Curtis A. Bronzan

As the church of Jesus Christ progresses further into the twenty-first century, it continues to address issues both new and old. While church membership is growing exponentially throughout many parts of the 3^rd world, it continues a rapid decline in the post-Christian West.

Charles Van Engen comments upon this reality when he notes

[w]e are all aware that the center of gravity of the Christian Church has shifted from North to South, from West to East. This shift does not only impact the numbers of Christians in the world, the languages they speak, and the location where they may be found. This shift also means that mission-sending is now polycentric: cross-cultural missions send their missionaries from everywhere to everywhere. (Missiological Constraints in Critical Contextual Theologizing, Van Engen)

Simply the names of a few recently published books reveal the impact of this seismic shift: They Like Jesus, but Not the Church: Insights from Emerging Generations, Quitting Church: Why the Faithful Are Fleeing and What to Do About It and unChristian: What A New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity. As such, we in the West must follow the guidance of Van Engen (see, for instance, Mission on the Way: Issues in Mission Theology, 207-229), Lesslie Newbigin and many others who call the Church in the West to re-evangelize its increasingly secularized culture.

An interesting element of this dilemma is that many who are leaving the church in the West do so not out of a loss of faith, but rather, they assert, in order to save it. This reality is explored in personal narratives, like Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, as well as practical guides seeking to reverse the trend, such as Essential Church?: Reclaiming a Generation of Dropouts. Though the perspectives these books offer are important for church ministry and missiological practice in the West, I seek to dig deeper, ultimately presenting a theological understanding regarding the role of gathering places in the life of a faith community.

In doing so in this and posts to follow, I will holistically engage the whole of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, seeking to explicate an eschatological, missional understanding of the role of the the Temple(s) and the Church(es) as a basis for church involvement in contemporary culture. In so doing, I will utilize the positive elements of an evangelical narrative theology, recognizing that the biblical narrative is “not merely the recital of events in historical sequence. Rather, [it] seeks to convey a deeper meaning, a deep-level revelation of the nature and purposes of God who breaks into human history.” (Mission on the Way: Issues in Mission Theology, 52)

Lesslie Newbigin puts it thusly:

The Christian church testifies that in the actual events of this finite, contingent, and yet rational world of warped space-time there are words and gestures through which the Creator and Sustainer of the world has spoken and acted. It is not that the events are anything other than part of the unbroken nexus of happenings within space-time that can be analyzed and classified along with all the rest. They are not ‘interventions’ by someone who is otherwise absent. (Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture, 88)

We start, therefore, at the Beginning. At their outset, the Hebrew Scriptures assert the primacy of God, not as an “Unmoved Mover,” but quite the opposite, as Creator who exists in divine community. Indeed, Scripture boldly proclaims not simply the existence of God, but in addition His creative power: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”Noting that we ought speak not so much of the doctrine of Creation, but rather the Creator, Karl Barth rightly asserts a theme integral to our study, that humanity “was in a pre-eminent sense created for the service of God, created to be the ‘image of God,’ not only as theatre, but as active and passive bearer of that glory.” (Credo, 33)

Not long after this idyllic Creation in the Garden, however, Scripture records an escalating crescendo of sin that begins with the first couple and their children, and continues throughout the first eleven chapters of Genesis. In Genesis 12, then, God starts over, by instead – as Wright puts it – calling “an elderly, childless couple in the land of Babel… [making] them the fountainhead, the launch pad of his whole mission of cosmic redemption.” (The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative, 199.)Indeed, Genesis 12.1-3 states

The LORD had said to Abram, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you.
I will make you into a great nation
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.”

As has been noted by Wright, (The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative, 199.)what we encounter in God’s calling of Abram can be categorized into two corresponding halves, each established by an imperative, “go” and “be a blessing.” These are each followed by three corresponding outcomes, which reveal the results of the commands, that is blessing for all peoples on earth. Thus, thiis new beginning should be understood not in terms of God completely starting over as much as God seeking to fulfill His original purposes inherent in the original Beginning. With the implications of the Beginning and new beginning at the forefront of our minds, then, we are now able to proceed onto our missiological investigation regarding gathering places throughout the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures.