of the “church” is that of receiving theirgracious hospitality (hence, some of the reason for the injunction not to carryextra provisions that make you independent and, therefore, never in need ofthe hospitality of the other).

Second, this is not, it would seem, a hit-and-run event—there is a strongsense that these disciples stayed with the people for quite some time. Enteringthe house would not carry the same meaning as it does for us (entering asingle-family dwelling). “House” here could be read “household,” whichmeant not only an extended family but an economic unit. The implication isthat, in some way, the “church” is to go in such a way that it enters, indwells,and joins the social and economic rhythms of the household (hence, themeaning of the strange comment in verse 7 that the “worker deserves hiswages”). This is more than a door-knocking junket to evangelize or invite aneighbor to a special “seeker” service. This is about entering deeply into thelife of the other on his or her terms, not your own—“eat what is set beforeyou” (v. 7 NRSV).

Third, these disciples are not to run about from place to place looking forjust the right location or just the right kind of people to be with. It wouldseem that Luke is aware of the belief that the “grass is always greener on theother side of the fence” syndrome, which besets us all. Here, staying putamong people is a critical element to being a gospel people and rediscoveringthe gospel for ourselves. There is no room given here for the language house

of meeting with my own kind or being drawn to those who share my valuesand politics. The neighbors across the street or next door could be from anypart of the world today, and chances are they don’t share your worldview.This is where we are invited to plant ourselves in the local, making acommitment to the long haul. This is not a hit-and-run mission in an attemptto get our kind of church in place and successful. It seems that for Luke thelong view is a prerequisite to engaging the question of what God is doing inthe world. This is a very different way of going about discerning God’spurposes from the usual Bible study groups in a church that are oftencomprised of people who all share the same values, have known each otherfor a long time, and can finish each other’s sentences—there is somethingwildly different happening here.

What does all this say about our congregations and the crisis of identityfaced by so many of the Euro-tribal churches in North America? What mightbe the implications for the kind of transformation that people are eagerlyseeking just now? Luke is retheologizing those past decades to invite theseGentile Christians into a different language house about the gospel and God’spurpose.

Could it be that the Spirit is inviting us on a similar journey? We, thechurches of North America, are being called to reorient ourselves, to beconverted all over again in a way that may be more radical than the sixteenth-century reformations. In our day of disorientation and boundary-breaking,we’re called to practice becoming like the stranger who needs to be receivedas a “guest” and welcomed to the table of others who may be very differentfrom us.[49]

Our calling is to enter into their homes (dwell with and among them) andstay with them for quite a period of time without any plans to take off if theyor their ways don’t suit us. This is going to require radically different ways ofthinking about being the church in our day. For one thing, it’s going to meanlearning how to actually listen to people without making them objects of ourends. It’s going to mean a readiness to enter into dialogue with the other,seeking to listen to their stories and conversations in a genuinely humanengagement. This is going to feel very strange and disrupting for manyChristians, even those in leadership, because it will mean we are no longer incontrol of the conversation. This kind of engagement will not be about ourgetting something from the other or deeming the other a potential customerfor our “pitch.” This leads to another element of what I think Luke may have

been communicating to these Gentile Christians whose world was beingturned inside out. He wrote that part of Jesus’s instructions to the discipleswas to eat what was set before them.

Eating and Drinking What Is Placed before Us

Theologian Alexander Schmemann writes:

Man is what he eats. . . . In the biblical story of creation man is presented, first of all, a hungrybeing, and the whole earth is his food. Second only to the direction of propagation . . . accordingto the author of the first chapter of Genesis, is God’s instruction . . . to eat of the earth: “Behold Ihave given you every herb bearing seed . . . and every tree, which is the fruit of a tree yieldingseed. . . .” Man must eat in order to live; he must take the world into his body and transform it intohimself, into flesh and blood. He is indeed that which he eats, and the whole world is presented asone all-embracing banquet table for man. And this image of the banquet remains, throughout theBible, the central image of life. It is the image of life at its creation and also the image of life at itsend and fulfillment: “. . . that you eat and drink at my table in my kingdom.”[50]

In the Scripture text, the instruction to stay in the same house is followedby the phrase, “for the worker deserves his wages” (Luke 10:7). Often thispassage has been used to justify paying church workers (again this shows ourpreoccupation with the internal working of a church). But what if this phrasehas a different meaning? One can’t imagine that these seventy were receivedinto the homes of townspeople as “Christian workers” and, therefore, givenfood and drink! That would be a huge stretch of the text, particularly if Lukeis addressing Gentile Christians in a relatively hostile environment, whichwas not particularly welcoming to Christians.

What if these seventy, when they entered into towns and villages, actuallyspent time doing manual labor among, with, and beside the people? This wascertainly part of the way Paul functioned during many of his journeys acrossthe empire. He would regularly find the local tentmakers and join with themin their work. This was one of the primary ways he entered into the rhythmsof community life.

If this group of seventy were sent out, not as traveling prophets or religiousemissaries but, like Paul, to work among the townspeople, we must read thisstory differently. We have disciples entering into every aspect of the life ofthe townspeople—working and eating together (remember, at this timepeople didn’t “go to work”; the home and workplace were usually prettymuch synonymous, so people would be rubbing shoulders with each other allthe time in the “home”).

Sitting at the table together would be an opportunity for shared lives anddeep communion. It is an honor to be welcomed to someone’s table. This iswhere people talked, as an extended family, about the things in life thatmattered. Luke is saying that one of the primary places where disciplesshould interact with others is at the table of others. Others are the generoushosts; we are those who receive their hospitality. In the midst of these kindsof relationships, we stand a chance of rediscovering the gospel.

This is a strange imagination for us. We live in a time of the continualbreakdown of the table as a place where we gather to eat and talk with eachother. How rushed our lives have become, represented by the increasingnumbers of middle-class people who eat at restaurants or bring home fastfood. There are few times when any of us take the time to gather the basicelements of a meal and put together a table where others can sit for a time totalk. This has become an alien way of life for most people.

My wife and I had two young, single women at our table one night. We hadcooked supper from scratch as the four of us sat around drinking wine andtalking up a storm. It wasn’t hard—a bit of risotto with some mushroomsthrown in with grated cheese—simple food that communicated we loved toeat with others and savor the good things of the earth that God has given us.As we sat down, Jane lit a candle and we continued our conversations. Theevening went on for a few hours with wonderful conversation. As we sat andlistened, we became aware of the struggles these single women experienced,engaging in relationships in a time when we have grown suspicious andfearful of the other. The striking thing about the evening was that these twowonderful people not only thanked us, they told us how rarely they sit at atable with others and just talk.

I don’t think this was the case in Luke’s world. For early Christians, thetable was a natural part of their element. Sitting together at meals was whatthey did. People gathered around tables in extended households; the strangerwas welcomed; the life of the town was shaped around work and tableconversation. So Luke is sketching out a primary way, through sittingtogether at meals, in which these Christians might discover the shape ofgospel life in an environment where it made no sense and had no context.

The table is a symbol of where God is taking all of creation. More than asymbol, it is a sacrament that can engage us directly in the life of God. Thatis, perhaps, one of the reasons the world of modernity has created the beliefthat fast food, quick meals, and busy lives are the symbols of success—they

release us from the sacraments and rhythms that restore and root us in ourhumanity and personhood. But for humans to flourish, we need to beembedded in such a life.

The table is a symbol of the eschaton (God’s healed creation in Christ),which has already started among us. These early followers of Jesus were notentering the households as blank slates; they came with the news of God’sshalom, their own announcement that God’s promised future had comeamong them. These disciples brought their narrative of God’s coming inJesus to the table.

All of this needs explanation. In the first place, Western Christianity hasoften equated notions of eschatology and eschaton with what God plans to doat the end of time. This has certainly been the predominant way it has beeninterpreted in North America throughout the last century, popularized in suchpulp fiction as The Late Great Planet Earth and more recently the wildlypopular Left Behind series. What I mean here has nothing to do with thissense of the terms. I use eschaton to refer to the ways in which God’s futurefor all of creation in Jesus Christ has already begun with all kinds offoretastes for humanity and creation. In this sense, when we gather for a mealas Christians with others, we are in the presence of God’s future. In the midstof our conversations, God’s future begins to become materially present. Thisis what Jesus did with the disciples he met on the Emmaus road as he brokebread with them; it is the picture John gives us from Patmos of what thefuture will be like—a great banquet where God is here among us in the townsand villages, eating with us in celebration, for “the dwelling of God is withus, and he will live with us forever” (Rev. 21:3).

When I, as a Christian, sit down at someone’s table or cook a meal forfriends, for me that is a sacrament of the eschaton with Jesus present amongus. The table is not just a table and the meal is not just food to fill a body withnutrients. The meal is a sacrament that presents and anticipates God’s future.Here in Luke, two people enter a house, work side by side with the extendedcommunity of that household, and sit to break bread with them at the end ofthe day, and they talk together. In the midst of these conversations (whichrequire listening to the other) there will lie all the hints and intimations ofwhat God is up to out there ahead of us. This is the word and the world Lukeis opening up before us as he retheologizes the events following Jesus’sresurrection to address the crisis of identity overcoming the churches.

I believe we are being invited to lay aside all our church questions with alltheir programs designed to answer our questions about how to reach morepeople. We are to lay aside our anxious need to say the right words at theright place to get the right decisions and we are to enter the households, workbeside people, and sit at tables where we can listen to their stories and entertheir dialogue and, perhaps, catch the wind of the Spirit as he births newforms of witness and life in a time grown tired of church conversations.

The Church in Public Space

Luke may be suggesting a radically different location for being the churchwhen the Spirit is breaking our boundaries.[51] What if one of the mostimportant locations for the church isn’t so much being centered in here asbeing located out there? What if an element of what God is saying to us inthis passage is that the nature, meaning, role, and function of the church willbe rediscovered only to the extent we learn to discern what God is up to inthe interactions with people in the public space and homes of our towns andvillages? I’m saying this because, when I read this passage over and over, itstrikes me that the answer to the question, Where is the church in thispassage? is not in a building filled with people just like us and it’s not in abuilding where regularly scheduled religious meetings occur. It’s in thehomes of people who are largely outside of those meetings. It’s sitting at theirtables, listening to their stories, breaking bread with them, and entering into ahuman dialogue that is not a well-rehearsed sales pitch. This is the location ofthe church—in the public space.

