Why an Ancient Future?
Prologue
In every age the Holy Spirit calls the Church to examine its faithfulness to God's revelation in Jesus Christ, authoritatively recorded in Scripture and handed down through the Church. Thus, while we affirm the global strength and vitality of worldwide Evangelicalism in our day, we believe the North American expression of Evangelicalism needs to be especially sensitive to the new external and internal challenges facing God's people.
These external challenges include the current cultural milieu and the resurgence of religious and political ideologies. The internal challenges include Evangelical accommodation to civil religion, rationalism, privatism and pragmatism. In light of these challenges, we call Evangelicals to strengthen their witness through a recovery of the faith articulated by the consensus of the ancient Church and its guardians in the traditions of Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, the Protestant Reformation and the Evangelical awakenings. Ancient Christians faced a world of paganism, Gnosticism and political domination. In the face of heresy and persecution, they understood history through Israel's story, culminating in the death and resurrection of Jesus and the coming of God's Kingdom.
Today, as in the ancient era, the Church is confronted by a host of master narratives that contradict and compete with the gospel. The pressing question is: who gets to narrate the world? The Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future challenges Evangelical Christians to restore the priority of the divinely inspired biblical story of God's acts in history. The narrative of God's Kingdom holds eternal implications for the mission of the Church, its theological reflection, its public ministries of worship and spirituality and its life in the world. By engaging these themes, we believe the Church will be strengthened to address the issues of our day.
[reprinted without alteration with permission from: www.ancientfutureworship.com]
---
The opening sentence lays the foundation. I hardly think anyone would disagree that the goal of the Christian life is to know God in such a way that we become like God. We only know God because God became human in the person of Jesus Christ who perfectly revealed God to the world. We can only know Jesus as the Holy Spirit reveals him to us through the story of Christ recorded by the apostles (i.e. Scripture) and passed down to us from generation to generation by the great cloud of witnesses - the communion of the saints - that has gone before (i.e. Church). This is the base of all that is to come: A Triune God who works to sanctify God's people through the scriptures and in the church.
Understanding this, we must always have a spirit of discernment, for our context is rapidly changing. Many want to deny that the world is changing, but sticking our heads in the sand cannot stop the sands of time from shifting. To understand this shift - and to understand part of the motivation of the AEF Call, Dr. Webber (in "Younger Evangelicals") gives some characteristics that are descriptive of the changing world. Some of them include (see p 54, I won't list them all here):
1. Have recovered the biblical understanding of human nature
2. Differ with the pragmatist approach to ministry
3. Stand for the absolutes of the Cristian faith in a new way
4. Recognize the road to the future runs through the past
5. Committed to the plight of the poor
6. technology [savy]
7. Highly visual
8. Communicate through stories
9. Grasp the power of the imagination
10. Advocate the resurgence of the arts
11. Appreciate the power of performative symbols
12. Long for community
13. Committed to multiculturality
14. Committed to intergenerationality
15. Demand authenticity
16. Realize the unity between thought and action.
All this is to say that people are different, with different values, with different thought processes, with different world views than they were a generation ago. Everyone agrees that ministry must be contextualized. It would be ludicrous to go to Africa and simply recreate a American model of church (some could argue that is what we've done - but this is not the place for that). A church in Africa must be an African church. It must do what a church does in an African way, in a way that will speak to Africans and allow Africans to speak to God. What we are seeing here in America is the emergence of a new context. And with that new context the church has to be a new church, in a new way, that will speak to new people and allow new people to speak to God.
Further complicating the situation in which the American church finds itself at the start of the 21st century are some very un-Christian developments in the the mainstream evangelical world. The conflation of the national and the religious to the point that much of evangelicalism equates nationalism/patriotism with one's religious identity. The reduction of religion to a merely rational enterprise. The loss of any communal element of faith and the defining of faith in strictly private terms. And the embracing of an "ends justify the means" mentality. All of these developments leave the church in a very precarious position - starting a century behind the eightball if you will.
So how does the church respond to these developments within the church and the changing cultural context in which the church exists? Only with the discernment and wisdom of the Holy Spirit.
It is often said that those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Younger evangelicals seem keenly aware of the truth of this proposition. We are not willing to sit by and watch the church repeat past mistakes (heavens know we've made more than our share). So as we look forward, we also look behind us. We look for things that might help us confront our current situation. We look for things that might enhance our ministry. We look for lesson to be learned from those who went before us. We understand we cannot know where we are going if we do not understand from where we came. We are fully aware that who we will be is largely determined by who we have been. It is quite a natural part of the maturation process to ask about our identity, where we came from, family stories, family traditions, etc. Those are the things that make us who we are and shape who we are going to be. We are not entering waters never before sailed. In our 2000 year history the church has been there and done that. The past is a powerful tool for present work and there is no reason to ignore it and what it has to teach us.
The AEF Call was cast in order to keep our compass firmly fixed on Christ as he is revealed in scripture and has been embodied in the church. The AEF Call is all about a faithfully Christian future. We trust that the Holy Spirit will guide us into that future, but even so, Maranatha - Come quickly Lord Jesus!
