Evangelicals in the West, and North America in particular, generally agree that they live in a mission field. Cultural shifts and immigration have moved the boat of the Church into post-Christianized waters.
Lesslie Newbigin argued this.
David Bosch argued this.
The Gospel and Our Culture Network argued this.
The academy got it.
Evangelical church and denominational leaders got it.
People in the pews got it.
But “getting it” is not sufficient for Kingdom citizens. We are called to be a people who move.
The drift into post-Christianized waters occurred in the context of mature Church structures. The result? Ministry was (and is) to be filtered through a pastoral lens. There was no allowance for the Church sending the apostolic into her backyard. We left that behind a long time ago and assigned it to the missionary category for Majority World contexts.
Even when we said, “We must be missional,” or “Think like a missionary,” our thoughts and field practices remained pastoral in orientation.
Today, we may speak the language of the apostolic, but we only know how to fit it into the box of pastoral ministry. While there are biblical similarities between the two, they are apples and oranges in practice.
Our nineteenth century support structures, networks, and policies were not designed or developed for a mission field in our backyard. They were for “overseas” where pastoral structures did not exist.
We know we live in a mission field. We have been talking about this for a while.
We have never seen the co-existence of collaborative pastoral and apostolic structures in North America–a must for the post-Christianized West.
A place to begin the necessary shifts? Apostolic missiology.
