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Thursday, April 28, 2005

8. We must invite people to become involved in a community of believers as the first step to believing.
Among people who are hungry for authentic relationships and who are resistant to advertising claims, the gospel has to be lived out in order to raise interest levels and raise questions. The sequence for many people coming to faith today is, first, they belong to a faith community that welcomes them and treats them as one of their own, then they come to believe. Perhaps this is what the Church fathers were emphasizing in their insistence that outside the Church there is no salvation (ad extra ecclesiam nulla salus) because participation in the life-giving and salvation-conveying Spirit of God could not be understood apart from direct participation in the life of the believing community. Being in Christ entails being in the body of Christ. This is a vital theological truth to grasp in our hyper-individualistic society, in which so many Church members have, at best, a contractual relationship with the Church, rather than seeing it as a covenant relationship. Many Christians in the Emerging Church movement understand the Church to be a way of life, seven days a week, and not a 90-minute gathering once a week. For them you don't go to church, you are the Church. Put simply, "the gospel will be perceived as a feasible alternative when those who do not know God have some positive experiences with people who do know God."

Labels: mission, reinventing evangelism