Surprised and Forgotten

One of the advantages of not taking a class this summer was getting to choose which books I would read. I finished a really good one this past Saturday and started one yesterday which may end up on my best list.

The book I just finished is Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright. This is the fourth book of Wright's that I have read and he has quickly become one of my favorite theologians and authors. This particular book (with the subtitle Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church) was much more than I expected, even though much of this material Wright (by his own admission) has written about in other books in more detail.

One of the things I loved about Wright in this work was his continual reference to Scripture. I don't mean he quotes verses in every paragraph. Instead, he lays out different historical perspectives and beliefs on heaven, resurrection, and mission. Then, he will say something like, "Now let's go see what the bible actually says." Sure, he's coming at Scripture from a certain perspective - just like the rest of us. But he makes some very compelling arguments based on how he reads the bible. It was challenging, fascinating, and inspiring. If you really want to be surprised by hope, read this book!

The book I just started is The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church by Alan Hirsch. Hirsch is one of the leaders in the emerging missional church (EMC) movement today. The first book of his that I read was The Shaping of Things to Come: Mission and Innovation for the 21st Century Church, co-written with Michael Frost (Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture), and it sits on my all-time best list. That first book, combined with some Fuller classes at the time and personal experiences over the years, ignited a passion in me to be part of a missional community. As I've said in other posts, with each passing day I have a harder time envisioning "church" in any other way. This is a growing challenge for me in my current non-missional church, but I digress...

I'm only about 70 pages into it so far, but already several things stand out. Hirsch poses a question near the beginning of the book which drove much of his content. He points out that around AD 100, there were as few as 25,000 Christians. Merely 200 years later, before Constantine declared Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire, that number had grown to something like 20 million. So his question is simple: how did they do that? I expect much of the book will be trying to answer that question.

Another thing that caught my attention was a footnote on page 45, where he is writing about the decline of the Western church. He writes, "In fact, the church is on the decline right across the Western world, and we have had at least forty years of church-growth principles and practice." The footnote then explains:

In a dialogue between Michael Frost, many members of the faculty of Fuller's School of World Missions, and me, it was generally acknowledged by all there that church growth theory had, by and large, failed to reverse the church's decline in America and was therefore something of a failed experiment. The fact remains that more than four decades of church growth principles and practice has not halted the decline of the church in Western contexts.

As a Fuller student, I was pleased to read this. I was a little surprised, also, because Fuller has emphasized church growth and missions for a long time. But I was happy to read that at least some at Fuller are recognizing that perhaps we need something new.

More to come from this book...