For you and with you,
Eric+
In every age the Holy Spirit calls the Church to examine its faithfulness to God's revelation in Jesus Christ, authoritatively recorded in Scripture and handed down through the Church. Thus, while we affirm the global strength and vitality of worldwide Evangelicalism in our day, we believe the North American expression of Evangelicalism needs to be especially sensitive to the new external and internal challenges facing God's people.
These external challenges include the current cultural milieu and the resurgence of religious and political ideologies. The internal challenges include Evangelical accommodation to civil religion, rationalism, privatism and pragmatism. In light of these challenges, we call Evangelicals to strengthen their witness through a recovery of the faith articulated by the consensus of the ancient Church and its guardians in the traditions of Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, the Protestant Reformation and the Evangelical awakenings. Ancient Christians faced a world of paganism, Gnosticism and political domination. In the face of heresy and persecution, they understood history through Israel's story, culminating in the death and resurrection of Jesus and the coming of God's Kingdom.
Today, as in the ancient era, the Church is confronted by a host of master narratives that contradict and compete with the gospel. The pressing question is: who gets to narrate the world? The Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future challenges Evangelical Christians to restore the priority of the divinely inspired biblical story of God's acts in history. The narrative of God's Kingdom holds eternal implications for the mission of the Church, its theological reflection, its public ministries of worship and spirituality and its life in the world. By engaging these themes, we believe the Church will be strengthened to address the issues of our day.
[reprinted without alteration with permission from: www.ancientfutureworship.com]
---
The opening sentence lays the foundation. I hardly think anyone would disagree that the goal of the Christian life is to know God in such a way that we become like God. We only know God because God became human in the person of Jesus Christ who perfectly revealed God to the world. We can only know Jesus as the Holy Spirit reveals him to us through the story of Christ recorded by the apostles (i.e. Scripture) and passed down to us from generation to generation by the great cloud of witnesses - the communion of the saints - that has gone before (i.e. Church). This is the base of all that is to come: A Triune God who works to sanctify God's people through the scriptures and in the church.
Understanding this, we must always have a spirit of discernment, for our context is rapidly changing. Many want to deny that the world is changing, but sticking our heads in the sand cannot stop the sands of time from shifting. To understand this shift - and to understand part of the motivation of the AEF Call, Dr. Webber (in "Younger Evangelicals") gives some characteristics that are descriptive of the changing world. Some of them include (see p 54, I won't list them all here):
1. Have recovered the biblical understanding of human nature
2. Differ with the pragmatist approach to ministry
3. Stand for the absolutes of the Cristian faith in a new way
4. Recognize the road to the future runs through the past
5. Committed to the plight of the poor
6. technology [savy]
7. Highly visual
8. Communicate through stories
9. Grasp the power of the imagination
10. Advocate the resurgence of the arts
11. Appreciate the power of performative symbols
12. Long for community
13. Committed to multiculturality
14. Committed to intergenerationality
15. Demand authenticity
16. Realize the unity between thought and action.
All this is to say that people are different, with different values, with different thought processes, with different world views than they were a generation ago. Everyone agrees that ministry must be contextualized. It would be ludicrous to go to Africa and simply recreate a American model of church (some could argue that is what we've done - but this is not the place for that). A church in Africa must be an African church. It must do what a church does in an African way, in a way that will speak to Africans and allow Africans to speak to God. What we are seeing here in America is the emergence of a new context. And with that new context the church has to be a new church, in a new way, that will speak to new people and allow new people to speak to God.
Further complicating the situation in which the American church finds itself at the start of the 21st century are some very un-Christian developments in the the mainstream evangelical world. The conflation of the national and the religious to the point that much of evangelicalism equates nationalism/patriotism with one's religious identity. The reduction of religion to a merely rational enterprise. The loss of any communal element of faith and the defining of faith in strictly private terms. And the embracing of an "ends justify the means" mentality. All of these developments leave the church in a very precarious position - starting a century behind the eightball if you will.
So how does the church respond to these developments within the church and the changing cultural context in which the church exists? Only with the discernment and wisdom of the Holy Spirit.
It is often said that those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Younger evangelicals seem keenly aware of the truth of this proposition. We are not willing to sit by and watch the church repeat past mistakes (heavens know we've made more than our share). So as we look forward, we also look behind us. We look for things that might help us confront our current situation. We look for things that might enhance our ministry. We look for lesson to be learned from those who went before us. We understand we cannot know where we are going if we do not understand from where we came. We are fully aware that who we will be is largely determined by who we have been. It is quite a natural part of the maturation process to ask about our identity, where we came from, family stories, family traditions, etc. Those are the things that make us who we are and shape who we are going to be. We are not entering waters never before sailed. In our 2000 year history the church has been there and done that. The past is a powerful tool for present work and there is no reason to ignore it and what it has to teach us.
The AEF Call was cast in order to keep our compass firmly fixed on Christ as he is revealed in scripture and has been embodied in the church. The AEF Call is all about a faithfully Christian future. We trust that the Holy Spirit will guide us into that future, but even so, Maranatha - Come quickly Lord Jesus!
For you and with you,
Eric+
posted by EF + at 8:20 AM
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