Community Society and Culture

The last two edition of The Flame have addressed the changes in culture and the need for churches to change in order to do mission in the late modern or postmodern world. We have taken some segments from Alan J. Roxburgh.

Communitas

“Like any other group, churches are agents of socialization. They pass on meaning and identity in a double way. First they communicate their own sociality, and second they communicate the values of the dominant culture. The churches have contributed powerfully to the second form of socialization. One of their main characteristics over the last half century has been this power to socialize members into the culture. Church and good citizenship have been synonymous. Positively, this contributes to the stabilization of society and, to an extent, this is a good thing. What has been absent is the other, more important element of the church’s calling, namely, the transformation of culture through its own sociality as an alternative community...

A missionary encounter with modernity presupposes some form of transformational model for the church in relation to culture…

Denominations and churches… operate out of status roles based upon an assumed place within the larger social structure. One way in which this is evident is the reformulation of congregational life following World War II as the majority of churches switched to the new suburbs. A study of the organizational shape of these congregations... indicates patterns of organizational forms parallel to the new corporate structures in which most modern suburban churchgoers worked. This reshaping along the lines of the structural functions of the society suggests the church’s comfort with its place at the heart of the culture, even if that heart was the private world.

But what is impossible in this situation is what Turner calls “play”. There is little room to dream, to think outside the lines of modernity, or to envision an alternative future… Despite the number of studies and books written, all of that creativity and vision resulted in very little permanent change in congregational life or in mission beyond a new aggregation within the suburbs.

Part of the ferment within churches today stems from the fact that their postwar status roles have eroded…

They are searching for a location within the new social context. Positively, as at the midpoint of (the twentieth) century, the potential to dream and envision is present. The discovery of social bonds rooted in the gospel is again possible. The tension is that, as in the postwar period, the churches will once more look for status roles in the culture and so define their life by norms within the society. It would be a great tragedy to allow this present moment of opportunity to pass without affecting fundamental transformation…

This is the way Christianity entered history. It was a new social reality formed out of a liminal experience that created the communitas of a new peoplehood. It took the form of a group existing on the edges of the social worlds of its time. It was a distinct and peculiar people with a strong sense of belonging to one another.”

From Alan J. Roxburgh, The Missionary Congregation, Leadership, & Liminality, Trinity Press, Harrisburg, Penn (1997), pp 49-54

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