What if this is the new journey into which God is calling us? This would bea radical shift from our current understanding of church. It’s a lot more thantraining people how to engage others in talking about the gospel or how tomove them through steps toward decisions. Can we grasp the implications ofwhat we’ve become when we have to train people how to have conversationswith neighbors or set times aside to talk with another human being? Whatkind of inhuman world have we created for ourselves, and how has thechurch managed to accept it and develop marketing skills to manage it? Canwe be that far away from the gospel of our Lord that we don’t see what wehave become? This book proposes a fundamental change in ourunderstanding of how we live as Christians.

Everything has become impersonal today, and with that we have lost thecapacity to encounter one another on a human level. By personal I don’tnecessarily mean individual. The former has been lost in the latter in our timeand that is a great tragedy. We now tend to use personal for that which is ourown, what is private, but that is not what the word was meant to convey.

When I use the word personal, I’m not referring to what is private but towho I am in my relationships with and among particular people at a particularplace and time in the world. Personal has to do with the kind and quality ofperson I am, in terms of character and gifts, in relationship with all the peopleto whom I am connected. Therefore, personal is about my connection withothers. (The opposite would be some universal type of human being,illustrated by the telemarketer who asks if Mr. Roxburgh is home, so he canoffer me a special product that has been developed personally for my needs.In this case I am simply an abstraction, a member of some universal categoryof people who fit a certain buying profile.)

The personal is grasped directly in real, human, face-to-face engagement,not abstractly as an idea or compilation of the average person. The personal isall about the messiness of relationships over the long term in which knowingand hearing and sharing in the life of the other are critical.

If someone asks me if I know Jesus as my personal Savior, in the sense ofthe word I have just conveyed, I could say, “Yes, yes, that is who I am!” Butthe person would be surprised by my answer, because that’s not what is beingasked.

I believe Luke 10 is a critical text for our time of dislocation; it challengesthe belief that the church is the place for personal self-development andmeeting of needs. We can’t go on doing church in the ways the Euro-tribalcommunities of the twentieth century did and we can no longer have as ourmain concern how to get people into church or the kind of “pitch” we’ll useon a potential “seeker” or the “type” of person our focus group study tells uswe should go after for a new church plant (shall we go after False CreekFanny or False Creek Fred?). This is far from the gospel of our Lord.

I’m appealing for the recovery of local and particular ways of calling forththe personal once more in the towns and neighborhoods where we live. Forme, this is about dwelling among, working beside, and eating at the table ofthe men and women who live in our communities, who long for the personalrather than the pitch.

It all sounds so simple and straightforward, so obvious! But it is far fromwhere most of our churches are at this moment. Most have bought into theprivatized, individualized culture of the great bazaar and chosen to competein the market of experiences, using sophisticated sales pitches in their journeyto success. If they haven’t bought into it, most are trying to find the plan thatwill get them into the game.

Will this monologue about the church never end? Luke 10 offers analternative direction—it suggests that the location of the church is in thepublic space of household, neighborhood, and town. The church willrediscover its life at the table, where bread is broken and stories are told.

Now it is time to turn to the other part of Luke 10—the story andconversations the seventy were directed to share in the households wherethey stayed. One way of approaching this section of the story is to ask, If thechurch is to be located out there in the public spaces and households of thetowns, what is the gospel being asked to communicate? If Luke is addressinga second generation of Christians struggling to reorient themselves in a timeand place where the story they have received no longer seems to be makingsense, then what is Luke saying to these Christians through this story?

11Peace, Healing, and the Kingdom of God

Living Out a Subversive Proclamation

They were seen not just as a religious grouping, but one whose religion made them a subversivepresence within the wider Roman society.

N. T. Wright

For a lot of Christian leaders the proposals about the location and shape ofChristian engagement in an unthinkable world just aren’t enough.Suggestions about entering, dwelling, and listening to discern what God is upto just seem bereft of an “edgy” gospel that demands response because it isgiven with utter clarity. Leaders are unsettled by the proposals outlined inthese chapters because they seem empty of the propositions that have to beconfessed, the “pitch” that has to be made if one is to get into the “church”conversation. I see these responses in the body language of leaders and hear itin their questions. The perception is that the proposals offered in this bookare just not going to get the job done—the job of getting people to confessJesus as their Lord and Savior and join the church.

I’m not denying the need for men and women to respond to the call of Godand the announcement of the kingdom, but something massive is happeningto our Euro-tribal churches. A trickle of change that was resisted is becominga torrent where the boundary-breaking Spirit is radically changing the natureof mission in North America. But let’s be clear that experiments in suchthings as emergent or simple or multisite churches do not change theconversation or the preoccupation. There is nothing formally or imaginativelydifferent about these movements and tactics. Each is a different version of thesame old ecclesiocentric, make-the-church-work conversation, themonologue that has been in place for too long.

The Spirit is out there ahead of us, inviting us to listen to the creationgroaning in our neighborhoods. Only in the willingness to risk this entering,

dwelling, eating, and listening will we stand a chance as the church to bringthe embodied Jesus to the world.

I must confess how arduous it is to be met with these “church” questions,realizing that most of those who ask them are still locked into seeking churchsolutions. Sometimes people will ask if what is being proposed isn’t justcommunity development. They mean good works that anybody can do, notreally the gospel. Such questions are fundamentally Gnostic and Docetic innature.[52] I used to argue with such people, but now I know I’m not going tochange anyone’s mind. How do you paint the pictures that show why, in ourtime, this is the way God is calling us to rediscover the gospel, not as amarketing strategy but as the hope for all human life and this wonderfulcreation in which we live?

Uprooting Cherished Assumptions

It is at this point that people ask about my reading of Luke 10, because I havenot yet said anything about the “message” the seventy-two were instructed tobring to the households in these towns and villages. Before turning to thoseissues, one further piece that is implicit in the passage is important to discuss.I’m going to talk about the church for a moment and address the churchquestion that besets leaders so much in our day: how do we reach them to getthem in? Of course the question is asked in far more subtle and complexways than this, but for the sake of our discussion, this way of stating it willdo. The typical answer is to turn an inside-looking church into an outside-looking church. (Some call it moving from an internally to an externallyfocused church, but the discussion in this book should demonstrate that thiskind of false polarity is really to miss the point altogether.)

For people asking the question, the church remains the focus of attention.The church is a location and a place where we bring people and where certainthings happen. Obviously, there are important elements of being Christiansthat require us to gather in a place to do certain things, like the sacraments,the recitation of the creeds, formation in Christian practices, and so on. Butthis has become the limit of what is functionally meant by church for toomany Christians and their leadership. It’s a place to which we go wherecertain private, religious experiences take place with like-minded people. Inthis context it is perfectly understandable that most people, including leaders,simply assume that the gospel is about getting people to know Jesus, and

knowing Jesus means coming to church. Church, then, is where you go andit’s about certain things you do when you get there.

How might Luke’s story be questioning our assumptions about Christianlife and the gospel? What hints does it offer as we seek to shape the Christianlife today? Rather than assuming we have already read this story many timesand figured out what it’s about, how might this story “read” us in ways thatchange our imagination about being God’s people? In both Old and NewTestaments the Spirit was continually uprooting the basic and cherishedassumptions of God’s people, overturning their comfortable, manageablelives and the beliefs they had created about God. Luke’s two volumes do thesame.

A Larger Story

Consciously, Luke sets the narrative of Jesus and the early church in thecontext of the continuation of the larger story of God’s actions that has beengoing on for a long period of time. Therefore, Luke is committed to beingrooted in the narrative memory of Scripture and its anticipation of God’sfuture. For Luke the question of what Jesus is about, and by extension, whatthe new community is about, can be answered only in terms of continuitywith the memory of a specific narrative and within the boundaries of alanguage house shaped by the Jewish Scriptures and the incarnation, life,death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. The Luke text we haveexamined is not an isolated text to be used for personal edification or someillustration of how to make life work. It’s part of a larger story that is, itself,filled with memory and anticipation. Our challenge in letting the storyaddress and read us is that, as heirs of modernity, we are embedded in waysof reading the world that are the opposite of what Luke is communicating. Inour time we are driven to excise the past continually and make memoryirrelevant so we can make good on the belief that we have started anew witha clean slate. We must be aware of this dynamic if we are to let this story readus instead of blithely using it for our own ends.

For us to grasp the significance of this story, I need to say a few thingsabout the larger narrative in which it is set, namely, Luke’s own perception ofwhat is going on. As I have said numerous times, Luke is concerned withwhat is happening to the growing number of second-generation GentileChristians who are growing discouraged by the way things are turning out

and the darkening clouds of the political and social world around them. Inthis sense it is an example of pastoral writing. Things don’t look that good forhis readers. Luke’s two volumes focus on issues of social status; the birthstories right at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel indicate this tension as well asthe keen awareness Luke has of the political world in which these Christiansmust now operate. The story of the sending of the seventy must be readwithin the context of these concerns.

Luke roots the narrative of Jesus in the memory, purpose, and ancient planof God, presenting Jesus in the image of a prophet like Moses whom God hasraised up to bring deliverance.[53] Jesus is, therefore, about the continuationof God’s narrative among a people. But Luke shows Jesus to be more than aprophet. He is the prophesied Messiah who comes to announce anddemonstrate a great reversal of the order of the world (given the way Lukebegins his Gospel, this work of the Messiah is far more than a private,individualistic experience to be worked out within the confines of some“church” world; it is deeply political and social). The poor will have the goodnews proclaimed to them, the captives will be set free, the blind will see, andthe oppressed will be released (Luke 4:18–19). Anyone who has grown upreading the Old Testament or hearing its stories told over and over again willknow automatically that these texts are commentaries on the promisedshalom of God, which is about his coming reign and the new creation.

