About Rhizone - It's About the Great Commission, Stupid

Rhizone is about the spread of Christianity worldwide and the growth of its emergent, global frontier.   

The tag "Dispatches from the Next Christendom"  captures the sense of what is happening on a planetary scale and derives from the title of a book by historian Philip Jenkins.   Jenkins' The Next Christendom  , published by Oxford University Press in 2002, projects the accelerating, future growth of Christianity, which is no longer really a Western phenomenon, but a global one.  Christians in the West still have little clue.  According to the book blurb, "the explosive southward expansion of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin American has barely registered on Western consciousness. Nor has the globalization of Christianity--and the enormous religious, political, and social consequences it portends--been properly understood."

While Christianity is spreading rapidly in Asia and Africa, it is also undergoing some radical and long-term shifts in the West itself.  The sudden decline of the evangelical establishment in America with its almost single-minded focus on "family values" and "social issues" such as abortion and gay marriage has been offset by the growing influence of socially conservative Christians in the global south, as the recent fracturing of the Anglican church's worldwide communion suggests.    At the same time, American evangelicals are becoming more socially "progressive," or at least not so lockstep when it comes  to the traditional issues that their leaders have espoused.

The so-called "emergent church" - which is now a catch-all label for new, experimental, and youth-based forms of Christianity in the West  - may have seeded the current trend in Western evangelicalism.   But in many ways all the different varieties of emergentism for the most part tend to be the mirror image of the old guard against which they are reacting.  What they have in common is a preoccupation with social and political issues, the gist of what was once called the "culture wars," and a kind of choleric take on how the other half represents itself.  In many ways the emergent movement, broadly conceived, has defined itself as simply the "alternative" to the now senescent evangelical empire of the 1980s and 1990s.  Traditional evangelicalism  favored mega-churches and "church growth."  Emergents have concentrated on small gatherings, even "house churches."  The "religious right", as embodied in the influence and agenda of Jerry Falwell, was  for years on its high horse about the takeover, which happened in the Sixties, of mainline Protestantism by liberals and social activists.  The new evangelical "religious left," personified in Jim Wallis and his Sojourners movementa presidency and the all-out push for an Obama, seems to want to turn the hands of the clock one more time again.   

By and large American Christianity  across the political, cultural, and theological spectrum remains focused on what faith "can do for me and my lifestyles," an outgrowth of consumer capitalism which Americans pioneered and perfected over the last half century.  It is what I have called "Burger King Christianity,"  which coined the marketing slogan "have it your way."  But consumer capitalism is currently going through a crisis that it has never  in the past experienced.  Oil shocks, credit crunches,   offshored jobs, and generalized economic Angst without any immediate prospect of a turnaround are the bitter harvest of decades of consumerist self-absorption.  The idols everywhere are now falling. 

If Christianity during the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century was forced to disentangle itself  from  the Constantianian heritage of Christ as Caesar (what historians call "Caesoropapism"), Christianity in the new millenium will find itself forced to separate from the legacy of consumerism.  Consumerism is about "me" and "what I want."  Christianity is about "God" and "what God wants."  God and self cannot be served any more than God and Mammon can. 

When Christ rose from the dead, he bid his followers to "make disciples of all nations."  He did not say "start churches that will appeal to people and grow because of that appeal."  Nor did he say "figure out what you want in life and go for it."  He said "make disciples of all nations."  That bidding has come to be known as The Great Commisson.  Scripturally, the Great Commission is the practical imperative corresponding to The Great Commandment - "love the Lord your God with all thy heart and your neighbor as yourself." 

The new Christians of the global south are likely to lead the old Christians of the super-indulged west into what is truly the next Christendom.  The next Christendom will be the realization of the Great Commission. 

In our next post we will begin to explore more fully what that means, and what the word "rhizone"  means for the next Christendom.

NOTE: many of these ideas are explored in Carl Raschke's new book GloboChrist: The Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn, set for release by Baker Academic Books on August 1, 2008. 

   

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Traditional evangelicalism favored mega-churches and "church growth." Emergents have concentrated on small gatherings, even "house churches." The "religious right", as embodied in the influence and agenda of Jerry Falwell, was for years on its high horse about the takeover, which happened in the Sixties, of mainline Protasfdestantism by liberals and social activists. The new evangelical "religious left," personified in Jim Wallis and his Sojourners movementa presidency and the all-out push for an Obama, seems to want to turn the hands of the clock one more time again.