The Pneuma Project

Don’t know why this didn’t publish, but I just found it in my draft file.

I’ve been devouring Darrell Guder’s (and others) foundational book, Missional Church:A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America. First published in 1998 this prophetic call for change is both affirming and wrecking many of my ideas and convictions of living as an incarnational community. Two things amaze me. First, is the fact that I am just reading this book now, and second is that, for the most part, this book seems to be completely ignored by most church leaders. I’ve found myself getting so into reading that I actually have to go back and re-read whole sections because there is so much good stuff in here. The writers do a great job of pointing out the fact that the church must be open to change in order to respond not only to the culture surrounding it, but also to what God is doing in that culture. Followers of Jesus must recapture the idea that living as a “church” is not about a building, or offering programs, or even having a weekly time of worship and teaching (as good as those things may or may not be). Following Jesus is, first and foremost, about living together as a sent people: a people on mission to proclaim and demonstrate the in-breaking of the reign (kingdom) of God.
Guder writes (you may have to read this a few times to get the full effect of it):

“It is not hard to see that at many times in the church’s history this central affirmation of good
news [the kingdom of God is at hand] has suffered a pattern of omission or ‘eclipse’. Two tendencies
in the long history of Christendom help to explain this troublesome pattern. First, the church has
tended to separate the news of the reign of God from God’s provision for humanity’s salvation. This
separation has made salvation a private event by dividing ‘my personal salvation’ from the advent of
God’s healing reign over all the world. Second, the church has also tended to envision itself in a
variety of ways unconnected to what must be fundamental for it–its relation to the reign of God.
If it was Jesus’ announcement of the reign of God that first gathered the fledgling church into a
community, and if that church grew and matured around the way that reign found meaning and hope
in His death and resurrection, then the church must always seek its definition with the reign of God
in Jesus as its crucial reference point.”

The question then becomes, what does it mean for a community of God’s people (the local church) to be defined by the fact that “the Kingdom (reign) of God is at hand. How does one as an individual and as part of an intimate community live that out so it is “good news” for the actual community that we live in? I’d love to hear your thoughts and answers, and maybe I’ll post some of mine later.