Over 17 years ago, Loren Mead, in his book The Once and Future Church, stated that “where a sense of mission has been made clear and compelling, the church has been sacrificial and heroic in its support of that mission.” (Alban Institute Publicatgion, 1991, p. 28) He describes two paradigms which he suggests shaped the church up to this point and then describes the evidence that indicates we are now shifting to a third paradigm, the boundaries of which are not quite clear.
The frontier of the first paradigm was at the front door of the church as they geared up their courage to carry their message of salvation into a hostile world. Everytime they left a gathering of the church community, they were immediately confronted with neighbors who not only believed differently but were often hostile to their beliefs. Every believer was a missionary as he or she lived their faith in relation to their neighbors.
When Constantine declared Christianity as the official religion of his empire, the context of missionary work changed. Now the model or paradigm of mission was different. It was presumed that the surrounding culture was already made up of Christians. The frontier of the second paradigm, the Christendom Paradigm, was at the edge of the empire. Now missionaries were specialists trained in carrying the message to foreign lands. The task of those who lived in the Christian empire was to support the missionaries who traveled to these pagan lands.
As was explained in my previous comments on evangelism, the establishment of the church as the official church of the Christian land has broken down. In this country we talk about the separation of church and state and increasingly the state and the culture recognizes the pluralistic nature of religion around us. So we enter a third paradigm where we can no longer presume that our surroundings support our faith. In most cases, unlike the first paradigm, the culture is more indifferent than hostile to what we believe.
The question is whether the lines of this third paradigm have become any more clear in the last 17 years.
