If Christianity isn’t the quest for (or defense of) the perfect belief system (”the church of the last detail”), then what’s left? In the emerging culture, I believe it will be “Christianity as a way of life,” or “Christianity as a path of spiritual formation.”

The switch suggests a change in the questions people are asking. Instead of “How can I be right in my belief so I can go to heaven?” the new question seems to be, “How can we live life to the full so God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven?”

In this setting, preaching both loses and gains status. Instead of an exercise in transferring information so that people have a coherent, well-formed “worldview” (often an upbeat name for “systematic theology”), preaching in the emerging culture aims at inspiring transformation. It is in a sense demoted from the center of public worship, bookended by bumper music. It steps down from its pedestal to join singing, the Lord’s Supper, prayer, silence, and recitation as one formative ritual or practice among many.

This apparent demotion can actually be a promotion: preaching becomes less and less a well-reasoned argument, and more and more a shared practice among preacher and hearers, in which the Word runs among us like rivulets across a meadow after rain, nourishing fresh green life to spring up. The preacher becomes the leader of a kind of group meditation, less scholar and more sage, less lecturer and more poet, prophet, priest.

…the church seeks to build a kind of miraculous community of virtue, a community not based on race, culture, status, wealth, or even religious background, but rather a community convened in the Spirit of Jesus Christ. Who else is building community in this world of expanding publics and self-interested individuals? The church is, in more and more places, the only community-builder left in town. Sadly, too many churches function more like publics, sucking people out of their neighborhoods into church activities that isolate believer from neighbor and frustrate Jesus’ prayer that his followers would remain in the world.

So, this quest for community challenges us not to seek community as a commodity, but rather to pursue love (which is patient, kind, not rude, etc.) as a practice, which yields community as a byproduct. We’re working against a lot in the quest—not only our native selfishness and surliness, but also massive systemic problems, like these:

1. Our dependence on automobiles which isolate us in little glass and metal boxes, transporting us from the glass and concrete boxes of our workplaces, shopping malls, and church buildings to the glass and gypsum boxes of our homes, where we watch the world happen in the plastic and silicon boxes we call TV sets and computer screens. This auto-dependency turns neighborhoods into bedroom communities (an oxymoron), so we sleep, not in communities, but in housing developments. Front porches are gone; back decks have replaced them. Nobody walks down the streets anymore, or if they do, they’re too preoccupied on their cell phones to wave and say hi to a neighbor, much less slow down and sit a spell.

2. Our manic pace of life that wants community, but fast, like French fries, and without the grease.

3. Our transience, which means right about the time we, against all odds, get close to a circle of friends, half of them will up and move away.

I was once talking with Dallas Willard about Islam. He dropped this little thought virus: “Remember, Brian, in a pluralistic world, a religion is valued by the benefits it brings to its non-adherents.” The virus has taken hold in my thinking, bringing to mind sayings of our Lord, like “the birds of the air” nesting in the branches of the kingdom of God, people seeing the light of our good deeds and “glorifying your Father in heaven,” “by their fruits you will know them.”

How different is this missional approach to the “rhetoric of exclusion” that worked so well in modernity: “There are blessings to being on the inside. You’re on the outside and so can’t enjoy them. Want to be a blessed insider like us?”

In contrast, missional Christianity says, “God is expressing his love to all outsiders through our acts of kindness and service. You’re invited to leave your life of accumulation and competition and self-centeredness to join us in this mission of love, blessing, and peace. Want to join in the mission?”