Luke is setting the story of the sending of the seventy firmly within thememory and the anticipation of the people of God. The encouragement tothese Gentile Christians is that all Jesus began to say and all that hashappened to Jesus and these Christian communities are still firmly rooted inwhat God has been doing from the beginning. This is important because it istelling these young Christians to be confident, even while the picture isconfusing. The confidence is not based on the certainty of plans but theSpirit’s continuing work of disrupting all things to bring about all that Godhas promised and done from the beginning.

In Jesus’s time, anticipation had been pulled apart—it lay in shatteredpieces like painful shards of memory. Since the time of the Babyloniancaptivity, there had been a diaspora. The memory of that event lived onalongside the Maccabean revolt and the Roman occupation. For most wholived in these towns and villages, the memory of exile continued. Theirexperience was a failed hope and a fear that little could change. In suchcontexts people pull into themselves, draw lines around tight little

communities, becoming, in our terms, gated and tribalized with a narrowview of themselves and their purposes.

The Essenes were an example; they were the sectarians andcommunitarians of the time. They believed that if only they could pull thelittle community of the faithful together long enough, with all the correctpractices and habits, they would overcome and God would intervene.

Another group, the Zealots, were a narrow band of radical terrorists bent ondisrupting the political and economic nexus of the mighty empire. They feltcompelled to act in view of the fact that the old institutions trundled alongwith ever-increasing regulation as the temple establishment sought topreserve old certainties and normalcy as a way of guaranteeing somesemblance of control.

The Pharisees believed that if they could form and model for people athoroughly righteous way of life, the Messiah would come. These passions,desires, and practices were alive in a swirling environment of expectation anddisillusionment. But as it is with all peoples in all times of history, the townswere filled with people who knew of all these movements and just wanted tokeep their heads down and get on with life. For most, hope was a luxury theycould ill afford in a world that seemed far out of their control and where Godseemed unconcerned about the issues they faced.

Jesus: The Story’s Fulfillment

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus comes as the bearer of memory and anticipation—the birth narratives point to God’s promises. In Luke 4, Jesus opens the scrollto the words of deliverance in Isaiah. There could be no mistaking that hewas taking up the promises of God and identifying himself with theirfulfillment. The people of the towns where he went saw the healing andmiracles as signs of God’s kingdom coming among them. Luke is tellingthese second-generation Christians that in all Jesus did and said, he wassignaling that God’s promised future had arrived.

In terms of the disciple community Jesus gathered, it is clear that they werenot going to function like the disciple bands of other groups. Instead ofturning inward, like the Essenes huddled together in expectation of somefuture tomorrow, Jesus would not allow his disciples to shape themselvesaround this option (see 9:33 where Peter desires to build three shelters on theMount of Transfiguration; 9:46–50 where Jesus teaches that to be the least is

to be the greatest; and Jesus’s description of discipleship that is the prelude tothe sending of the seventy in Luke 10). His disciples, unlike the Phariseegroups, don’t seem to be focused on keeping all the regulations ofrighteousness—they would pick grain or heal the sick on a Sabbath. Instead,Jesus gathers and sends out his disciples to announce that God’s future hascome among them. Luke seems to be making the argument that Jesus’sdisciples are about continuing the work of their Lord, and Jesus’s work isabout being sent out, about leaving places of familiarity, control, and security(see Phil. 2:1–11). Luke describes them as being sent like lambs amongwolves, as those who take nothing with them on the journey except the wordsof shalom, the announcement of the kingdom, and the healing of the sick.

What are we to do with this description of a disciple community sent todwell among people rather than withdraw into closed communities that seekto attract others? What are we to do with this call to live in, with, and amongthe concrete particularities of people’s lives rather than constructpredetermined abstract formulas and devices that sort others into formulaictypes bearing little connection to any certain individual? How do we answerthis question: what is the gospel in this story of the sending of the seventy?Luke 10 addresses such questions differently than do the writings andconversations that have shaped the missional church conversation over thepast decade. Today we are seeing the unhappy results of our failure to breakout of the church monologue; increasing numbers of books uncritically pickup the missional conversation and apply it to this monologue about thechurch.

Luke’s focus, first, is not that of the “church” but of the gospel as thecontinuing narrative of the memory and expectation of God’s actions inJesus. Second, Luke is concerned to address these Gentile Christians aboutthe gospel’s ongoing encounter with the culture. The engagements we needrequire the same ordering. We must now shape our conversation by, initially,leaving aside questions of church and begin with the other two sides of thetriangle—the gospel and the culture. Only then can we again raise thequestion of the church. To begin the other way around will only force us backinto the default monologue, fortifying the practice of making both the gospeland the culture servants of the church.

This is the point at which a lot of church leaders I know confront me,demanding I pay attention to the fact that the seventy don’t just sit at tables ordwell among people; they announce the gospel. They use this fact to argue

for the decisionist evangelism so central to and characteristic ofcontemporary evangelicalism. Here, they argue, is primary evidence for plansand programs to present the gospel to people.

Their critique needs a response. There are three elements to thecommunication of the seventy: speaking the peace (shalom), healing the sick,and announcing the kingdom of God. Each will be commented on briefly inthe light of the argument I am making in this book.

Speak the Peace: ShalomEach time we walk past someone in the little Italian village where I am

writing part of this book, we say either Buon giorno (in the morning) orBuona sera (in the afternoon). This is a common, everyday courtesy thatneighbors give to one another. In San Diego recently I was having supperwith some friends when a young man came in and greeted two other menwith Salaam, which for Middle Eastern people from a Muslim background isa common greeting that means “peace from Allah.” We give peoplecustomary greetings as part of the social code of a community. In a similarway, there’s no question that speaking the peace (shalom) was a commongreeting people gave to one another all the time in the ancient (and, for thatmatter, contemporary) Middle East.

On the other hand, in Luke’s Gospel, shalom functions as a lot more thanjust a greeting. In the way Luke is writing his Gospel, we will note that whenthese disciples of Jesus enter into the towns and villages, they are amongpeople who know the old stories but have lost any sense of their vitality.They are getting by and making do with life, keeping their heads low to avoidtrouble from the Romans and the authorities. When they hear the language ofshalom on the lips of these strangers who are followers of Jesus, it remindsthem of God’s promised future. Shalom is the promise of Jubilee and the ruleof God among them. They must have heard this word as a shock because itwould be suggesting that the exile is over.

In the postresurrection narratives of John’s Gospel, the story is told of thedisciples (not just the Twelve but a much larger group of men and women)gathered in an upstairs room with the door bolted for fear the authoritieswould come to kill them as they had Jesus (20:19–23). These were terrifiedpeople for whom the story of Jesus had gone terribly wrong. All bets wereoff; nothing had turned out as expected. Confusion and disorientation filledtheir hearts.

Then Jesus steps into the room, and the text makes it clear he did not comein through the door. To assuage their shock and terror, he shows them thewounds in his hands and sides—signs that he was not an apparition but, infact, the resurrected Lord. John is focused on emphasizing the uttermateriality and physicality of this moment. The disciples, in John’s story, arenot projecting their desires or playing at wishful thinking to compensate forthe utter loss of hope. This was Jesus standing before them in his resurrectedbody. The next points in John’s account are crucial.

John is a theologian. Like Luke he is writing a theohistorical account ofJesus and the birth of the church. John weighs his words carefully toconstruct the point of his story. Those gathered in that upper room had pinnedtheir hopes on Jesus’s being the fulfillment of God’s promises in theScriptures. Jesus was to be the one who brought the good news that God’spromises were being fulfilled—this is what was involved in the times beingfilled up and coming to completion.

When, therefore, Jesus stands in that room and says to those gathered,“Shalom,” he is not speaking in what might appear to our psychologicallydriven, modern Western ear as an effort to quell the fear of those in the room.In this word Jesus was picking up the expectations of Israel for the shalom(kingdom, reign, rule, future) of God. In this word Jesus was announcing thatthe promises of God’s coming reign are now being fulfilled in his resurrectedpresence.

This is the same meaning of the word shalom Luke is using in 10:5–6.When the seventy go to the towns and villages, they are announcing thatGod’s future has come in Jesus. The seventy announce good news, but whatis the nature of this good news? One suspects that for at least some in thosetowns and villages, it must have been a terrifying announcement they did notwant to hear in the midst of empire occupation. The healing of the sick was,itself, a sign that in these followers of Jesus the promised kingdom of Godwas coming. Exile was over!

The Kingdom of GodThe seventy also announce and demonstrate the kingdom of God. Three

times in this brief story the kingdom of God is mentioned. Again the questionis what the announcement of the reign of God would have meant for the menand women in the towns that Jesus visited. To understand its significance,first, we need to understand that for these people the exile, which took place

in the sixth century BC, was not over. They continued in exile from thepromises of God. Second, they had the memories of a kingdom where theirown David and Solomon ruled the world. This kingdom had been snatchedaway. Finally, they are under the control of another king and another empire.The Pax Romana was a bitter reminder of a lost past and continuing exile.

Jesus comes to bring and embody God’s promises. This is what happens inNazareth in Luke 4. Luke also portrays Jesus as a form of second Moses andso identifies him as the one who comes to release the captives. When theseventy announce the kingdom of God, they are proclaiming that in Jesuscaptivity is coming to an end and a new exodus is about to begin. Theenlivening conviction shaping these early Christians from the beginning wasthe profession that the kingdom of God had drawn decisively near in Jesus.Their focus was the kingdom in Jesus. In Luke 10 we are confronted with thefact that any announcement of this kingdom in the name of Jesus results inconflict of major proportions—shaking off the dust and Sodom are not tameimages.

Implications for Now

Luke’s focus, therefore, is so very different from that of Euro-tribal churchesat the beginning of the twentieth century who are trying to find tactics to fixand adjust their churches in the midst of massive boundary-breaking. Luke isnot all that interested in getting a right model for being the church or comingup with a clear delineation of what it means to be the church. He’s interestedin the continuity of a story that was going forward long before Pentecost. It isa story about the reign of God that Jesus announces, embodies, and fulfills.The end to which all of history is moving can now be clearly seen by all(Eph. 1:9–11), and it will not be seen in the mighty or in empires or inabstract ideas like freedom and truth, but in ordinary, obscure people whobroke bread, drank wine, and gave themselves away for the sake of the world.

