Missional Mirage: New Christian West in Bloomington, MN

MISSIONAL MIRAGE explains how 'missional practices' contain the socially fragmenting seeds of modernity and Christian dominance. The stated goal is 'remaking a New Christian West.' Alan Roxburgh quotes Wittgenstein; 'a picture held us captive and it lay in our language and our language repeated it to us inexorably.' Ironically missional language like leadership, mapping, planning and mission keep Christianity captive in a picture of its past ie colonial mission. The Missional Movement, Mission Shaped Church and mainline Christianity are trapped in a picture of cultural superiority where Christ is conquering King. This creates a fragmenting picture of Christian social dominance; an image absent from the example of Christ. Protestantism and its bureaucratic capitalism gave birth to the fragmentation and alienation of modern society. These effects cannot be healed by a Missional Movement trapped in the same language / practices of modernity. In a neotribal society the true enemy of the Gospel. . . is mission itself.