Church Planting FuelBox

One of the striking things about Murray’s book is his argument that Christianity moved form the margins to the centre in fourth century
Rome.
Constantine was drawn to Christianity’s ethical monotheism and its seeming ability to bring unity across the Empire. Adopting it as the official religion of the Empire, Christianity was no longer the movement from the margins that had been the hallmark of its success, but was now in the centre of both power and control.
Murray argues that this shift effectively robbed Christianity of its ability to be a movement.

The shift to the centre brought about a number of changes. Congregations and buildings grew in size and in number. The clerical caste emerged with its enhanced status, power and wealth. A hierarchy appeared among the clergy that seemed to model that of the Roam Empire. The clergy took over more and more of the services reducing the laity to an almost entirely passive position. The move to clerical performance bought about the dominance of monologue preaching and the practice of church discipline.
Mission was seriously affected as the church was more concerned with protecting the institution than practicing evangelism. This reduced the roles of leadership to pastors and teachers, as evangelists weren’t needed and apostles and prophets were dangerous because they rocked the boat. And finally the gap between church and culture was highly diminished because of its high level of influence.

Yet
Murray argues there were always small groups of people protesting from the margins.
Murray draws attention to the Donatists, the Lollards, the Waldensians and the Anabaptists as key examples of these voices from the margins who questioned the status quo. Their reading of the Bible caused them to be suspicious of how the scriptures were being interpreted and they observed that a number of the church’s beliefs and practices were at odds with what they were reading. This of course drew persecution from the church as it sought to protect its power and position.

Murray argues that this is the stream that we need to be coming from if we are to survive in a Post  Christendom world. We can’t just go back and draw on the way the church operated before the Christendom era because our culture is not the same as theirs. But we can follow on the tradition of those who have gone before us and operate from the margins. He argues for simple church that recovers friendship, as our relational paradigm, that eats together and laughs together. He asks us to imagine a community stirred by poets and storytellers, to imagine the church as a monastic missionary order, and to imagine churches as safe places to take risks. He argues that in a world that is sick of institutional Christianity, Jesus still commands interest and respect. Our priority, says Murray, is to rediscover how to tell the story of Jesus, how to present Him as a friend to sinners, good news to the poor, defender of the powerless, reconciler of communities, pioneer of a new age, freedom fighter, breaker of chains, liberator and peacemaker, the one who unmasks systems of oppression, identifies with the vulnerable and brings hope. To do that, he says, we need to encounter Jesus afresh ourselves.