Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: In many church contexts today, "new church" can trigger enthusiasm or defensiveness, evoking missionary energy while also raising fears of fragmentation, consumerism, or ecclesial amnesia.This edited collection refuses to begin from the usual battle lines.Cockayne and Foulger name three polarities that often distort the conversation: the gap between practitioners and theologians, the perceived opposition between inherited and new churches, and the rivalry sometimes assumed between planting and pioneering.Their aim is not to force consensus, but to foster a more truthful and theologically informed exchange.Their central insistence is that theology is not an add-on to starting new churches, because the Church is "theological" in its very being, called into existence by God, ordered by God's self-revelation, and sustained by grace.The Church is not first a set of techniques later seeking doctrinal justification, but a community formed by God, whose practices, mission, and hopes already presuppose claims about God and the world.The editors therefore address two audiences tempted to mistrust one another (practitioners who fear theology slows action and reflective critics wary of novelty and self-deception) and warn against two corresponding pathologies: activism hardened into technique and reflection drifting into detachment.The volume argues that theology must stay close to practice and remain open to theological correction, since new ecclesial ventures can teach the wider Church by stripping away inherited assumptions and making convictions visible.Its four parts and nineteen chapters repeatedly return to basic questions: What is the Church when mission is framed as missio Dei? Who is acting when churches are "planted"?What counts as "success" if the primary agent is the Holy Spirit?How do polity, funding, training systems, and cultural assumptions quietly harden into theological commitments?While missiology, praxis, context, and ecclesiology cannot be neatly separated, the sequence still moves from divine agency through formation and leadership into contextual
Source: Ecclesial Futures
DOI: 10.54195/ef26617
Author: Dejan Aždajić
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7154184181
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