Unless the church is equipping believers to embrace the values and vision of the kingdom of God and turn away from the materialism, consumerism, greed, and power of the present age, it not only abandons its biblical mandate, it is rendered missionally ineffective.
Put simply, the church finds itself in a post-Christendom era, and it had better do some serious reflection or face increasing decline and eventual irrelevance.
If we can embrace the adventure and risk and equip our churches to lay down their lives and abandon their inherent loss-aversion, who knows what innovation, what freshness, what new insights from the Spirit will emerge.
Interestingly, it's as though the gospel story of Jesus is the archetypal heroic journey, the embodiment of the very adventure that all people in every epoch have desired.
The church of Jesus needs to wake up from the exile of passivity and embrace liminality and adventure or continue to remain a religious ghetto for culturally co-opted, fearful, middle-class folk.
Whether [new Protestant church movements] place their emphasis on new worship styles, expressions of the Holy Spirit’s power, evangelism to seekers, or Bible teaching, these so-called new movements still operate out of the fallacious assumption that the church belongs firmly in the town square, that is, at the heart of Western culture. And if they begin with this mistaken belief about their position in Western society, all their church planting, all their reproduction will simply mirror this misapprehension.
Our point isn't to make an examination of popular film but to illustrate that the yearning for a heroic adventure lies just beneath the surface of our consciousness; film, television, literature, sports, and travel are in a sense vicarious adventures.
Being the church that Jesus intended means that we must participate in God’s eternal purposes for his world. Renewal means more than reinventing ourselves; it means rediscovering the primal power of the Spirit and the gospel already present in the life of the church—reconnecting with this purpose and recovering the forgotten ways. This purpose and potential have always been there, but individuals and communities have largely lost touch with them.
If we are going to make the change from community to communitas, and not just end up with an unsustainable adrenaline-junkie culture, we must have a sophisticated process to form people into adventurer-disciples.