The Importance of Rethinking Paradigms

“No one looking at the cultural context of the church today can say that over the past century or so things have not fundamentally and unalterably changed in society. The reality we deal with is that now, after some two thousand years of the gospel, Christianity is on the decline in every Western cultural context. In fact, in terms of percentage of the population, we are proportionately further away from getting the job done than we were at the end of the third century! Even in the United States, for so long a bastion of a distinct and vigorous form of cultural Christendom, society is increasingly distancing itself from the church’s sphere of influence and becoming what can be more appropriately called neo-pagan. Much ink has been spilled in trying to analyze the situation.

But seldom in these assessments do we hear a call for a radical rethink about the actual mode of the church’s engagement—the way it perceives and shapes itself around its core tasks. Rarely do we hear a serious critique of the often-hidden assumptions on which Christendom itself stands. It seems that the template of this highly institutional version of Christianity is so deeply embedded in our collective psyche that we have inadvertently put it beyond the pale of prophetic critique. We have so sacralized this mode of church through centuries of theologizing about it that we have actually confused it with the kingdom of God, an error that seems to have plagued Catholic thinking in particular throughout the ages.

Most efforts at change in the church fail to deal with the very assumptions on which Christendom is built and maintains itself. The change of thinking needed in our day as far as the church and its mission are concerned must be radical indeed; that is, it must go to the roots of the problem.” 

~ Excerpt taken from Alan Hirsch’s The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating Apostolic Movements