On holiday I read Alan Hirsch’s book “The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating
the Missional Church.” Hirsh is a
missionary at heart serving in urban Australia.
He is a practitioner who gets on with the job, but also a thinker who
reflects biblically on the changing culture we are seeking to engage in God’s
mission. Alan
challenges his readers to look back to our roots and remember what we so easily
forget. We are called to be a community
of people under the lordship of Jesus, defining ourselves and organising our
life around being an agent of God’s mission to the world. This is true both here and there, on the
Taieri and in Thailand!
What stops us being active in God’s
mission like this? Sometimes we forget
that we are called to be disciples – apprentices who are learning from the Master. All the congregations at East Taieri Church
will be participating in a series in August titled “Called on By God Together.” It aims to reaffirm our sense of being called
to be followers of Jesus, who help others to follow also. Sometimes we lose confidence in the gospel,
forgetting that we are sent out with marvellous news to share. This is part of the reason I’m keen to host
one of the African Christians the Church Missionary Society are bringing here
in 2014. They have a white-hot faith in the gospel.
But in Hirsch’s book I read: “for we who
live in the Western world, the major challenge to the viability of Christianity
is not Buddhism, with all its philosophical appeal the Western mind, nor is it
Islam, with all the challenge that it poses to Western culture. It is not the
New Age that poses such a threat... I have come to believe that the major
threat to the viability of our faith is that of consumerism. This is a far more heinous and insidious
challenge to the gospel, because in so many ways it infects each and every one
of us.”[p.106]
Our identity, meaning and purpose are
found in Christ, and not in consuming ever more sophisticated goods and
services, not even religious goods and services.
Positively, Hirsch looks at the early
church and the growing Chinese church and asks what makes them tick? He describes the DNA of a missional church as
mDNA (missional DNA). It is this mDNA
which codes the “apostolic genius” which pulses through the early church and
apostolic Jesus movements through history. [p.76] His working definition of
missional church is: “a community of God’s people that defines itself, and
organizes its life around its real purpose of being an agent of God’s mission
to the world.” [p.82]
He explains the key components of this mDNA using the
following diagram. The heart is having
Jesus as Lord. (Not as simple a thing as
we first imagine). He goes on to expand
on each of the other five key elements.
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