Mission After Christendom by David Smith

I thought I'd throw in some quotes from David Smith's book. It is a "must-read" to discover how to do missions today. Incredibly insightful...

“Every day the church must wake up and ask itself, ‘What kind of day is today?’ for no two days are alike in her history.” P. ix

“It is not easy to live between paradigms at a point when the old model no longer works and the new one has not yet emerged.” P. 6 [this is the prelude to his discourse on liminality—the state between two states as when Israel was in captivity. “It is precisely in the acceptance and embrace of such painful dislocations that we may discover a new word gifted to us by the one who miraculously turns endings into surprise beginnings.” P. 35

The fading missionary paradigm in anachronistic but an attractive view of mission.

“With the end of the modern period in world history has also come the end of modern missions.” P. 5

“…mission model is fatally flawed by the concept of ‘conquering’ for Christ. The question of Jesus, “what does it profit one to gain the whole world and lose one’s soul?’ could be applied to the church; what if the church gained the whole whord and in the process lost its soul?” p. 8

“The church was the center the missions its periphery. We had the model here, the copy over there [in foreign countries] but the center of gravity has shifted.” P. 4

Christopher Columbus model for the past 500 years—Cristobol Colon…lit: ‘Christ-bearing colonizer.’ [This may be from another source]

“The first essential of leadership, the one above all others with regard to mission, is to see the vision of the reign of God being established in these frontier situations, and then to hold that before the church. All else is secondary.” P. 10

“…had the effect of hardening the distinctives between evangelism as an activity designed to make nominal western Christians into real believers and mission as the form of witness required overseas among primitive peoples lacking the blessing of a Christian civilization.” P. 20

“We no longer want you to come and teach us the Bible, we want you to come and read the Bible together with us”—from leader of Qoay people in Argentina p. 58

“As respect for the institutional church has declined reverence for Jesus has grown.” P. 59

“This movement [Christianity] has been deeply infiltrated by the spirit and toods of modernity and it continues to act as one of the leading global apologists for modernity through its publications and mission agencies.” P. 40

“Thanks to terror combined with preaching that the Indians had become Christians…”—Juan de Sepulveda p. 50

“[Peter] is making the painful discover that things he has always regarded as unchanging absolutes were in fact, in the light of Jesus Christ, culturally relevant.” [Acts 10 experience] p. 74

"In crossing cultures, the missionary teacher becomes a learner, the one who is in posession of divine revelation discovers new truth, and he who seeks the salvation of others finds himself converted all over again." p. 78

“God is the object of our faith and the subject of their search.” P. 79

[Quoting aKempis] “When Jesus is with us, all is well, and nothing seems hard but when Jesus is absent, everything is difficult. When Jesus does not speak to the heart, all other comfort is unavailing; but if Jesus speaks but a single world, we are greatly comforted.” P. 103