Missional Literature Review - Part 2 - Commonly Held Reasons for Change: The Argument from Contextual Change

Commonly Held Reasons to Adopt Missional Living
A review of the literature clearly documents a call for the church and its programs to change. The call for change most commonly begins from one of three starting points: contextual change in the West, the institutional crisis facing the Church, or a personal crisis of faith (Junkin, 1996). Though not as common as the previous three starting points, a missional hermeneutic is also beginning to gain ground as a foundation upon which the need for change is established. (see Wright, 2006). Though each of the four starting points are distinct, they are often connected and interdependent as they form one powerful argument concerning the need for the church to change in the West.

Argument from Contextual Change
The notion that the world is changing is certainly nothing new to most contemporary people. It might seem, then, that the call for the church to change that arises from an analysis of contextual change in the world is unnecessary. However, the authors from whom the contextual analysis come claim that the change currently taking place in the world is abnormal, “discontinuous change” (Roxburgh, 2006, p. 7). Roxburgh (2006) categorizes discontinuous change as “disruptive and unanticipated” (p. 7) and claims it always challenges commonly held assumptions.

Though no one seems to be able to define, list, and name the discontinuous change in precisely the same way, the same general culprits of change are often repeated: globalization, religious and cultural pluralism, relativization or democratization of knowledge, advances of science and technology, the collapse of Enlightenment and modern principles and worldviews, growth of postmodernism, secularization of the West, dominance of capitalism and the continue presence of a huge gap between the rich and the poor, and the loss of confidence in primary social structures and relationships (Bosch, 1991; Dietterich & Dietterich, 1994; Hirsch, 2006; Roxburgh, 2006, 2008; Turnipseed, 1998; Van Gelder, 1996, 1998). Summarizing these changes, Wright (2006) says the Enlightenment Tower of Babel built in modernity has collapsed into the fragmented world of post-modernity.

Within the new, fragmented, and confusing world, the position of the church in the West has been drastically altered. Religious diversity has created an environment for individualized faith to flourish and true religion to fade in the light of uncertainty (Turnipseed, 1998). Secularization has de-Christianized the West, leading to a commonly held belief throughout the world that Western theology is suspect at best (Bosch, 1991). It is in this light of a new world and a new position for the church that the call for a missional change comes. The church must realize the West is a “mission field” (Roxburgh & Boren, 2009, p. 75) and should see itself with “exilic eyes as ‘resident aliens,’ an adventurous colony in a society of unbelief” (Hunsberger, 1996, p. 18).