This book assesses the crisis of the Western church and proposes strategies for recovering the missional character of the church. According to Robinson and Smith, the mission of the church in the apostolic period was spurred by its conviction in the Lord’s imminent return and the urgency of spreading the gospel. The people of God as a whole were engaged in mission. However, with the new social status gained in Constantine’s conversion, mission shifted from being the essential nature of the church, to being one of its many functions. Mission was now seen as preserving the institution through the new class of professional priests and tied to the agenda of the church. The institution began to define its mission, rather than God’s mission defining the church (p. 46). The crisis in the Western church today is once again rooted in its misplaced focus on declining numbers and its frantic quest to reverse this trend. Robinson and Smith call the church back to its core purpose and calling—mission.

The underlying conviction is that the church’s mission is sharing in God’s mission to the world, in giving the only begotten Son to the world for the sake of the world. Divine mission must be reflected in the church. The life and witness of the church is rooted in God’s mission, in which the church becomes the love of God manifested in the world.

Crucial to the church’s mission is Christian formation, argue Robinson and Smith. When the church defines itself according to its institutional priorities the focus becomes church growth and success, but when the church is shaped by mission priority is given to sustained personal transformation, relationship and intimacy with God and fellow human beings. The authors suggest that personal transformation takes place in the mentoring process of small group structures. In the small group, all the people of God are engaged in the church’s mission and witness. Unfortunately, however, lively worship acts as a substitute for personal transformation, creating a dependency in a consumer approach to worship (111). Also detrimental to mission is the culture of domineering leadership. “The abnormality of the ‘man at the top’ syndrome…is a cancer eating at the health of all human organization. It is this concern, extending through the expectations of younger leaders and reinforced by training institutions, that has created our present realities (p. 126). Robinson and Smith propose a missional style of leadership that empowers people to engage the cultures of this world for the sake of the kingdom. “Dynamic leadership does not think first of how to retain control but how to give away as much as possible (p. 153).” True New Testament leadership is always shared; dissension and opposition is viewed as Trinitarian diversity, not as a threat to a dominant leader.

How can we use the internet to effectively introduce people to Jesus?

Andrew Halloway is Publishing Manager for Christian Publicity Organisation in Worthing UK. (He was previously an editor and writer at CWR, who among other things produce the daily notes EDWJ/Every Day Light, also available by email from Crosswalk.com. CPO produces evangelistic leaflets, tracts, booklets and overprinted invitation cards for church events. They have always based their ministry on two vital principles:

• that evangelistic literature should be as modern, lively and graphically well-designed as secular material.
• that editorial content should relate to the things that people are interested in, and only then offer, in a non-preachy accessible style, the Christian angle.

These two essential communication principles are equally important in online evangelism. Andrew kindly shares his view of these principles.

Communicating the Gospel in a secular, postmodern culture

As secular culture has moved further and further away from Christianity, it has become increasingly necessary to change the traditional evangelistic approach in order to communicate the Gospel. On the whole, we can’t earn an opportunity to be taken seriously when talking about Jesus or God until we have connected with people on issues they are already interested in. We have to earn the right to be heard.

In the not too distant past, there was a time when most of those who weren’t card-carrying Christians at least had an understanding of the claims of Christianity, and assented to its view of the world and its morality, even if they didn’t have an active faith themselves.

The situation is now completely different: Christian values are competing with a vast array of other competing values, and people are either ignorant of the basics of Christianity or misunderstand them. In the West we have reverted to a pagan culture which is comparable with the first-century Gentile Romano/Greek world that the first Christians found themselves in Jesus’ own ministry was to the House of Israel, and though he had a few significant ‘evangelistic’ encounters with Gentiles, he never left the environs of Judea, Galilee, Samaria and Decapolis. In contrast, he commanded his disciples to take the Gospel to the ends of the earth. That meant that his disciples would have to tackle evangelism in a different way to preaching the Gospel in the Jewish monotheistic context they had been used to. However, much of Acts features the apostles going to Jewish communities in the pagan world before reaching out beyond that. Therefore, there aren’t too many examples in the Bible of how the Early Church evangelized the Gentile world, but we know from history that they certainly succeeded. However, the Apostle Paul’s sermon at Athens on ‘the unknown God’ is perhaps the best example we have of the kind of evangelism that we now have to engage in, in our own post-Christian culture.