Allelon Summer Institute – Day 2

We covered a lot of ground today – here’s a bit from John Franke:

- “Our primary commitment is to the relationship of Gospel to Culture. We have no stake in ‘how’ church is done. There is no experience/notion of church apart from the interaction between Gospel & culture.”

- One could argue that the first century Jerusalem church, the fourth century council of Nicaea, the Irish monastics, 19th century English church, 20th century African church – although they looked completely different (save some key practices – Eucharist for example) were nevertheless faithful to the heart of Christianity (as expressions of ‘church’) in their own contexts.

The focus of the missional conversation is nearly completely theological in that it is preoccupied with questions like “Who is God?” and “What is the gospel?” In light of that (and only secondarily), “What does it mean to be human, or church?”

Alan Roxburgh had a great piece today about the “other” and its ten-dollar counterpart “alterity.” I’ll try to share a bit of that after some reflection.

For David’s comment below, here are some texts for the Roxburgh/Franke class:

The Open Secret by Leslie Newbigin (Roxburgh calls Newbigin ‘the patron saint of the missional movement’ – and for what its worth, this is another great Newbigin book)
The Out of Bounds Church by Steve Taylor
The Missional Church ed. by Darrell Guder (this may be the best introduction to the missional conversation – even though some key things have progressed in the ten years since it was written
Models of the Church by Avery Dulles
The Essence of the Church by Craig Van Gelder
Invading Secular Space by Robinson and Smith

Then there’s a long list of supporting texts that include Brueggemann, Bosch, Franke, and others. The best part of this is all the great resources (podcasts, videos) available (free) at the Allelon site.