The ebullient Alan Hirsch was in Portugal recently with the Christian Associates leadership community, talking about what makes a missional church-planting movement, in his words, go ‘Kaboom!’ In his book The Forgotten Ways he faces squarely the fact that the church in the West is experiencing ‘massive, long-trended decline’ (16). For the most part, the techniques and strategies that are currently being proposed as remedies for this dilemma are no more than revisions of techniques and strategies that have already proved themselves ineffective. ‘As we anxiously gaze into the future and delve back into our history and traditions to retrieve missiological tools from the Christendom toolbox, many of us are left with the sinking feeling that this is simply not going to work’ (17). What is needed is a new paradigm: ‘a fundamental change in our thoughts, perceptions, and values, especially as they relate to our view of church and mission’.

This is an attempt to clarify, in response to some perceptive comments on the post ‘NT Wright and the confusion of kingdom and new creation’ (the link is to a copy of the article in this site: the original with comments can be found here), how I understand the relation between ‘kingdom of God’ and ‘new creation’. These two themes have become central to the thinking of the emerging church, but I’m not sure that the tendency to treat them as broadly synonymous does justice to their biblical provenance.

I came across a curious paragraph in Tom Wright’s Simply Christian, in which he highlights a ‘mystery’ in the social organization of God’s ‘new world’. He argues that the end of all things is not the emigration of the righteous to heaven but the reintegration of heaven and earth, when God will remake the world and ‘raise all his people to new bodily life to live in it’. I have a bit of a problem with the way he characterizes resurrection as ‘life after life after death’, but the basic assertion that we are summoned ‘to live in the present as people called to that future’, in the light of the believed in renewal of creation, is surely a good one. He continues, however…

I have recently had a very interesting conversation by email with Jonas Lundström, who for a Swede writes remarkably good English, and Graham Old (Leaving Munster). It is partly about the substance of The Coming of the Son of Man and Re: Mission, and partly about the broader question of how the church in the West should respond to the collapse of Christendom – if, indeed, Christendom has collapsed. Jonas and Graham have given me permission to write up the conversation, with only some minor editing, as a post on Open Source Theology.