What is the Churchs Mission in the World - Book Report/Review Example

What is the churches mission in the world and how does the church engage the world in that mission? Chapter16 Summary From Wright the validity of the human and the divine through the classical incarnation view of spirituality is recognized as humans’ struggle to be called spiritual. In this struggle, there are both negative and positive impacts. The negative impacts emphasize on the necessity to use self abandonment and quiet to encounter God. Conversely, the positive implication resulting from the search for spirituality is our meeting God with life’s responsibility, in life’s history, and everyday issues. Without the positive and negative elements together, there is incompleteness. The incompleteness results to people tending towards the search for spirituality. Spirituality differs from spiritual given that the former is something not within humans but something they only turn to at a particular time and place. However, spiritual is something that becomes a habit or way of life and a continuous state of being. Spiritual is not instantaneous or sporadic but consistent practice that involves the search for God with lots of stillness and uproar of life. Again, spiritual involves the search for God everywhere and at any given time provided it is in and through the church which is where Christ is presented to us, the from us to the world. With the modern day’s tendency towards spirituality, there is need for the church to emphasize on the spiritual to both challenge and motivate the people. This way, the world will be presented with a point of contact with a world where numerous forms of spirituality form part of the culture. Chapter 17 and 19 summary According to Webber, evangelism is essential in spreading Christianity throughout the world. Within the ancient church, evangelism was linked to triumph over evil and the founding of God’s kingdom. Consequently, evangelism was defined by three main elements. First, evangelism emphasized that through his life, death and resurrection Jesus washed away our sin. Therefore, salvation is attained through repentance, believing, and obedience. In this regard, Christ introduced to the church a new era where God took human form, and lived with them. In order to be identified as part of the church, then one has to receive baptism to mark the end doing wrong and act as a necessary step towards conversion. Webber then reveals that having received salvation through the cross of Christ and sealing it with baptism, one is then called to evangelize. Evangelism is a clear indication that the world has to be transformed. In order to transform the world, the church in the postmodern era has to understand that the world is inhabited by influence from evil powers. Through this understanding, the church has to church has to take a strong stand regardless of social, political, and economic structures around it. In this regard, the church has to ensure that Christians live according to the standards of the kingdom. the proper standards of the kingdom are taught to the world through emphasizing that the gospel does not apply to the lives of Christians only at particular times and places but that the gospel applies in every aspect of social, personal, national, and moral life. The church on the other hand must ensure that it is always a neutral ground such that no political affiliations prevent it from speaking to and serving the entire society a community. This way, the church will be clearly defined as no longer being one with the world but as a separate entity from the world. In its attempts to be separated from the world, the Christians have to expect sufferings, misunderstanding, reviling, and prosecution for the sake of uprightness. However, the separation of the church from the world should not be used as a force that attempts to overthrow the world governments. Instead, the church should be identified in the world. Like Webber reveals, “be zealous to perform good works and to please God, living righteously devoting himself to the church (169)”. Criticism of both Webber and Wright I agree with Webber and Wright on their stand about the church and Christians in the modern world. Webber argues that Christian spirituality in the postmodern era has drifted the role of the church from transforming people to become spiritual to promoting spirituality. As a result the world now operates under spirituality dictated by time and place unlike spiritual life that promotes continued way of life everyday and everywhere in and with the church. Conversely, Webber argues that the church has to revive its evangelism and see it as a process with stages and not an event. With the enlightenment evangelism, the focus shifted to individualism whose emphasis is on personal salvation at the expense of the spreading the gospel’s message. With the enlightenment evangelism, the personality of the evangelist, his eloquence, conversion history, and hardships he has endured amongst others are the central focus when people decide which spirituality they will follow. Additionally, evangelism is promoted by the church which has to place itself within the world as separate from the world but as identified with the world. Additionally, the church in its efforts to transform the world to has been transformed by the world which it was set to transform. This is evident from Webber who reveals that “Modern evangelism, grounded in the satisfaction theory of the augment, has been primarily cross-centered evangelism.144” Although the transformed evangelism teaches about trusting in Christ, it fails to go beyond the death on the cross to Christ conquering evil powers. The result is that, depending on the spirituality one attends to, Christianity is a personalized and privatized affair. The implication here is that there is no place for the community to under God’s reign and so is eschatological destination of history in evangelism. This results to another problem of separating the church and baptism from evangelism. This is evident through the modern day process of salvation. Instead of placing adequate emphasis on nurturing salvation as the responsibility of the church, the change is viewed as an event that occurs and affects the individual. This separation of the church with evangelism has washed away the element of obedience hence introducing the cult of straightforward and eye-catching Christianity. In this type of Christianity, the people testify of how the goodness and positives they have received in their lives through salvation. As a result, the message of Christianity has changed to one that only focuses on a very attractive Christianity and not one that transforms lives into Christ. Disobedience in modern day Christianity has also been promoted by evangelists who focus on having Christians commit to Christ through their playing with the Christians emotions. “the music, the testimonies, the sermon, the invitation are all geared to skillfully and psychologically guide people to a decision 145”. Like Webber and Wright, I agree that the spiritual life is attained through an evolutionally progress and not an optimistic perception of human person. Wright argues that “Jesus is our spirituality the supreme image of spiritual life is baptism, through into his death and resurrection”. Webber agrees that “from the beginning of faith, baptism was the primary symbol of getting to church, 147”. The argument here is that baptism is just a stage in the life of a Christian which requires that the individual with the assistance of the church seeks and identifies self with the other stages. This is possible if the church focuses evangelism on the understanding of the death of Christ, church as the womb that nourishes the new born, the passage rites as a way of organizing and inward experience, and maturation that led to baptism. Through this plan, the post modern church will not be replaced but will be provided with a plan of will allow the gospel to apply to all elements of personal, moral, social, and national life. Works Cited Read More