In this sense the seventy were practicing eschatology; they wereannouncing something longed for and now present—they were announcingthat the firstfruits of a restored Israel were present and that all the promisesthat had been given to Israel were now continuing under radically newcircumstances in Jesus. Therefore, we cannot understand what Jesus is up toor what was happening when Luke penned this story, without first livinginside this wider story. It is clear that it is about the mission of God, not the

needs of church members. It was about the contagious joy a person has wheninside the one, true story about people and the whole direction of the world.

The announcement of the kingdom meant Jesus is the bearer of thesubversive memory that is full of anticipation. Our work is rekindling theenvironment in which this subversive story will once again enter ourchurches, leading to questions about almost every assumption on which theyhave been constructed over the past century. This can be done only by riskingthis “going without baggage” and entering the everyday lives of ordinarypeople in our neighborhoods.

I watch my grandchildren emerging into life, developing language andhabits as they live among us, their parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles.Adam, Owen, Maddy, Ben, and Ethan are in and out of our home. We playwith them on our knees, read to them, and carry them sleepily to bed. Theyknow that, when they come to Grandma and Granddad’s house, there arepredictable events and experiences they can anticipate. They have a sandbox,a tree to climb, a special cupboard filled with their toys, “fishy crackers” toeat, iTouches and iPhones on which to play “Doodle Jump,” and on and on.

Throughout the year Jane takes copious photos of them through the seasonsat play and in special events we do together. Just before Christmas shecreates a story around the pictures that tells of who we are as a family andwhat we have done together. When it’s completed, it goes off to a printer, andon Christmas day each family receives its yearly book. We are into our fifthor sixth edition at this point. What is happening to our grandchildren in thesegrowing experiences is that they are being nurtured inside a story. It is thestory of this family and its antecedents that will shape them.

We are weaving a narrative just as our parents and grandparents did to andwith us. I think it is all much harder these days because there are so manymore competing and beguiling stories to capture and color our worlds. It getsharder because ours is a culture that has formed us to believe that the storiesare all intended to make us the center of meaning and fulfillment. That is howit has been from time immemorial until very recently when all stories seem toget liquefied in a complex universe of apparent multiple choice and endlessself-creation.

Too often this is what has happened to the story of Jesus and the coming ofthe kingdom. Churches are so focused on themselves because ours is aculture whose language house tells us we are to be focused on ourselves, thatthe story of Jesus is lost. Yet the role of a local church is to form a people

around the presence of God among us in Jesus Christ. This has always beenaccomplished in two primary ways: first, through worship that directs us tothe mystery, otherness, and wonder of God’s grace and love toward us inJesus Christ; and, second, through catechesis, formation in practices ofChristian life. These must always be at the center of Christian communities.These are the essential ingredients for participating with the God of mission.In so many ways each of these ways of life, the language house of worshipand formation, have been lost to us. This is the reason the boundary-breakingSpirit is decentering and marginalizing the Euro-tribal churches of NorthAmerica. God is doing something far bigger than tribal survival or measuringall things by certain sixteenth-century events in Europe.

The Spirit is breaking apart a form of church that took shape in theProtestant West from the sixteenth century forward. There are all kinds ofmaterial reasons that can be given for this, from falling birth rates tosecularization theories to a new globalizing pluralism and so forth. But ifLuke were writing his two volumes today, he would probably eschew thesociopolitical reasons, not because they are unimportant but because theymiss the point of it all. God is on the move. The kingdom is so much biggerthan our little, tribal cultural enclaves, and the world is in crisis. The Lord ofcreation is out there ahead of us; he has left the temple and is calling thechurch to follow in a risky path of leaving behind its baggage, becoming likethe stranger in need, and receiving hospitality from the very ones we assumeare the candidates of our evangelism plans. Luke’s retheologizing would saythat the only way we can understand and practice again this kingdommessage is by getting out of our churches and reentering our neighborhoodsand communities. This is where we will discern God’s future, not in ourvision and mission statements or the arrogant need to start a movement in ourown image. This is a time for a radical shift in the imagination and practicesof our once dominant Euro-tribal churches.

12Rules for Radicals

The Contours of a Method

How might a local church begin to live out the implications of this book?These final two chapters sketch a direction. We have entered a new space;we’re walking in new territory in a time when so much is unknowable. It’snot possible to lay out a big strategy or a detailed plan. There is much to bedone in testing and experimenting. We need to gather and tell stories of thosecommunities of Jesus that are risking moving back into or awakening to theirneighborhoods, and we need to hear the ways in which God is going ahead ofus.

These are early days. The majority of our leaders still remain firmly lockedinto the language houses of tending to and shaping everything in terms of thechurch and its success. That’s what they have seen and how they are trainedin seminaries and Bible schools. Recently I asked a denominational leaderwhat she thought was the greatest challenge facing the clergy and localchurch leaders for whom she had oversight. She went down the usual list ofcontenders, then paused and said, “No, none of these are the real issues. It’snot about more training or getting them more time away from administrationor even more skills in certain areas. As important as these may be, they allpale in comparison to what I think we are really facing. When I listen to myleaders with their plans and visions, at the bottom of it all, they are stillworking at trying to get people into their churches and make them successful.It’s not that this is wrong; it’s not the point. The real challenge we face ishow to transform the imagination of our leaders for them to see it’s not aboutgetting their churches filled; it’s about joining with what God is doing in theworld.” Then she acknowledged how difficult it is to change this defaultimagination.

Taking the Journey

There is no simple, painless method of change. The risks involved inpracticing Luke 10 are high; the story is full of warnings about this all alongthe way. The story makes no pretense of offering easy answers. Those late-first-century Gentile Christians were being challenged to let go of a deeplyentrenched imagination and trust that God was up to something radicallyoutside anything they had come to expect. The history of the first severalcenturies of the church suggests that at least some of them went outside theirassumptions and language houses without baggage and entered the towns(neighborhoods and communities) of the empire because the empire, if onlyfor a moment, bowed its knee to Jesus. Ours is a similarly arduous, risky, anduncertain journey. This chapter will outline a series of proposals for takingthat journey. The final chapter will offer a specific way in which any localchurch can go about practicing Luke 10.

The Rules

The title of this chapter is taken from a book written many years ago by aman of radical convictions about how to form communities of hope. SaulAlinsky was born of Russian Jewish immigrant parents in Chicago in 1909.He understood what it meant to live on the edge, to struggle with how to livewithin shifting language houses that often put the powerless in ever moreperilous situations. Without endorsing his political ideology, we can see inAlinsky a man who understood that imaginations are changed through thedevelopment of rules rather than the piling up of knowledge, information, andmetrics. He developed a set of simple rules ordinary citizens could follow toaddress their sense of powerlessness and discover that among them they hadthe resources and imagination to create a different future for themselves.Beneath Alinsky’s rules lay a rock-hard conviction that, in giving ordinarymen and women a set of simple rules, they would be able to change theirsituation and overcome those who had seemingly unbreakable power overthem. It is this conviction about the ways ordinary people, in the ordinarinessof their context, transforming their environment, that undergirds the stepsoutlined in this chapter.

If the boundary-breaking Spirit is out ahead of us in our neighborhoods andcommunities, it will be through simple rules, not complex plans or the visionsof leaders, that we will see God’s future emerge among us. Along the lines ofAlinsky’s “rules for radicals,” which have shaped the imagination of all kinds

of reformers right up to the present day, I have adopted the spirit of hisinsight to develop ten rules that any leader and local church can follow if theywant to enter the way of Luke 10:1–12.

1. Go LocalThe first basic rule is extremely simple to articulate but not so easy to do—

go local. This means that the focus of a local church and its leaders needs tobe on two things. First, the focus must be on the ordinary lives of the peopleof a local congregation through which the Spirit is shaping a new future.Second, the focus must be on the local contexts as the venues for discerningand engaging that future.

As we have seen, we discover what God is doing in the world and what itmeans to be the church as we move back into the neighborhood. This is botha simple and radical proposal. It’s radical because for many of us there islittle connection between where we live, where we go to church, and what itmeans to be a Christian. That’s the tragic state of Christian life in NorthAmerica. Christian leaders regularly tell me that they have no time to knowwho lives in their neighborhood and, besides, they tell me, neighborhoods area thing of the past; that’s the “old” way of thinking; we don’t live like thattoday. A radical way we can re-form Christian life in our time is by thesimple decision to reconnect with our neighborhoods, by asking what God isdoing there. If you want to recover the sanity of your life and that of yourfamily in deeply Christian rules, reconnect and reenter your neighborhood.

It is at this point that a lot of people agree with this idea of going local butthey wonder about the focus on neighborhood when we live in what they calla “networked” world. I have written about this before so will only summarizethe reasons here.[54] Briefly, the problem with the “network” idea is thesame problem faced and not addressed by too many local churches—homogeneity. Look at the networks to which you belong! Chances are mostof them are comprised of people in the same economic, social, and ethnicgroup as you and they generally share the same political and religious views.The boundary-breaking Spirit is interested not in re-creating homogeneousEuro-tribal churches but in calling forth local communities that manifest thenew creation in a globalized world. Today most neighborhoods areincreasingly ethnically mixed and represent the new religiously pluralistsociety North America has become. The Spirit is calling us to go local in suchneighborhoods rather than running back to our homogeneous networks.

What we need here is to develop habits and rules in our local churches thathelp our people move back into their neighborhoods (they are already therebut too often, emotionally and in terms of time or focus, they are hardlypresent to the neighborhood) as the focal location of Christian life and rule.Instead of building local church life around church programs (to which weare supposed to invite people to come) let’s make the focus the neighborhoodand community, then turn the local church into the center of formation for theequipping, sending, and resourcing of their people in the local.

