Missional: Joining God in the Neighborhood
Overview
The missional church movement is a sign that we increasingly feel the call to impact our communities, which is a good thing. But, says Alan J. Roxburgh, these conversations still prioritize church success over mission—i.e., how can being missional grow my church? But to focus on such questions misses the point.
Missional calls you to reenter your neighborhood and community to discover what the Spirit is doing there—to start with God’s mission—and join in, shaping your local church around that mission. With inspiring true stories and a solid biblical base, this is a book that will change lives and communities as its message is lived out.
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- Encourages readers to discover what the Spirit is doing in their communities
- Offers several stories of successful missional churches
- Articulates what might be involved in rethinking Christian life in an unthinkable world
- Part I: The Cul-de-sac of Old Questions: Why We Have to Stop Thinking about the Church
- Coral Reefs, Garage Sales, and Other Mind-Blowing Disturbances: Grappling with a New World
- A Parable of Three Friends: Coming to a Right Understanding of Newbigin
- How It All Came to Be: A Brief History of the Missional Conversation
- The Language House
- Part II: The Language House of Luke-Acts: A Narrative for Shaping Our Time of Missional Formation
- Finding God in the Concrete: Locating Our Stories in the Here and Now
- Texts That Propose a World: Discovering a Different Way to Enter Scripture
- Shifting Worlds: The Need for a New Text
- The Context and Crisis: The Shattered Hopes of Luke’s Readers
- The Boundary-Breaking Spirit: Seeing Luke-Acts through a Language House Lens
- The Strange New Ways of God: Sending the Seventy—a Guide for Our Times
- A New Set of Practices: Themes of Luke 10
- Peace, Healing, and the Kingdom of God: Living Out a Subversive Proclamation
- Part III: A New Language House
- Rules for Radicals: The Contours of a Method
- Beginning the Journey: Some Practical Steps
Top Highlights
“Christopher Lash uses a helpful word to capture what this kind of Christian life is about. The word he uses is performance. Here’s the way he illustrates what this means. To experience a Beethoven symphony or Shakespearean tragedy, it’s not sufficient—if we are to enter the drama of the music or the play—merely to read notes or memorize lines. While important, it’s not enough just to read the historical background of the works or absorb the evaluations of music or drama critics. At the heart of engaging Beethoven or Shakespeare is the performance of the score and the play—you need to experience a symphony or a theater group actually performing it. Only in the performance do Beethoven’s music and Shakespeare’s plays assume life.” (Page 83)
“Luke is helping his readers understand that opposition is the norm when the Spirit breaks the boundaries of expectations and predictable ways of relating to people. At each turn of this story, Luke is providing these second-generation Gentile Christians a radically different language house from which to reframe their imagination about the promises of God and their place in the movement of Jesus.” (Page 122)
“First, the focus must be on the ordinary lives of the people of a local congregation through which the Spirit is shaping a new future. Second, the focus must be on the local contexts as the venues for discerning and engaging that future.” (Pages 167–168)
“It is among ordinary men and women, whose names will not be recorded or remembered, that God shapes a future. Contrary to the way we set everything up in the modern West, it will not be from the stars and professionals, the so-called great leaders and gurus, that the direction of God’s future is discovered. It will not be through some who get to the top of some proverbial mountain and come down with the directions and solutions that the answers to the questions of what God is up to in the world emerge. It is through the ordinary people of God, the nameless people who never stand on stages or get their photo in the newspaper, that the gospel will indwell their space. This is the strange, counterintuitive imagination Luke seeks to give to these Gentiles and, over the millennia, to us.” (Pages 129–130)
The term ‘missional’ is in serious danger of becoming all things to all people and thereby signifying nothing. In this book, Alan Roxburgh offers an important corrective to this situation by providing a concrete, practical, and theologically sophisticated conception of the term in conjunction with a fresh imagination around the idea of joining God in the neighborhood for the sake of the world. This is the best book yet from one of the leading voices in the missional conversation.
—John R. Franke, theologian in residence, First Presbyterian Church, Allentown, PA
I’ve read Al Roxburgh over the years and, taking nothing away from his previous work, this is Roxburgh’s finest to date. His take on Luke 10 is compelling. Filled with stories and theological precision, this book takes us to new places for the future of Christ’s church in North America. It is sure to be a tour de force for the missional conversation. I am not being excessive when I say this book is brilliant.
—David Fitch, B. R. Lindner Chair of Evangelical Theology, Northern Seminary
Missional may well be the best yet from author Alan Roxburgh as he prophetically reclaims the Newbigin engagement of Gospel and culture as the key to rediscovering what it really means to be church. This engagement is compellingly framed in theological terms from the Luke-Acts texts as readers are deeply challenged and creatively invited to ‘join God in their neighborhoods.’ A must-read for anyone who takes seriously the challenge and opportunity facing the church in the West in light of it having lost home field advantage.
—Craig Van Gelder, professor of congregational mission, Luther Seminary
Many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of things called ‘missional,’ but Roxburgh deconstructs our modern strategic orderliness, claims we often ask the wrong questions, and lures us into Luke’s narratives. Roxburgh posits that our ‘language house,’ our whole imagination about what God is up to and how we might participate, needs to be upended through some rather odd activities like listening to neighbors and rehearing some biblical narratives.
—Mark Lau Branson, Homer Goddard Associate Professor of Ministry of the Laity, Fuller Theological Seminary
Roxburgh daringly puts the church in its place . . . literally. Missional invites us to relocate the center of missional life from churches to our places and neighborhoods. Drawing on a lifetime of missional practice and study, Roxburgh brings together missional theology with real world stories of missional practitioners. A must-read for any community seeking to live even more missionally.
—Dwight J. Friesen, associate professor of practical theology, Mars Hill Graduate School, Seattle
Alan J. Roxburgh is a teacher, trainer, and consultant who works with Allelon and framing resources for the missional church internationally. He coordinates an international project involving leaders from 12 nations who are examining leadership formation in a globalized world. He is the author or coauthor of several books, including The Missional Church, The Missional Leader and Leadership, Liminality and the Missionary Congregation, and Reaching a New Generation.