For some time now I have been becoming more and more aware that the way we are doing/being church is not long term sustainable. But how is God calling us to be church differently? So I went shopping for books about ecclesiology. Actually I went looking for one that I had seen recommended and found this one along the way (I also found the one I was looking for and it is next in my reading queue). It looked interesting so I gave it a try.
To be honest I was a bit disappointed. Malphurs is so heavily embedded in an evangelical understanding of the church that much of the time he ends up denigrating other understandings of the church (I stopped counting how many times he described the "liberal" church as not really being true churches). So I spent a lot of the book trying to translate through that rhetoric.
There were some pieces about process that I think I might be able to make use of. However there are time I questioned if the author truly understands the wide variety of church structures and understandings that are out there. Certainly he shows little understanding of the how different church sizes actually operate (and tends to see a small church as a size that many places would consider large).
Doing it again, I may not buy this book. But I think that in the end I might get enough out of it to make it work.
No comments:
Post a Comment