“The radical church is the fastest-dying church in the world”

Myers, C. (1988) Binding the Strongman Orbis.

DISCIPLESHIP AND FAILURE: “YOU WILL ALL DESERT ME”

At the time, his words could hardly have hit home any harder, I ws still recovering from the painful breakup of my own community, the loss of home and marriage.  I had never expected that the “cross” would take this shape. If readers of this book still feel it is an exercise in imaginative idealism, they should be aware that Mark’s vision is flesh to me, flesh seared and scarred. I have seen business-as-usual rudely disrupted by the kairos of the call, seen the vision of radical discipleshhip community realized.  And more importantly, I have also seen those dreams fade, seen our best attempts to weave a fabric of hope and wholeness unravel, seen good persons bail out.

The radical discipleship movement today is beleaguered and weary. So many of our communities, which struggled so hard to integrate the pastoral and prophetic, the personal and the political, resistance and contemplation, work and recreation, love and justice, are disintegrating.  The powerful centrifugal forces of personal and social alienation tear us apart; the “gravity” exerted by imperial culture’s seductions, deadly mediocrities, and deadly codes of conformity pull our aspirations plummeting down.  Our economic and political efforts are similarly beseiged.  The ability of metropolis to either crush or co-opt movements of dissent seems inexhaustable.