2. Leave Your Baggage at HomeLeave your baggage at home is a profoundly world-changing instruction.

We have discussed it at length in previous chapters, so I will only summarizehere. More than anything else this is a gospel plea for the humanization ofour relationships with others, rather than seeing the people of ourneighborhoods as potential objects for our church marketing strategies (oftencalled evangelism or outreach). It is also a plea to leaders to set down theirneed for vision statements or the hormonal drive to create some kind of major“movement.” These activities are about “baggage”; they leave us in control ofrelationships because we are predetermining what they need to accomplish aswell as creating barriers that prevent us from being surprised and hearing thenew things the Spirit might want to do outside our vision, mission, andstrategic plans.

Leaving your baggage behind means that the local church learns togetherhow to become like “strangers” who receive the hospitality of the people inthe community. This is really learning how to have basic, simple, ordinaryhuman relationships with the people in our community without any otherstrategy or intent.

Again the reactions to this proposal are plain and are raised with greatregularity: “All this is good. It sounds like social work or good communitydevelopment, but when do we get to the gospel?” As discussed in theprevious chapter, this response betrays a basic Gnosticism with its falsepolarities that separate the good news of God in Jesus from the basicindwelling of life described here. Furthermore, it conveys a massive lack ofimagination and a failure to understand the ways in which our people areshaped from within the Christian narrative. Lurking behind these kinds ofquestions is the assumption that when I sit at the table of my neighbor andenter into his or her world in dialogue, I am some kind of blank slate, who

brings nothing with me. This is patently absurd but it is the assumption in thequestion.

At the risk of repetition, let me say that, when I sit with my neighbors tolisten and enter their stories, I am there as one who is shaped week in andweek out by the liturgies of worship with the confessions of faith, the readingof Scriptures, and the affirmations of forgiveness. I am formed weekly by theEucharist as I kneel to receive the bread and wine. I can no more sit at thetable of my neighbor as a blank slate than I can deny I am a male.

The problem here is that most of our worship and church experiences don’tform us in the language house of the Christian narrative. The point aboutgoing without baggage is the stance, the spirit, and the attitude with which Iam present in the neighborhood. It is the opposite of planned outcomes andpredetermined strategies to get people turned into something I want. But thatis not to deny the presence of the Spirit in the midst of this being sent. He isright there, present in the conversations and working in the spaces betweenour conversations in ways that will surprise me because I have come as astranger in need of hospitality, in need of receiving, without any tactic thatturns my neighbor into an object of my goals. This is the amazing placewhere God does things we could never imagine.

3. Don’t Move from House to HouseThe instruction not to move from house to house is pretty straightforward—

settle into the neighborhood, bloom where you’re planted, and stop imaginingthere’s a better place or the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Inother times this was known as the rule and vow of stability; that is, staywhere you are and be present to the people among whom you live in yourneighborhood.

We have been a society that moves about, often grasping after upwardmobility or the lie that we need more space to attend to the individualisticneeds of our children and ourselves. All this movement cuts us off frombeing present in a neighborhood. Too many of us spend so much timerunning from church meeting to church meeting or some demand or anotherthat we have almost no time for the kind of being present in a community wewill need to cultivate if we are to indwell our neighborhoods.

Make no mistake about this call to stability and place—in twenty-first-century suburban society it is radically countercultural. If there is anythingthat attracts increasing numbers of people to investigate the new

monasticism, it is this elusive call to stay in one place, love where you are,and take a vow of stability. There could be nothing more powerful as awitness to the alternative story of God’s future than Christians who take thisvow to stability and make their own neighborhoods the primary location oftheir lives. The implication of Luke 10 is that we will not discern what God isdoing in our society until we take on the rule of stability. Obviously onecannot legislate or program this way of life in a local church. The place tobegin is with simple, small experiments among some of the people of a localchurch as will be described in the last chapter. But, frankly, this reimaginingthe nature of local church life will not happen unless those in primaryleadership live this life by example.

4. Eat What Is Set before YouSeveral years ago I was in China with a group of North Americans. Our

hosts wanted to share their food with us. They had spent a lot of timethinking through how to share with us their experience of cooking and eating.Most of the food was very foreign to a North American palate in terms of theelements used and the ways it was cooked. Several of the people in the groupsimply would not eat the food set before them. I will never forget one personleaning over to tell me she was desperate to find a McDonald’s and have adecent American meal.

Recently I was in South Korea for the first time, being treated to Koreanfood. The wonderful people with whom I was meeting were eager to take meto restaurants where, awkwardly sitting cross-legged on floor cushions, wedelved into the delights of Korean cuisine. One evening in Pushan I ordered aplate of squid, not aware how proud these people were to serve the freshest ofseafood. When the plate came, I picked up my chopsticks and was ready toeat until I saw the small pieces of squid moving on my plate. The squid wasso fresh the nerves in each piece kept them movingabout.

Delighted Korean friends watched me, wondering what I would do. As I atethe squid, I could tell that something had changed. My friends realized I wassomeone who wanted to meet them in their world. They were willing then towelcome me not just to the table but to a conversation.

The rule of eating what is set before us is about our readiness to enter intothe world of the other on his or her terms rather than our own. We are allshaped inside the sounds, tastes, and perspectives of our own small worlds

and have come to expect we can stay inside these shells of comfort gettingour own needs met. This rule calls us to a different way of being with people.It involves a readiness to be present with someone else in ways that meetthem in their context and environment. Again, this would be a radical shift inChristian life and witness if we began to find some simple ways of practicingthis way of life in the neighborhoods where we live as God’s people.

5. Become Poets of the OrdinaryThe rule to become poets of the ordinary will be, at first, the work of

leaders as they help people reflect on what is happening in theirneighborhood encounters. The poet is one who listens to the stories that liebeneath the stories people tell and gives voice to the music beneath theirwords.[55] The poet is the one who, in such listening, offers ways in whichpeople can connect this music to a larger movement, to a bigger story. Thework of being a poet addresses the anxiety of the modern-day Gnostics whoask, “When do we get to the gospel?” As we enter the local, stay in thatplace, and learn to eat what is set before us, we find ourselves entering thestories and hearing the music of the other in ways we could never do if werelied on programs or the calculation of where someone is on a scale ofreadiness for the gospel. It is in the safe space of table and conversation thatwe hear the rhythms and stories of our neighbors. This is the context in whichwe can become poets of the ordinary who connect people’s stories withGod’s great story.

This is not, however, a one-way street as if we are simply using theconversation as a tactic so we can interject the gospel. Poets tell stories andconnect stories. They point and suggest and evoke. Jesus continually engagedpeople in this way. Whether he was with the woman at the well orNicodemus late at night, Jesus was a poet listening to their stories and thenevoking in them disquieting questions because he connected their stories withsomething in God’s story that caught their attention but didn’t give a solution.

The other side of being a poet is that we get changed in the process as well.As we listen to the story of a neighbor, we too become shaped by that storyand start to see that God’s story doesn’t only connect with the neighbor but italso challenges and, often, questions the ways we have automaticallyassumed what the gospel is all about. This is what happens to Peter when helistens to Cornelius. It happens to Saul as he’s rushing down the road toDamascus or sitting in a circle of tentmakers in the markets of Corinth or

Rome or Ephesus. As a poet of the kingdom, Paul must have been continuallyhaving his world rearranged and his imagination of what God was doingreshaped by these encounters around tables and amid the daily lives ofpeople.

6. Move the Static into the UnpredictableA simple but powerful rule of formation is to move the static into the

unpredictable. Too often in our churches the rhythms of life have becomestatic and terribly predictable in terms of programs, habits, and attitudesbecause people have become ingrown. To get at this hardening of a localchurch’s arteries, leaders need to find ways of creating some disruption. Ofcourse too much disruption will lead to system breakdown and responses ofanger and resistance. But too little disruption will leave everything as it is.The skill here is knowing what is too much and what is too little in a specificlocal church.

There is no formula for this; it’s an art that involves listening well to acongregation to hear the Spirit-created desires people have to disrupt thestatic. It is about being awake to those moments when the unpredictable turnsup and we know how to invite people to ask new questions about what ishappening rather than just trying to fix everything.

Illustrations of this abound. One local church is experiencing a growinglevel of anxiety because it is aging and losing young adults and youngfamilies. People don’t know what to do about it. They are afraid to give voiceto this anxiety because they don’t want to disrupt the static. These are goodpeople. They are not closed to wanting God’s future but they have beenformed in a world of church programs that once worked yet no longer do.They have also been raised not to express their concerns or rock the boat. Allof this has created an environment where anxiety is present but it’s pushedunderground by the power of the static.

People are nostalgic for a past when the church had kids all over the placeand the now-aging members were young couples, volunteering and runningprograms. When they are able to voice their anxieties, several things happen.First, they place blame. The preaching is boring, the youth program is in badshape, and so forth. Second, their solutions are in terms of the static worldthey know. They suggest, for example, revamping the youth program orsetting up intergenerational meals to connect with each other. These answers

involve doing more of the same, putting in place what once worked whenthey were much younger.

These are not people without imagination, but they are locked into thestatic. What should one do as a leader? Disrupt the static and create spacesfor the unpredictable! How? Why not, for example, help people give voice totheir anxieties? Be like a poet and help them name what they’re feeling.Then, recognizing that these good people will keep coming up with the sameold programs as solutions, offer a proposal. Invite some of them to go andtalk with their nonchurchgoing grandchildren about their lives and what isimportant to them. Help these people write “appreciative inquiry” questionsto ask young people in the community. (Appreciative inquiry is a method ofasking open-ended questions that invite people to share their stories.) Thencome back together, share the responses, and assist people to hear the voicesbeneath the words in these conversations. In the midst of such interaction,people start naming the fact that the old programs and solutions aren’t goingto make a dent in reaching young people and young families. This is whenthe unpredictable emerges; it comes from the people themselves and theirconversations.

7. Listen People into SpeechThe illustration above of moving people out of their static is an example of

“listening people into speech.” The people in the illustration knew thatsomething was amiss in their church life but didn’t know how to give voiceto what it was. Because of this they would express themselves in terms ofprograms needed in the church or the ways leaders needed to improve whatthey were doing. None of these proposals came close to what was actuallyneeded. The problem was that the static life of the church closed down thecapacity of people to connect with and give voice to what was happeninginside them; all they could speak were the change proposals.

