Which New Testament Church Will We Be?

In their book Introducing the Missional Church: What It Is, Why It Matters, How to Become One (Allelon Missional Series) (Baker Books, 2009), Alan Roxburgh and M.  Scott Boren urge us to consider which New Testament church we will be: 

In some ways the church founded in Jerusalem after Pentecost failed to recognize the nature of the journey onto which the Spirit was calling them. These Christians immediately settled into a pattern they thought exemplified God’s mission as they met at the temple as Jews had done for centuries, and they met in small settings as extended households with a sense of belonging and fellowship. They saw themselves as basically a Jewish movement that was the completion of God’s people…

Then the boundary-breaking, assumption-challenging Spirit took some unknown Christians from Jerusalem north toward Antioch where they encountered Gentiles who had heard about Jesus and wanted to learn more. What happened next was outside the imagination of those early Christians and could not be controlled by the church in Jerusalem. As they spoke to the Gentiles about Jesus, the Holy Spirit fell upon them and a new kind of church was birthed in Antioch, comprised mostly of Gentiles. Nobody expected this turn of events…

We might say, using our own categories, these first-century followers of Jesus were moved from a well-defined attractional way of doing church into a missional imagination of being the church in the world. The church in Jerusalem was an attractional model of church life because it sought to draw people into the center of a predetermined understanding of what it meant to be God’s people. It was a Jerusalem-centered movement shaped by the assumptions of Judaism. They saw Jesus as the Jewish Messiah who had come to fulfill the promises for the Jewish people….

We believe something similar is happening in the life of the church in North America; a stirring is taking place; the Spirit is up to something where we least expect the presence of God to break out. People are tiring of the attractional pattern as the primary focus of their churches; they are hungering for a different journey.