Reggie McNeal, Missional Renaissance: Changing the Scorecard for the Church. Jossey-Bass, 2009. 224 pages.
Every few years, the evangelical church seems to go through a sort of mid-life crisis. The world regularly trumpets our irrelevance at best or our hypocrisy at worst. And as we are mocked, we assume our opportunity to gain a hearing for Christ is slipping through our fingers. Our significance is always up for debate.
Missional Renaissance: Changing the Scorecard for the Church by Reggie McNeal was written in a much more hopeful moment in society than now. But then, as now, there were many valid critiques of evangelical churches as insular, self-interested, and out of touch. McNeal attempts to address that irrelevance by setting out a roadmap for change.
The missional movement was “opposed to church-as-usual” and invested in making a meaningful difference in the world. Missional Renaissance is an attempt to begin the definition of what must be embraced in order for “missional” to make lasting change in Christianity (xv). McNeal’s own metaphor is apparent in the subtitle—we need to change the scorecard, because what we celebrate as a win is what we’ll promote and put energy towards. Yet for all the talk of revolution,
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