Listening into speech involves the skill of creating the spaces where peoplecan give voice to their anxieties, hopes, and fears, as well as the music thatlies beneath. This is the reason leaders need to be more like poets thanprogram designers, more like creators of the unpredictable than fixers of thestatic. Some of the process outlined in the illustration shows how to listenpeople into speech. When people feel it is safe to give voice to their unspokenhopes and stories and these are brought into conversations with the biblicalnarratives, we start to hear the life of the Spirit among us.

This listening into speech is what those of us in local churches have to learnso that we can sit at the table of neighbors and hear their stories. If this iswhere the Spirit is at work—out ahead of us—then we need to become acommunity of people who are giving this gift to one another. Then we will beable to give it to people in our neighborhoods and communities. One of theprimary roles of leaders in this context is making it a priority to keeplistening their people into speech.

8. Experiment around the EdgesThe temptation of many leaders remains the need to fix problems with big

strategies, more programs, and importing programs from outside. Instead ofdefaulting to these predictable, manageable solutions that have theappearance of addressing challenges, create experiments around the edge.[56]

In the illustration above, the leader didn’t respond to the anxieties of churchpeople by creating a new youth program or setting up a series of cross-generational meal events. Instead, this leader invited people to do somesimple experiments in listening others into speech. The experiments gavepeople their own sense of empowerment; they were doing something forthemselves, as well as creating the listening spaces where they could start toask different kinds of questions. This process created new energy amongpeople. It resulted in their willingness to try some experiments in connectingwith youth in their community as well as simply asking other churches whythey had so many youth. These actions created a new space for thinkingabout how to be God’s people in a changed world.

Often the problem is not that people are resistant to change; it’s that theyhaven’t been given the chance to imagine alternatives or empowered to dotheir own work of discovery through experimenting.

9. Cultivate Experiments, Not BEHAGSThis rule—cultivate experiments, not BEHAGS—builds on and is a subset

of rule number eight. One of the primary blockages to releasing theimagination of the people in a local church and having them enter theirneighborhoods is this deep-seated need of leaders to come up with a big planor the right model to make the church work.

A BEHAG is a Big Hairy Audacious Goal. It is the knee-jerk reaction ofleaders to come up with something really big that catches the imagination ofpeople and gets them all involved in making a difference. The problem with

these big visions is that, first, they don’t last; second, they don’t changeanything; and, third, they create disappointment and loss of hope as, severalyears on, leaders come up with yet another BEHAG.

This rule moves in two directions. First is the spiritual determination toresist BEHAGs, seeing their source for what it is—the anxiety-driven need ofleaders to be seen as in charge (or the hormone-driven passions of youngerleaders who believe they can have a wonderful plan for everyone else’s life).Second is the determination to focus attention on moving back into theneighborhoods. As we listen people into speech, we can cultivate simple,often small, experiments.

10. Repeat Rules One through Nine Over and Over AgainFinally, keep repeating these rules over and over again. The plain fact of

the matter is that real change in the culture of a local church takes place as wepractice these simple rules as a way of life. If you want to see a deeplytransformative movement of your people in the neighborhoods andcommunities where they live, start to practice these rules, remembering thatthings begin to change when we repeat the rules over and over again.

Creating a Luke 10 way of life in and through our local churches takes timeand is about learning simple habits and rules. It is not big ideas and piles ofknowledge that change the culture of a people; it is doing what Jesus does inLuke 10:1–12. He sends out a group of seventy disciples into theneighborhoods and communities to live by some simple rules. In so doing hecreates a new language house for mission in the local.

Luke is working with these stories to assist Gentile Christians faced with acrisis of identity to grasp how they might reorient themselves in a new space.That reorientation involves taking on counterintuitive practices and rules forbeing God’s people. The same calling is being laid on the once dominantEuro-tribal churches now struggling to understand what has gone wrong andstill trying to fix it by revamping the same old church-focused programs. Theboundary-breaking Spirit will have none of it. The Lord has left the temple,picked up a new set of wheels, and is already ahead of us out there in ourneighborhoods and communities.

13Beginning the Journey

Some Practical Steps

This final chapter proposes a way a local church can join with this movementof the Spirit. Already a growing number of experiments are taking place inmany parts of North America. Some of us are starting to collect the stories ofhow Christians are moving back into the neighborhood and starting to learn aLuke 10 way of life. Where might a local church begin this strange newjourney? In Edmonton, Alberta, Howard Lawrence has been quietly andgently cultivating this way of life with his family in their neighborhood. InEagle, Idaho, Mark Priddy has been doing this for some years already. InDenver, Colorado, local churches are seeking to practice this way of life. InSan Diego, Chicago, Atlanta, and the Bay Area around San Francisco, mycolleague Mark Lau Branson and I have met with hundreds of Christians toshare with them some of the things we’re learning about shaping Luke 10types of communities. Under the radar, pioneers are already experimenting ina Luke 10 way of being church in their local context.

Some, misunderstanding what it’s all about, are already trying to franchisesome kind of “moving back into the neighborhood” program without any realsense that this is about cultivating from the bottom up in the local.

More than twenty years ago I wrote a book for InterVarsity Press calledReaching a New Generation, describing the tectonic shifts that would reshapethe relationship between Christian life and the culture of North America. Theintervening years have shown that these shifts continue to rearrange thenature of church life for us all. In the latter part of that book, I reflected onmany of the efforts to renew, re-form, and reshape the church to engage thisemerging context. Thinking ahead and imagining what it might mean to beGod’s witnessing people, I wrote these words:

Today’s church is in crisis. Its renewal requires far more than liturgical change or doctrinalcorrection. Focusing on new structures is . . . not an adequate response. The tectonic plates of

Western culture are shifting. As modernity is questioned and parts rejected, the church is alsoquestioned and marginalized. . . . Despite all our protestations the church in North Americaremains focused on itself. Until this is changed, evangelization will continue to look like foraysinto the world in order to recruit members for our clubs.[57]

I concluded the book with a picture of the way ahead, which was not aboutbigger and bigger churches located out of neighborhoods or more churcheseffective at getting other Christians into their buildings. I saw a different kindof movement involving thousands and thousands of lights being lit inneighborhoods and communities across the continent, as God’s people movedback into their neighborhoods to rediscover that God was already ahead ofthem creating and calling forth that which is new. Local churches can be apart of this movement. In fact they are the key to the creation of such amovement. In this light we have developed a set of proposals for guidinglocal churches into Luke 10 engagements with their neighborhoods. Thischapter outlines the elements of the process for those eager to get started onthe journey.

This outline presents a series of steps your local church can take to initiateseveral groups for reconnecting with their neighborhoods, learning to ask thequestions of what God might be up to already in the neighborhood,discerning where they might join with the Spirit, and then reporting back tothe church in ways that will invite others to join this journey.

Step 1: Prepare the Local Church

Communicating with the BoardOne of the most important first steps in initiating a Luke 10 life in your

local church is to get your board connected so they understand what it allmeans and how people can get involved. You want to ensure good buy-infrom the church’s leadership so that key people feel ownership of the process.

Communicating with the ChurchYou want to create a climate of invitation and conversation so that people

feel welcomed into a process of moving back into the neighborhood. Don’tjust announce decisions that have already been made or pass out informationsheets and expect people to buy in. At the beginning it’s very important towork at building ownership across the church rather than announce some top-down decision about creating a few groups who will be looking at how the

church might reengage the neighborhoods where its people live. Givingpeople ownership, getting them involved, and keeping them informed arecritical from the beginning. Let people know what you’re thinking andprovide a rationale that helps them understand what it means to be God’speople in the neighborhood. This might involve doing the following:

1. Teach and have conversations with people in the church about what itmeans to move back into the neighborhood, why this is important, andwhat would be the benefits to the local church.

2. Identify people who can tell brief stories about being present in theirneighborhood. Provide multiple times for this sharing of stories.

3. Invite input and responses as you practice listening to the people ofyour church.

4. Use biblical texts in your preaching around the metaphor of neighbor;see, for example, the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37)as well as Luke 10:1–12.

5. Set up a brief communications workshop so that any who would likemore information or want to ask questions can do so. You’ll besurprised at the people in a local church who know the neighborhoodreally well and want to make connections for you. The more of thiskind of involvement that gets created in the church, the greater yourlearning, the richer the discoveries, and the more ownership there willbe.

Forming TeamsIt’s important to identify the people who will form a number of

neighborhood teams. Establish patterns for gathering together during theprocess and practicing the spiritual discipline of listening to Scripture. Here itis important to share basic information about what’s involved and providepotential team members with a guidebook, such as the Moving Back into theNeighborhood workbook, that outlines a step-by-step process withexpectations andtimelines.[58]

It may take several months of preparation to form these groups. People willneed lots of time for questions and dialogue to understand what is involved inmoving back into the neighborhood and its meaning for being God’s peoplein their context. Your goal, by the end of a three-to-six-month period, is toestablish a couple of teams within specific neighborhoods who will meettogether for a six-to-eight-month period to follow the steps outlined below.[59]

Step 2: Develop New Eyes for Your Neighborhood

Moving back into the neighborhood is about learning to see our communitywith a fresh set of eyes. This step looks at the story of Jesus’s healing a blindman. At first, the man sees people, but they look like trees; Jesus touches theman’s eyes again, and he sees people.

We may not be physically blind from birth but we can easily take ourneighborhoods for granted and stop seeing what is going on there amongpeople. An important part of joining with God in mission-shaped life islearning to see again with fresh eyes, to wake up to the fresh and not-so-obvious ways God is present. How might we learn to see our neighborhoodthrough God’s eyes and become detectives of God’s life in our neighbors andthe activities of the streets where we live? To do this, people start to practice:

1. Dwelling in the Word around Luke 10:1–12 each time they meettogether.

2. Learning to walk through their neighborhood and ask new questionsabout what is happening there. They would keep simple notebooksreflecting on questions like the following:

Without asking someone else, can I provide the first and lastnames of the people who live beside (or above and below) me?What can I describe about their lives that can be known only bysomeone who has been inside their home?What are some of the God-shaping longings and/or questions thatcurrently shape their lives?

