Pilgrim Soldier

Once again the book I am reading triggered some thoughts at the tail-end of last week. This time it is The Out of Bounds Church? by Steve Taylor that has got me thinking.

In Chapter 2 “Edges of Culture” Taylor talks about the way in which, and why, the emerging church is working on the edges/margins of culture. One bit that hit me in particular was this:

[Israel] entered the borderlands. In exile, they experienced life on the edge marked by alienation, by exclusion. The nation of Israel cried: How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? In exile, Israel picked over the fragmented and shattered edges of its understanding of God. The strategies of the temple institution were inaccessible. Yet from this experience on the edge, Jewish faith was revitalized. It moved from temple to synagogue. It tactically initiated patterns that sustained it through centuries of life in the midst of other nations and other faiths.”
Steve Taylor - The Out of Bounds Church? - pg 39

In this post-modern, post-christendom era that we find ourselves in the Church is finding itself pushed, or exiled, to the edges of culture and society. No longer welcomed with open arms and ignored by whole swathes of its former constituency as irrelevant or out of touch, the formerly powerful institution of the Church, now finds itself powerless and in some places is floundering around trying to hold its head about water. In other places it is quietly ignoring the problem hoping it will go away.

Some people are asking why needs to happen as they are quite comfortable doing exactly what they have been doing. Others are saying that everything ‘emerging’ is either folly or heresy, but I can here the Jewish leaders saying the same thing in their own exile. I can hear them say that this exile was the worst thing to happen to the faith and that if people returned to the old ways then they would come through it.

The simple fact is though that there is a place of both the emerging and the traditional within the Church. However, to reach out into the margins of society we need brave missionaries who are willing to learn the language and culture of those they seek to reach. Most accept this need when they think of missionary work overseas, but seem to ignore the same need in trying to meet the cultural needs within their own wider society.

If we are going to reach the masses with the full Gospel in this increasingly fragmented society then we have to mould the Church into communities that meet the needs of individuals, whilst encouraging those same individuals into membership of the unfragmented community of the Church.