Francis Rothery

Missional Mirage: New Christian West (Missional: Impossible!) Francis Rothery 1. izdevums

Einstein said 'We cannot solve our problems with the same kind of thinking that created them.' MISSIONAL MIRAGE highlights the way in which the Missional Movement contains the socially fragmenting seeds of modernity and Christian social dominance. Its goal is remaking a New Christian West. Alan Roxburgh quotes Wittgenstein; 'a picture held us captive and it lay in our language and our language repeated it to us inexorably.' Ironically the missional language of leadership, mapping, planning and of mission itself keep Christianity captive in a picture of its past. It is one mishaped by the language and practices of colonial mission. The Missional Movement, the Mission Shaped Church and mainline Christianity are also trapped in pictures of cultural superiority and of Christ as a conquering King. They therefore perpetuate a socially fragmenting picture of Christian social dominance. This picture is absent from the Gospels and the example and teaching of Christ. Protestantism and its bureaucratic capitalism gave birth to the consumerism and fragmentation of modern society. Therefore its social effects cannot be healed by the language and practices of a Missional Movement trapped in the language and practices of modernity.