Below are the rest of my notes from “The Shaping of Things to Come” by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch.  Still in the first chapter, I’ve been blown away by some of the things I’ve been reading.

Something important to note: This chapter deals with the concept of “Christendom,” that is, our cultural understanding of how we gather as believers. This has been called “institutional church” by other authors. The following notes are not focused on individuals, but on the praxis.

This was one of my favorite quotes in the chapter. Extremely challenging.

“If we once have the courage to give up our defense of the old facades which have nothing or very little behind them; if we cease to maintain, in public, the pretense of a universal Christendom; if we stop straining every nerve to get everybody baptized, to get everybody married in church and onto our registers (even when success means only, at bottom, a victory for tradition, custom and ancestry, not for true faith and interior conviction); if, by letting go, we visibly relive Christianity of the burdensome impression that it accepts responsibility for everything that goes on under this Christian topdressing, the impression that Christianity is a sort of Everyman’s Religious Varnish, a folk-religion (at the same level as that of folk-costumes – then we can be free for real missionary adventure and apostolic self-confidence…” – Douglas John Hall, “Metamorphosis: From Christendom to Diaspora”

Michael Frost goes on to explain that Christendom has negatively impacted Christianity. Instead of the Church moving forward, she has been moved into maintenance mode:

[Christendom's] type of leadership can generally be described as priestly, sometimes prophetic to insiders, but almost never to outsiders (no one “out there” is listening), and rarely apostolic. Christendom has moved Christianity into a maintenance mode.

Another quote:

The church is worse off precisely because of Christendom’s failure to evangelize its own context and establish gospel communities that transform the culture.

Another quote:

Christendom is not the biblical mode of the church. It was/is merely one way in which the church has conceived of itself. In enshrining it as the sole form of the church, we have made it into an idol that has captivated our imaginations and enslaved us to a historical-cultural expression of the church.

We have not answered the challenges of our time precisely because we refuse to let go of the idol. This must change! The answer to the problem of mission in the West requires something far more radical than reworking a dated and untenable model. It will require that we adopt something that looks far more like the early church in terms of its conception of the church (ecclesiology) and its core task in the world (missiology)

Main point of  the book:

The whole tenor of this book will be to call post-Christendom to see itself again as a missionary movement rather than as an institution.

I appreciated the approach towards discovering ecclesiology.  It is rooted in an understanding of Jesus and mission:

Christology determines missiology, and missiology determines ecclesiology. It is absolutely vital that the church gets the order right.