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We have entered upon a new day when so much has changed and where local churches and denominations struggle to make sense of their role and place. The People of God, however, have ‘been here before.’ Although we do not know fully what is going on and where this all might take us (including what will comprise change that is ‘continuous’ and change that is ‘discontinuous’), we know that God will see the Church through, in His ultimate purposes as He leads us on, further into the mission and creative restoration of the people, places and ‘stuff of creation’ as He invites us to join with Him.

Alan J. Roxburgh echoes these thoughts in his book, ‘Missional Map-Making’ (Jossey-Bass). Here’s Al’s take on some of this:

“ . . . The Church in all its forms is a work of the Holy Spirit. That being said, today’s church requires a transformation of imagination, organization, practice and leadership. In the young church in Jerusalem, for example, this transformation of imagination was wrought by a geographical shift of its centre from Jerusalem to Antioch. Jerusalem represented the assumption that the ways of religious life that had worked for centuries, the sense of a continuous, developmental process from all that God had promised in the Old Testament to its fulfilment in Jesus and the birth of the church, would be a seamless development of this past. This church, as Acts 11 makes clear, was almost totally Jewish in composition. The overarching assumption in Jerusalem was that Jesus’ death and resurrection fulfilled all the expectations of Jewish hope, and the young Jewish church was its fulfilment. The early church was and would remain Jewish in form and nature because Judaism was the young church’s map. The Jewish church was rooted in Jewish practices, rhythms and leadership forms. Jerusalem represented continuity and equilibrium; it was the central metaphor for all that God was doing. Within the young church’s imagination were assumptions about what it meant to be the people of God as well as God’s relationship to the rest of the world and the future of the community formed by Jesus. But this map would undergo a radical transformation that shifted the young church out of one world and into another.”