Step 3: Teach Radical Neighborliness

People ask why we bother with this idea of the neighbor and theneighborhood when so many of us live in what we call a connected world,where we meet friends online or travel across town or to another part of thecountry to meet them. Most of us just drive in and out of our neighborhoods;at the most we sleep and have meals there. Surely there are more importantplaces to live kingdom life in this postmodern world. Isn’t the neighborhoodjust a throwback to some other time? Shouldn’t we be focused on the “now”and the contemporary, rather than on these old formsof life?

If you ask a random group of people about who they know on their street,or in their complex, the answer would probably be similar to the one Steve S.gave. He said, “I’ve lived on this street for three and a half years and I knowthe names of a couple people; that’s about it.” Another person put it this way:“I have 470 ‘friends’ on Facebook but don’t know anyone where I live.”Neighborhood is a critical place where, as Christians, we can live, witness,and be a mission.

This step helps people move from the step of walking around theircommunity to connecting with the stories of some people where they live. Todo this groups will:

• Talk together about the parable of the good Samaritan, asking newquestions about who is our neighbor.

• Share with each other what they’ve been discovering in some of theirwalking around the neighborhood.

• Share some “first” stories about the neighborhood with one another.

• Plan a neighborhood BBQ or something that might gather people.

Step 4: Map the Neighborhood

As people walk around, they start to develop fresh eyes and see what theymay have taken for granted before. A helpful way to develop new eyes is todraw your own map of your neighborhood and share with one another thestories of what you’re seeing. This mapping helps you discover what youmay have not seen and appreciate what is actually happening every day that

you have been missing. It helps you learn to ask new kinds of questions aboutyour community. In this step groups build on the work of the previous stepsas they:

• Continue to dwell in the parable of the good Samaritan.

• Begin looking carefully and then drawing their own neighborhoodmaps.

• Share their maps with one another.

• Discuss new questions and observations about their neighborhood.

• Identify gathering places in the neighborhood and discuss how toconnect with them.

• Share stories while practicing hospitality with some of the people in theneighborhood.

Step 5: Listen to Neighborhood Stories

In connecting and building relationships in the neighborhood, people in thegroups now want to listen to the stories shaping the lives of their neighbors.This is critical to hearing what God might be up to around us. Through storieswe make fresh discoveries about our community as we listen withoutpresuming, concluding, or trying to develop strategies for getting them to door become something. This might sound counterintuitive, but it is importantto realize that by listening carefully we may be able to discern where we canjoin with what the Spirit is doing in our communities. This practice of joiningwith the Spirit (remember the Luke 10:1–12 passage) will give us thecapacities to discover fresh ways of being the church in and for ourcommunities. In turn the church will grow and be transformed in ways thatcan’t be imagined or predicted at the outset.

Often people ask how they go about listening to and discerning the storiesof their community. Here are some things to keep in mind in terms ofexamples of where people gather:

• Young moms may meet in certain spaces and carry on a rich discourseabout the neighborhood.

• Seniors may gather regularly in certain coffee shops to talk with eachother about what’s going on.

• Teens and young adults will do much of their communicating viaelectronic means, such as text messaging or Facebook. Think abouthow to access and gather information about the issues and themes thatconcern these young people.

• People tend to gather at local coffee shops.

• The busiest stores and shops are where you will find a good crosssection of the neighborhood.

• There will be certain bus stops where many people wait each morning.

• If there are clubs, gyms, or community centers, you will find peoplegathered there.

Here are questions to think about as you listen to neighborhood stories:

• What issues and conversations are important to various groups? Howare these being expressed? What is behind the emotions of theconversations?

• What are the needs and concerns of various groups?

• Who speaks for the community? Why are they seen as importantvoices? What are they saying?

• Who doesn’t have a voice in this community? Why might this be thecase?

• Who are the historians and poets of the community? What are theysaying about the neighborhood?

• What resources does the neighborhood have? What is absent and why?

• Who has power? Who is without power? Why?

• What topics of conversation concerning the neighborhood keep comingup?

We’ve lost the art of talking with one another. In fact sometimes peoplefeel threatened by our questions, thinking we are intruding on their privacy.A person needs to feel safe before he or she will enter into this kind ofconversation, so you will need to be sensitive to these feelings and throughtime and your own willingness to be vulnerable create safe spaces forconversations. Here are some simple questions:

• When did you first move into this neighborhood?

• What brought you here?

• What are your best memories of this neighborhood?

• What do you like best about the area?

• Tell me about your family. Does your extended family live here too?

• What would you love to see happen in this community?

Step 6: Discern What God Is Up To in the Neighborhood

As we listen to stories, we may be able to discern what God is up to in theneighborhood. This is a new way of thinking about God, the gospel, andmission. Sometimes we come to believe the only place where we can reallyknow anything about what God is doing is when we’re parked on a pew in achurch building, listening to a sermon, or gathered in a small group, readingthe Bible with people we’ve known for a very long time. But what if Godwants us to discover the Spirit’s working in our very own neighborhoods?What might it mean to have our eyes opened and our minds converted to thisidea that God is out there ahead of us in the neighborhood and is doingsomething? How might we discover this?

In some ways this will feel like the most difficult step to take. You need topractice discernment or the naming of what you believe God might be up toin your neighborhood. This discernment/naming process comes through yourdwelling in the Word together and your listening to the stories of the peoplein the neighborhood. In one sense we are taking this process one step furtherby asking, In the midst of all we have done, how do we dwell together withGod so we can listen to what the Spirit might be saying about God’s presencein all this?

Simon Carey Holt in his book God and Engaging the Neighborhood:Spirituality and Mission in the Neighborhood writes that this naming is not asolitary business but a communal practice. He wants us to understandsomething of the journey involved in this way of being a local church.[60] Most of us are schooled in making individual decisions about fairlyimportant things in life. We might talk to others about buying a new house oraccepting a job offer, but usually we make private decisions on our own andtell others about them. Often this is a good process, but an unintendedconsequence may be that we begin to think the most important actions ordecisions are the ones we do by ourselves, because we have not includedothers in them.

We need to develop the practice of discussing decisions with others. This isa little like developing an effective golf swing or mastering a difficult choirnumber. We must learn some new skills and do them over and over againuntil they become natural to us. The practice of naming what God is doing inour neighborhood is like that; it calls for learning new habits and doing themover and over again until they become a part of who we are. We do it withothers, sharing what we are hearing and then discerning together what Godmay be doing. We will not always get it right but, as we practice together, wewill have more and more success in understanding what God is doing.Sometimes we will have little more than an inkling or hunch, but other timeswe’ll see it clearly and have a burning conviction to be involved. Thisprocess requires testing out ideas and perceptions, and this is always donemore effectively with others rather than alone.

Step 7: Get Involved

To be the church is to be the hands and feet of Jesus. The call to theneighborhood is a call to discover what God is already doing and become apart of it.

In this step the group puts together what it has been discovering. You willneed to make a list of places and events where God is working and where youcould possibly get involved. Then work out together how you will join induring the coming months. Each time the group meets, report on yourexperiences and what you’re learning together as you continue to dwell in theWord.

Step 8: Report—What Are We Learning?

At this point groups that are becoming involved in a neighborhood shouldshare their experiences with the church (they may not all be ready at the sametime). They should also put together a simple report to the church board. Thiscan be done in all kinds of creative ways (for example: take others for a walkthrough your community, pointing out what you’ve observed, showing placeswhere you’ve seen God at work). The purpose is to give the church and itsboard the information and insight they need to discern how your church cancontinue this journey of moving back into the neighborhood.

Step 9: Commit—What Do We Do Next?

After groups have shared with the board and the church, the final step is forthe leadership to work with the whole church community in naming what it islearning about moving back into the neighborhood and determining the nextsteps it will take together on this journey.

Alan Roxburgh is president of Roxburgh Missional Network, aninternational group of practitioners and academics committed to partneringwith and calling forth missional churches and mission-shaped leaders. Alanserved as a pastor for more than twenty-five years. He is an author, teacher,conference speaker, and consultant to churches and denominational systemsaround the world. His books include Reaching a New Generation: Strategiesfor Tomorrow’s Church; The Missionary Congregation, Leadership, andLiminality; Crossing the Bridge: Leadership in a Time of Change; The Sky IsFalling: Leaders Lost in Transition; Introducing the Missional Church: WhatIt Is, Why It Matters, How to Become One; and The Missional Leader:Equipping Church to Reach a Changing World. He was also a member of thewriting team that authored Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of theChurch in North America.

Alan leads conferences and seminars with denominations, congregations,and seminaries across North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand,and the UK, as well as consulting with these groups in the areas of leadershipdevelopment and systems change for missional transformation.

When not traveling or writing, Alan enjoys mountain biking, hiking,cooking, and hanging out with his wife, Jane, and their five grandchildren aswell as drinking great coffee in the Pacific Northwest.

Also in the Allelon Missional Series

ChurchMorphEddie Gibbs

Introducing the Missional ChurchAlan J. Roxburgh and M. Scott Boren

Missional Small GroupsM. Scott Boren

MissionalAlan J. Roxburgh

Notes

[1] Joshua Cooper Ramos, The Age of the Unthinkable (London: Little,Brown, 2009).

[2] See Luke 10:1–12.

[3] See Alan J. Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader (SanFrancisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005); and Alan J. Roxburgh and M. Scott Boren,Introducing the Missional Church (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009).

[4] Darrell Guder and Lois Barrett, eds., Missional Church: A Vision for theSending of the Church in North America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).

[5] See Geoffrey Wainwright’s excellent theological biography LesslieNewbigin: A Theological Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); aswell as Michael Goheen, As the Father Has Sent Me, I Am Sending You,doctoral thesis, 2000; and Paul Weston’s excellent Newbigin reader: LesslieNewbigin—Missionary Theologian (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006).

[6] Weston, Lesslie Newbigin, 12.

[7] Lesslie Newbigin, The Other Side of 1984: Questions for the Church(Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1983).

