During my DMin program we read The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21 Century Church and here is one of my comments during the discussion of it:

Frost and Hirsch think of the church as incarnational, not attractional. As an incarnational church, it’s main purpose is to “come into the neighborhood” and minister for the sake of the world rather than created a “sacred place” where believers gather to encounter the good news of Jesus.

When I read the following on page 15 “Christendom is not the biblical mode of the church. It was/is merely one way in which the church has conceived of itself.” I thought of the following questions.

• How many of the churches represented in this cohort are more aligned to Christendom (as these authors, and other authors as well, define the concept) than missional?
• How many of the churches represented in this cohort who might be aligned to Christendom think they can be missional in a Christendom skirt? How?
• What do you think “revolution” means to the authors?
• How many buy into the author’s concept of revolution over reorganization?

The following is a post that I made during the reading of Philip Jenkins’ The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity in a recent Doctor of Ministry program that I have now completed. This book is now being used in many seminaries and graduate schools as standard reading. While going to a seminary or graduate school can be a plus, you don’t have to do so in order to educate yourself and think with an EPIC lens.

As one who has a “classic” Pentecostal background (Church of God, Cleveland, TN; Assemblies of God; and Foursquare plus a so called “Third Wave” movement (Vineyard) I often wonder why there is ongoing resistance to the Pentecostal/Charismatic church in USAmerica? While the traditional Pentecostal movements tend to be inbred (opinion), the Vineyard opened up its arms to any Evangelical who wanted to participate before entering into a partnership with a “latter reign” type ministry during its prophetic phase, which made it much more like the classical Pentecostal groups and caused many Evangelicals to view the Vineyard as caught up in a “silliness” itself. During the Vineyards formative days there was an openness to charismatic issues by English speaking Evangelicals who were ripe for a paradigm shift because it didn’t appear to have all the “silliness” of the televangelist. So, what does count for the cultural acceptance of charismatic/Pentecostal issues in the two-thirds world and not so much in the American and English(?) version of the church? What matters of worldview are we still facing?

On page 9 Jenkins says:

In their own way, secular, liberal Americans have distinctly apocalyptic view of the future, while a millenarian expectation of the uprooting of organized religion. At the least, there is a widespread conviction that Christianity cannot survive in anything like its present form

Is this really a “secular, liberal American” view only. It seems that within the church world that there is a growing view that the church must become something other that what she presently is. If apocalyptic can roughly mean “removal of old in favor of new,” a removal of the traditional church forms with something different, then how can one hold in tension the both/and of post Protestantism with the either/or of apocalypticism? Or is it really a “modified” apocalyptic view? More