| The Barnabas Ministry Book Review |
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Reclaiming God's Original Intent for the Church Wes Roberts and Glenn
Marshall have written a
thought-provking book
on the church for the twenty-first century. Amidst the challenges of
post-modernism and the trend towards the so-called "seeker sensitive"
mega-churches, authentic Christianity remains an elusive goal.
Roberts
and Marshall discuss the values driving the expectations and designs of
the various modern church models. From the foreword by Larry Crabb: I once gave up on
Christianity as I
knew it and discovered Christainity as the Spirit reveals it. I'm now
giving up on church as I've experienced it and looking for church as
the Spirit designed it.
Reclaiming God's Original Intent for the Church is bringing the picture into focus and creating enough hope to keep me looking. If, like me, you want to trade in illusion for reality, if you're a pastor or church leader or hungry Christian who loves the church and longs to participate in authentic community led by people who are more broken than confident and more Spirit-dependent than naturally talented, if you desire to see the church reformed into a place where character counts more than credentials, where life is lived in humble trust rather than by careful method, where organic growth matters more than organizational growth, where serving nudges aside controlling, then glance at the chapter titles of this book. Though the book at times is critical of big-church
dynamics, it is
careful not to lump all big churches into one category. The authors
speak to the reality that trends towards bigger churches, more
"effective" programs, slicker presentations, and the like, often
obscure the central point of biblical Christianity-- that Christians
are broken people who have been redeemed. A lost and hurting world
doesn't need bigger mega-churches, but the gospel lived out in lives of
individuals. The church doesn't need to build large organizations (and
succumb to all the value-shifts that are a part of that), but rather it
can flourish as an authentic, Spirit-directed faith community. In a
nutshell, the glory of the gospel isn't in Christendom (the fading
identification of Christianity with the dominant culture) or the large
church organizations and buildings that are currently in vogue (though
they aren't absolutely bad or wrong), but rather in the transformed
lives of individual believers and churches that bring the transformed
life to the forefront. As Crabb suggests in the foreword, the chapter titles
are worthwhile:
The authors don't come out and say, "do it this way or
else you're
wrong." But their focus is to encourage Christians to see how God has
always worked, and will still work, through the things that often seem
unattractive or unpopular about the church in our day. It is a
thoughtful discussion of
topics of interest to everyone strategizing "now what" for the
Christian faith. |
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