by Adam Clarke The Emerging Network
A crushing blow to individualism.
The church should move from being a therapy session for individuals and become a peculiar people within society... A “people-group” that does not exist outside of culture, but witness to the grander story of God.
The question of the book becomes: How do you move as a church from being therapy to individuals, but translate peopleʼs lives into the biblical narrative to portray and live apart of the body of Christ? This book becomes more than a how-to of preaching, it becomes a life-changing calling for preachers to move their congregations into partakers of the biblical narrative. (Read More)
The Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative, a movement looking at the role of narrative, is retold by Wright to show how North American churches ended up preaching the
individualism of Scripture. The church became a place for individuals to get away from the busyness of their week, the stress of the office - basically, the church became a therapeutic centre of individual needs. It was not a community, but a...
"Help me overcome, help me move past... Help ME."
The body of Christ was now individual body parts all moving to their own individual
needs. The solution became a new message to the people, a movement of sorts that
takes away this individual mentality and moves towards community. After all, in
community can we only help each other.
The movement starts by moving towards a tragedy, the tragedy of the cross. Tragedy
brings enlightenment, understanding, a new narrative. Is that not what the cross
accomplished? A brighter hope, a new horizon, and a new narrative to the lives of those partaking in it?
In the individual context of Scripture, the narrative becomes skewed.
If that is what we are turning from, then what are we being turned to? Well, first we must realize that we are apart of an ongoing story - that starts with creation and will end with Godʼs reign - but we are not there yet. Wright provides three turning points that we need to acknowledge in order to join the story:
[1] Acknowledge the contemporary horizon (worldview) of a congregation as they have been formed by the culture around them
[2] An anchor to move horizontally around the contemporary horizon
[3] Head in a new direction