[8] Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids:Eerdmans, 1989).

[9] Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978).

[10] Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,1986).

[11] See Mel Lawrence, The Whole Church (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,2009); Eddie Gibbs, Church Morph (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009); LarryOsborne, Sticky Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009); Linda Bergquist

and Allen Karr, Church Turned Inside Out (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,2010).

[12] Colin Greene and Martin Robinson, Metavista: Bible, Church andMission in an Age of Imagination (Colorado Springs: Authentic Media,2008).

[13] Mark Lau Branson, “Ecclesiology and Leadership for the MissionalChurch,” chapter 4 in The Missional Church in Context: HelpingCongregations Develop Contextual Ministry, ed. Craig Van Gelder (GrandRapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 95.

[14] For an extremely helpful assessment of what “culture” is about and howwe are shaped by narratives and stories that are not always consciouslypresent to us, see James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony,Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2010).

[15] Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke UniversityPress, 2004).

[16] Ibid., 23.

[17] Branson, “Ecclesiology and Leadership,” 95.

[18] Branson, personal conversation.

[19] This is not the only way social imaginaries are formed and extended in asocial group. Practices are equally important. The habits we build into oureveryday lives also shape the way a social imaginary forms the backgroundnarrative of a group. Most of the time, such practices are, again, part of the“taken for granted, this is the way the world works” understanding we haveof life. A simple example of such practices illustrates the power of a socialimaginary. The automobile is primarily used to enhance the individualisticsocial imaginary. The evidence is simple to find—drive on a highway thathas an HOV lane and note the percentage of people able to use it. In otherwords, we design institutions and structures (like highways and “single-family” dwellings) that embody this deeper-level social imaginary.

In a church there may be a major value on becoming a “community.” Inpracticing this value people come to church along highways in automobilesthat are mostly about individuals getting about; people go to small groupsfrom their single-family dwellings in which everyone has his or her ownprivate, personal space in the form of specialized rooms. Thus we see howthe social imaginary is really determining the practices and habits of oureveryday lives over against church values, the vision and mission statementspeople publicly announce.

[20] Branson, “Ecclesiology and Leadership,” 95.

[21] In our home (our language house) we live as an extended family acrossthree generations. This is not just a chance event or just an economic decisionbut a commitment to a social imaginary that seeks to move away from self-actualized individualism to a commitment of living within a differentnarrative. This embodies a set of practices informed by a language differentfrom expressive individualism and single-family dwellings. It refuses to takethis language of self as primary or determinative of human thriving.

[22] One of the ways to interpret this concept of a language house is toconclude that language is nothing more than a human construct describingand defining the particular way a social group has come to explain, manage,and control the world. In this sense, language is about the way a group has itsown “truth”; it is a language-constructed truth that points to nothing beyondor outside itself in the world. Language, in this sense, represents the waygroups socially construct reality and nothing more.

This is not what is meant by “language house” in this discussion. While it isthe case that every social group can form, extend, and practice its life onlythrough language, this does not mean language is nothing more than groupthink. As indicated in the previous paragraph, language is also how any socialgroup expresses the ways they are claimed and shaped by that which isgreater than themselves. Christians, for example, would claim that theirlanguages of worship and confession are not just socially constructednarratives but the deepest expressions of how they understand the ways Godhas come to and encounters them in their tradition. Language is also aboutthe ways we give voice to, articulate, put into actual life, and shepherd theworld and the gift of God’s life that comes to us.

[23] See Merold Wesphal, “Against Romantic Hermeneutics: Away fromPsychologism,” chapter 3 in Whose Community? Which Interpretation?(Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009); and Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries.

[24] See Walter Brueggemann, Texts under Negotiation (Philadelphia:Fortress, 1993), chapters 1 and 2; and Greene and Robinson, Metavista, 109–11.

[25] Peter Martin, Samuel Johnson: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 2008).

[26] Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog (New York: EuropaEditions, 2008).

[27] Toby Lester, The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of theEarth and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America Its Name (NewYork: Free Press, 2009).

[28] Brueggemann, Texts under Negotiation, 17.

[29] Ibid., 25.

[30] Greene and Robinson, Metavista, 109–10. Greene and Robinson offer animportant proposal in terms of the multiple narratives (language houses) thatcharacterize our time and how this multiplicity of narratives creates not asingular world but a metavista of stories and language houses. Theirimportant book addresses the question of how we might, again, be drawn intothe world of God’s particular story in our time.

[31] Ibid., 111.

[32] You can see this image by simply Googling The School of Athens.

[33] Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

[34] A wide range of literature concerning biblical interpretation hasdeveloped around this understanding of Scripture as drama that shapes andcalls the community of God’s people to embody the drama in their own lives.See Nicholas Lash, Theology on the Way to Emmaus (Eugene, OR: Wipf and

Stock, 2005); Samuel Wells, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics(Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004).

[35] See Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of AmericanExceptionalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008); and Fareed Zakaria,The Post American World (New York: Norton, 2009).

[36] See David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in theTheology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 84–85.

[37] See Joel B. Green, The Theology of the Gospel of Luke (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1998), 16–21.

[38] Barry Harvey, Another City: An Ecclesiological Primer for a Post-Christian World (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 1999), 21.

[39] Green, Theology of the Gospel of Luke, 8–9.

[40] Bosch, Transforming Mission, 85.

[41] Jerusalem at Pentecost would have been filled with these pilgrims fromoutside of Palestine—the so-called Greek parts of the world. We can assumethat a good number of the people drawn into the church after Pentecost werefrom this group who, parenthetically, would have been older men andwomen. This is important in terms of understanding the issues that quicklysurface in Jerusalem, such as the sharing of goods (these people stayed onand so there were big issues of food and accommodation) and, later, therecomes the question of the “Greek” widows.

[42] Jehu Hanciles, Beyond Christendom: Globalization, African Migration,and the Transformation of the West (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008), 94.

[43] One suspects that letters, such as Ephesians, would by this time havecirculated among these late-century Christian communities so that they werefamiliar with the cosmic dimensions of the incarnation as expressed, forexample, in Ephesians 1:9–11.

[44] It is often assumed that a certain kind of American exceptionalism made

this continent different from Europe in terms of its strength, but as Hancilesargues, the reasons might lie elsewhere. He states, “At the very least, massiveChristian immigration throughout the nineteenth century is perhaps the mostimportant single reason why the decline of Christianity in America at the endof the 20th century is less substantial than Europe’s—America, as AndrewWalls comments, simply ‘started its Christian decline from a much higherbase than Europe did’” (Beyond Christendom, 7).

[45] Some biblical manuscripts have the number seventy-two, which isprobably the more accurate translation, but since many popular Bibletranslations use seventy, that will be used in this section.

[46] Bosch, Transforming Mission, 85–94.

[47] See Alan J. Roxburgh, Missional Map Making (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010).

[48] I am referring to the heirs of the British and European churches formedin the sixteenth-century reformations—these are “Western” churches thatassumed power and privilege, whether they were Presbyterian, Baptist,Methodist, Mennonite, Lutheran, or all those new forms of evangelicalismthat emerged later in modernity reacting against Anglicanism or other formsof dominant Anglo-European Protestantism.

[49] In our culture the language of “stranger” has received a diabolicalreversal of meaning. Walk through neighborhoods these days, and the signsindicate that strangers are not welcomed but feared. Strangers are reported tothe police. In the time of Luke the stranger was welcomed, received, housed,and fed. The core reason for the curse that is called down on some of thesetowns and villages was that they failed utterly to offer hospitality to thestranger. By that accounting, most housing developments today, filled withmiddle-class Christians, seem to have come to a place where they arefundamentally incapable of receiving and welcoming the stranger.

[50] Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments andOrthodoxy (New York: St. Vladimir Seminary Press, 1988), 5.

[51] This statement, as indicated throughout this book, does not mean there is

no place for the traditions and liturgical life of churches as they worship Godand shape discipleship through catechesis. As I have said over and overagain, this is not what is at stake here. The issue is the ongoingecclesiocentric nature of almost all our church life and the call to reimaginethe location where we will discern how the boundary-breaking Spirit isreshaping and re-forming God’s future in the West.

[52] Each question seeks to deny the materiality of Jesus and/or God’s workin the world. Each seeks to “spiritualize” the Christian life as if the ordinaryand material have no importance to the way of the gospel. As such, there isthis strange, unreal belief that someone’s daily life can be radically separatedfrom their experience with God, so sitting at a table with another is just thatand no more. This is the deep suspicion Gnostic Christians bring to thisconversation. They seem unable to see that when we are formed in thematerial practices of Christian life (prayer, Eucharist, daily office, and so on),we are embodying a narrative that shapes us materially as God’s people. It isthe inability to conceive of this reality that makes them conclude that thiskind of entering and dwelling at the table of the other will result only in“community development” or “social work” or just good feelings amongpeople. This is a poverty of Christian imagination as well as a sign of theutter absence of any real catechesis and formation within our churchcommunities.

[53] See Stephen’s speech before he is stoned to death in Acts 7.

[54] See Roxburgh and Romanuk, The Missional Leader.

[55] See Alan Roxburgh, The Sky Is Falling: Leaders Lost in Transition(Eagle, ID: Allelon Publishing, 2006).

[56] See Roxburgh, Missional Map Making.

[57] Alan Roxburgh, Reaching a New Generation (Downers Grove, IL:InterVarsity, 1993), 105.

[58]Moving Back into the Neighborhood is a comprehensive workbook,available at http://roxburghmissionalnet.com.

[59] These groups need to be formed among people who live near oneanother. Usually there are groups of people in the church living fairly closetogether. When one group of churches realized that, as individual churches,they did not have many people living near each other, they began to problemsolve for themselves in a wonderful way. By looking at the places wherepeople lived from among their various churches, they discovered there werelots of people living close to one another, so they formed cross-church groupsin local neighborhoods. The Spirit calls us to risk and experiment with ourimaginations about what is possible.

[60] Simon Carey Holt, God and Engaging the Neighborhood: Spiritualityand Mission in the Neighborhood (Brunswick: Acorn Press, 2007).