All the clearest voices tell us that the corpus Christianum, the Constantinian arrangement, and the world of Christendom that guided our thinking about ourselves for 1500 years, is not coming back.

Our habit of telling our Christian story always as a success story, the habit so ingrained in us by even these later years in which formal Christendom was largely disestablished but functional Christendom continued, is running out of capital. The danger lies in continuing to believe the fiction that this is the way our story goes. The crisis means discovering what new story awaits us, and how the Holy Spirit draws us into the story in a new way.

That brings us to the opportunity side of the crisis. The opportunity is to recover what it means for the church to be missional. This is not just to have missions, or to send missions or missionaries, but to possess a distinctly missional sense of our identity, and to know ourselves to be formed by God as a sent community that bears the marks of the full biblical story of a cross, as well as a resurrection.

Here we are face to face with the challange for which Lesslie Newbigin has become so famous (or, infamous). He imagines what it would be like for the churches of the West to become genuinely engaged in “the missionary encounter of the gospel with our Western culture.”

That this sounds so new tells how far we have lost our missional character because it is in such a continual engagement that our calling and vocation finds it certre.

– George R. Hunsberger from “Birthing Missional Faithfulness: Accents in a North American Movement” in International Review of Mission