Missional MapMaking

Alan Roxburgh has a writing project that’s posted on the Allelon website titled Missional MapMaking: The Art of the Missional-Shaped Church.

In chapter one he discusses the assumptions we bring to life - assumptions about what the world is like, who we are, what is of value and importance, how to get along in life, etc. In western cultures we live under the assumptions of what is often called “modernity.” They are assumptions we inherited from the Enlightenment project and the philosophy of René Descartes. You may not know much about the Enlightenment or who René Descartes was, but if you’ve seen a recent job posting (either secular or religious) or if you’ve been to church lately, then you’ve seen the Enlightenment and the philosophy of Descartes in practice.

Does this sound familiar?: Wanted, self-starter who is highly motivated, can multi-task and is seeking to maximize his/her potential in a setting that offers great advancement opportunities. Or have you read “40 Days of Purpose” or “Your Best Life Now”? Whatever you may think of the content of any of those examples, they all share a common way of looking at the questions above and they all answer them from that fundamental understanding of life. Most modern preaching is more of the same, by the way (even those of you who assume you are giving good old fashioned expository/exegetical sermons. No, especially you).

Roxburgh writes:

We’re born into a world and cultures that already have maps. …[F]or us in the West that map has been modernity and that modernity in many ways has profoundly reshaped, even deformed, the Christian imagination in our culture. From birth we’re formed and shaped by the maps of the culture into which we’re born to the point where we assume this map (in our case modernity) simply describes the way the world is. Our cultural map of modernity shapes how we see the world, ourselves, and our relationships. These maps “make sense” because we a live inside their world.

We don’t know how profoundly we have been influenced by the “maps” of the world we’ve been given because this is all we’ve known. As a fish doesn’t notice the water it swims in (until, of course, it is out of it), so we do not fully understand the culture we swim in, the presumptions we make about life. But as Roxburgh says, the map of modernity has, in some cases, deformed our understanding of God, life and the church, even many of the religious expressions of this modern mindset. Roxburgh calls us to become new mapmakers.

[W]e are in a time when the maps of modernity with their promises of management, control, and predictability are no longer sufficient to describe the places where we find ourselves. The rapidity and extent of these changes create disequilibrium, anxiety, confusion and disorientation among people in North American culture, and this means that our maps of modernity again need to be re-imagined. Once more we are required to become mapmakers. In order to move into God’s future, we must assume that the maps we have inherited no longer adequately describe the realities we face. We must release the desire to copy our inherited maps and … learn to listen to the stories of pioneers so that we can make new maps. In this way, we can re-shape the imagination of God’s people.

Check out chapter one of Missional MapMaking here. You can find the Introduction and other chapters here.