Author Archives: Alan Roxburgh
Reclaiming the Commons: What it is and Why it’s Important.
An understanding that all of creation is God’s shapes Scripture. There is a deep, fundamental covenant that human beings hold the creation as a gift for all and ensure that every human being is cared for with dignity and honor. This is about the common good. As stated in the Jeremiah passage, it is part of the vocation of God’s people to seek the welfare of the city in which we abide. Connected to this basic framing of Christian vocation is the critical question of how it can be practiced. At one level the challenges confronting Western societies are immense...
Book Review: ‘An Other Kingdom’ by Block, Brueggemann and McKnight
Reading An Other Kingdom takes me back to Augustine’s task. In its pages we read an important attempt to name the maladies of our time when faced with the ending of a certain Western narrative and the desperate need for an alternative imagination. In this sense it is an important book written with urgency. Like a tract it deconstructs the malaise of our time and offers an imagination for the reconstitution of social and cultural life in the West. It is to be applauded. Its proposals are important; they need to be taken seriously by any Christian desiring to faithfully live out the Gospel in these times; however, it misses the essential imagination that framed Augustine’s project and directed his desires.
Book Review: ‘Inventing the Individual’ by Larry Siedentop
Review of Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Milton Keynes; UK: Penguin Random House, 2015)
First published in 2014 this is a must read for anyone committed to addressing Newbigin’s question about a missionary engagement with the late, modern West, especially its North Atlantic form. True confession - this book reads like a good thriller...
Book Review: The Vanishing Neighbor – The Transformation of American Community Culture by Marc J. Dunkelman
Wherever I speak, or people ask about my writing, [2] about the call of churches to join with the God who is out ahead of us in our neighborhoods and communities the same basic question is inevitably asked: Why bother with neighborhoods these...
Read more
Book Review: Culture and the Death of God by Terry Eagleton
Terry Eagleton’s Culture and the Death of God is a dense tour-de-force that launches one through the ways modernity, in its multiple forms, has sought to frame all of life without reference to God. More than a decade ago the...
Read more
Practices of a Missional People
Alan begins his keynote by affirming God’s creative engagement in our world of destructive social patterns, brokenness and oppression...
Rapid Response
Kyle Small – Rapid Response to Practices of a Missional People by Alan J Roxburgh
Rapid Response to ‘Are We Post-Community’ by Ash Barker
It is with appreciation that I read this article asking a tantalizing, perhaps rhetorical question: ‘Are we post-community?’ While I don’t believe this is the case (the devil is in the question of what is meant by ‘community’). Barker is...
Read more
Joining God in the Neighborhood – How Do You Do That?
I was recently attending a meeting sponsored by TMN (The Missional Network) listening to a lecture about the nature of incarnational life and Christian mission. The speaker was pointing out that the God we confess in the Trinity is One...
Read more
Practices of Christian Life – Forming and Performing a Culture
Introduction The Missional Network’s convictions are formed out of an ongoing engagement with a question posited by Lesslie Newbigin over thirty years ago: What is the nature of a missionary encounter with the late modern culture that shapes the West?[1]...
Read more