Miroslav Volf Challenges an Important Part of the Pragmatic Missional Church Narrative

One of the abiding assertions I hear among Missional Church theologians and practitioners is the idea that the American church is somehow following in the footsteps of the European Church. European Christianity has ebbed and the stats on European church involvement are ugly. The logic is that the North American church will not be far behind. This line of thinking is a popular rationale for the development of a new church paradigm, and is often used by those working in the area of missional church theology and praxis.

In this short segment from a Q&A; after a lecture at Yale, Miroslav Volf suggests that there is another way to look at the data. He suggests that current scholarship indicates that since there are many ways for nations to modernize, including how the church adapts and responds to a society’s modernization, it is actually now assumed that Europe is the anomaly, and American church development through modernity is the more paradigmatic model.

It’s an interesting idea, and strikes at the heart of the narrative to which so many mission church leaders have hitched their wagons – especially the ones selling strategies, new models, & pragmatic solutions. They simply assume that Europe is the paradigm and the U.S. is simply lagging behind about 40 years. Volf is suggesting that – on the basis of watching how other religious cultures continue to modernize – there may be good reason to see European church as the anomaly, and the U.S. church as the paradigm. This means that the U.S. Church is not necessarily destined to move along the same path as Europe, but rather it is actually on the leading edge of how religion and societies interact with one another.

I think there is some merit to at least examining our own assumptions here. What if Europe is the anomaly and North America is the paradigm? How might the narrative of the Missional Church movement need to change if the rationale many of its leaders seem so dependent upon suddenly disappeared? I think that at the very least, this should push our quest for rationale farther away from pragmatics and more toward theology.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx0RrRZGu04?version=3