The title of this blog post “Rules for Everyday Rebels” is the working title for the upcoming (shooting for Autumn 2020) book by Rod Dreher. He announced this in a recent blog post. The working subtitle is “Twenty Lessons in Resisting the Cultural Revolution.”

For about the past 5 years or so I have been, as an avocation, learning about Chinese history and culture so this subtitle has particular significance for me. See this Cultural Revolution hyperlink.

Arguably, the most important sentence in the blog post is:

For example, the most important thing I’ve learned from talking to the underground church community in Slovakia is the absolutely critical importance of small, strong communities.

Since about the summer of 1992 I have been on a spiritual journey – doing “research” at each step of the journey. This has been a journey of discipleship – my spiritual growth – but I have also explored how the situation needs to change to create a culture and infrastructure that would nurture discipleship. Here is a summary of what I have learned:

This is what the early (first few hundred years of its history) church did.

This is what happened when the Church was first institutionalized and what happened when the situation worsened.

This is what John Wesley advocated and did.

The book Underground Church: An Example of the Church in Its Most Potent Form describes how they (churches of the Underground Network) see their mission (see page 182):

When Jesus called and sent his followers into the world, he gave them three assignments: community, worship, and mission. All three of these still apply.

They have developed and are developing strategies, plans, infrastructures, and tactics to live out that mission.

Lesslie Newbigin, in his book The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society, presents what I believe to be the deepest and most profound thinking about our present predicament – and I intentionally used that word. He also presents a way forward. He says (on page 227):

‘I am suggesting that the only answer, the only hermeneutic of the gospel, is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it.’

He goes on, in the next chapter “Ministerial Leadership for a Missionary Congregation” to describe the characteristics of the leadership required to develop the envisioned congregations.

I believe that we know what we should be doing and we should be about doing what we know we ought to do – developing small, strong, communities.

13 May 2019