THE GREAT GIVEAWAY
Reclaiming the Mission of the Church
By David E Fitch. Baker Books. 263 pages. £5.41 (Amazon)
ISBN 0 80106 483 X
Written out of frustration with the North American church scene, the thesis of this book is that evangelicalism has ‘given away being the church in North America’.
The author pastors and teaches at a seminary in Chicago and is co-founder of Up Rooted, a gathering of church leaders ‘engaging the postmodern context’. The charge is that, seduced by the values of the consumerist, capitalist culture, the church has lost her biblical distinctives and become a Christianised version of big business or psychological therapy. Secular leadership models and entertainment values are in the driving seat and many of her core responsibilities are farmed out to parachurch organisations. Much of this rings true, though the book is entirely rooted in the USA, which is a distinctly different Christian culture from our own.
Behind the description, the root cause of the tragedy is identified as ‘complicity with modernity’. Christianity has become a commodity, packaged and marketed like any other, to suit the individual consumer. But the ‘massive critique of modernity’s sweeping American cultural institutions’, which is postmodernism, demands that we discover an authentic evangelical ecclesiology, credible for these new times. This has been the author’s own personal pilgrimage, in conflict with the veneration of modern science and its devotion to factual truth and objective reason. He has remained an evangelical, but left modernity with its problems and baggage be-hind. The book comes out of four years’ experience of pastoring ‘the Vine’, a decidedly postmodern yet evangelical community.
Its eight chapters deal with evangelical definitions of success, evangelism, leadership, experience, biblical preaching, justice, spiritual formation and moral education. They contain much which resonates in a stimulating and challenging way. The major conclusion that ‘our first task must be … to come together and live as communities of faith, pursuing the life of Christ together as his church’, is undeniably important. It is to receive back from God what the churches have given away, so that ‘they become the alternative to the Starbucks of our day’. But if the corrective is controlled by postmodernism effectively governing the use and interpretation of Scripture, isn’t the problem with modernity merely being repeated, just in a more contemporary style? This critique appears to be driven more by cultural pressure than biblical priorities.
