The Future Horizon for a Prophetic Tradition

A Missiological, Hermeneutical, and Leadership Approach to Education and Black Church Civic Engagement

Everett

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781498278638
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In this book David Everett examines how Church has changed throughout a modern/postmodern context. Everett explores how social gospel dimensions and prophetic radicalism have diminished in a way that it might reestablish itself as a pillar in the community through a retrieval of its prophetic voice and social gospel roots so that it to might be missional-minded and civically-engage. Everett anticipates that this perspective will assist the Black Church in the reclamation of its heritage by confirming its purpose and affirming its position within the missional context that God has placed it.

Chapter One

Setting the Stage

Introduction

Why is staying within the city gates, confines of one’s community, or organizational silos so natural and preferable? A sociological response could be that what is known breeds a certain level of security and comfort, but a spiritual reply would question whether earthly security and comfort should be goals of the sojourner. This has been the question at the center of the missional conversation. With either response, an important understanding for the church is its dual nature: social and spiritual—the church situated in a social context with a spiritual calling. And, as such, its missional ecclesiology has to address and engage the dynamics, factors, and qualities of its context if it is to be faithful to its calling.

In this chapter, I will attempt to frame the missional conversation from a biblical perspective touching on both Old and New Testament narratives. This intent is to transition into a “public” defining of ecclesial practices and social characteristics such as the Black Church’s reconstitution of mission and a macro/micro comprehension of culture. Revisiting Black Church beginnings, specifically the slave period, I begin to frame how mission in a Black context integrates liberation from, and participation in, the social systems and structures that not only shaped its culture, but were once prohibited. My aim here is to point out that in order for missional ecclesiology to be biblically-reflective and spiritually-effective, it needs to be contextually-informed.

Framing Conversation

A careful analysis of the biblical story reveals dialectic between centripetal and centrifugal forces concerning mission. A scan of Jewish history in the Old Testament uncovers flight from and absorption of the secular, a concern for self-identity and responsible (or irresponsible!) interaction with one’s environment, elect status as God’s chosen people as well as a humble awareness of one’s solidarity with humanity entirely.1 A screening of the New Testament discovers the fundamental aspects of Jesus’ confined ministry that sought to challenge and restore the community of Israel, and how they became an inspiration and source for post-Easter universal mission of community—representing multiple ways in which members of the Christian community reflected on their missionary purpose and its relationship to the personhood of Jesus and the history of Israel.2

Arguing against an operational ecclesiology that is more instrumental in character, the missional church conversation has reintroduced a discussion about the very nature, or essence, of the church.3 This conversation no longer understands “being missionary” primarily in functional terms, as something the church does, but rather in terms of something the church is, as something related to its nature—representing a change that places ecclesiology more front and center.4 In this regard, the focus shifts toward the world as the horizon for understanding the work of God, and that redemptive work as the basis for understanding both the nature and purpose of the church,5 replacing the operational ecclesiology, characterized by an organizational self-understanding around a purposive intent, with an ecclesiology that comprehends the church as being created by the Spirit and, in nature, missionary.

Initially, the missional church conversation concentrated on the sending nature of the triune, missionary God: God the Father sends Jesus the Son who then sends the Holy Spirit, who in turn sends the church to the world. This conversation introduces two streams of understanding God’s work in the world. First, the missio Dei—God has a mission within all of creation; and second, God has brought redemption to bear on all of life within creation through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.6 In an attempt to recover the relational nature of the Triune God, the missional church conversation has more recently adopted somewhat of a retrieval of trinitarian theology where God seeks to bring to His kingdom, “the redemptive reign of God in Christ, to bear on every dimension of life within the entire world” so His larger creation purposes can be fulfilled.7 This relational dimension is grounded in the fundamental bridging of social context and spiritual calling.

Ecclesial Aspect

Public is a word that resides at every turn in the missional ecclesiology conversation. The word ekklesia itself emanates from the idea of a civic meeting as does its Hebrew counterpart qahal, which refers to a deliberative assembly of the body politic. Public is associated with the New Testament word kerygma and its verbal vicissitudes. Usually translated “preaching,” it is far removed from what we now label preaching. According to George Hunsberger,

its meaning field has to do with the function of the “herald,” the news announcement by the official spokesvoice of one in power or authority. The public broadcast of the news, the “publication” of it, is the form of witness the New Testament describes.8

Once clear that the church is not simply an organization based on membership, but a body of people bounded by a mission—settling the fact of who we are—then where we are is not the building on the corner, or the ivory institution on the hill, but people pressed into the fabric of life, living it out in the social context and public dimensions shared by others.9 Civic engagement then becomes the welcomed outcome of this “sharing” because it is within such a public society that individuals and institutions learn to cultivate the virtues of citizenship.

As associated, “connected critics,”10 individuals and institutions committed to fundamental, communal ideas can functionally observe the shortcomings of a public society while engaging and immanently critiquing the very same enterprise. Critical social theorist Max Horkheimer based his theory of society on the notion of an “immanent critique,” arguing that normative rational ideas, which simultaneously serve to critically evaluate as well as redesign and rebuild a different society, are themselves present within a given social system. He explains: “Immanent critique summons the existent [society], in its historical context, with the claim of its conceptual principles, in order to criticize the relation between the two and thus transcend them.”11

In succession, immanent critique restates and redefines the “norms and ideals that have been forgotten or repressed, usually because they inconvenience a social class or social arrangement.”12 It can then serve as a contemporary conscience13 that we...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Setting the Stage
• Chapter Two: Interpretative Dilemma
• Chapter Three: Contextual Shaping
• Chapter Four: Moving Forward
• Chapter Five: Conclusion
• Bibliography