The urgent question for Christian mission in North America today has to do with churches and congregations and the crisis of their identity in the culture of modernity. According to Alan J. Roxburgh, the church has shifted from the center of culture to the margins. This text examines this shift and explores Victor Turner's work on liminality (a term describing the transition process that accompanies a change of state or social position).

Jane Collier and Raphael Esteban present a thoughtful and disturbing critique of Western culture. They see the West as obsessed by the "culture of economism"--a pervasive and often oppressive culture in which economic causes or factors become the main source of cultural meanings and values. Such economism, they point out, perpetrates inequality, injustice, divisions among people (especially rich and poor), and a host of other evils throughout the world.

The culture of economism touches all of us and is, in fact, manifest also in the organizational culture of the church. In many...

What is the church, and what is essential to it particularly in a post-Christian age?

In contrast to "the City," that is, the world (including the hedonism and narcissism of popular culture) that virtually all human beings now inhabit, the author calls upon the church to remember that it is "Another City" that does not compromise itself by giving allegiance to any political entity that belongs to this world. He points out how the hedonism and narcissism of "the City" or popular culture have been embraced also by those who make up Christ's body, the church, without seeing that this...

Has the church abdicated its responsibility for and privilege of spreading the gospel? Has this baptismal birthright been forgotten or denied out of ignorance, poor example, or even misinformation? Stephen Pickard argues that the church is called to be a community of the evangel and thus a community that seeks to embody the glad tidings of God in all of its life.

He addresses two issues: the relationship of evangelism to systematic theology and the relationship of evangelism to the church. In the case of the former, he calls for a recovery of the complementary nature of theology and...

What really drives the technologies that dominate our modern world? Ruth Conway here brings under scrutiny: the deceptive dreams of development, the masculine "voice and structure" of so much technology, the obsession with control that obliterates both recognition of human fallibility and sensitivity to the needs of "the other," the inadequacies of technologies that fail to take account of the "wholeness" of life and what might constitute "justice" (right relationships) within the human community and with nature, and the impact of information and communication technologies on our ways of...

Christian missionaries generally head out to the field with a single assessment of the human condition--humans are fallen, sinful creatures in need of salvation. Yet, as the history of missiology developed it found itself confronting other models of the human condition in anthropology and sociology that it had to incorporate into its theological models.

Taber offers a brief history of the interface between missiology and the social sciences. He contends that this relationship has been largely superficial and uncritical, even though it has brought a number of helpful dimensions to...

The church in our post-Christendom era needs different models for conceptualizing its own identity and its relationship to the rest of society. Philip Kenneson sets forth a model that suggests that the church's role in contemporary society is to serve as a "contrast-society." In this model, the church is animated by a different spirit than that which animates "the world." Moreover, the "contrast-society" model has tremendous missional promise in that its embodied life in the world is its witness to the world.

Kenneson acknowledges that this model is sometimes rejected by both...