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.
In order to develop a pioneering missional spirit, a capacity for genuine ecclesial innovation, let along engender daring discipleship, we are going to need the capacity to take a courageous stand when and where necessary.
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.
The appetite for adventure and risk is not exclusive to young Christians. In face, it seems to be a fundamental yearning, knitted into the fabric of the human soul.
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.
Many church folk, in their self-conscious attempt to be overtly morally upright, emit all the wrong signals, thus messing with people's perception of the gospel.
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.
Heroes are important not only because they symbolize what we believe to be important, but because they also convey universal truths about personal self-discovery and self-transcendence, one's role in society, and the relation between the two.