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    God Unbound: Wisdom from Galatians for the Anxious Church
    God Unbound: Wisdom from Galatians for the Anxious Church
    God Unbound: Wisdom from Galatians for the Anxious Church
    Ebook107 pages1 hour

    God Unbound: Wisdom from Galatians for the Anxious Church

    By Elaine Heath

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    About this ebook

    What does it mean to move beyond the boundaries of what we believe?

    The apostle Paul led the Galatians through a massive cultural shift in which they had to radically expand their ideas of who God is, who they were, and God's mission for the church. He was able to lead them through this time of great change because of his encounter with the risen Christ on the Damascus road, an experience in which his view of God was completely upended.

    Today Christianity is undergoing a cultural shift just as challenging as the situation confronting Paul and the Galatians. As many churches decline, congregations and pastors feel uncertain and anxious about how to continue their mission of making disciples of Jesus Christ.

    Elaine Heath extends an invitation to broaden our view of God by moving beyond the walls of buildings and programs to become a more diverse church than we have ever imagined. While deeply honoring tradition, she calls the church to boldly follow the Holy Spirit's leadership into the future.

    Ideal for a 6- to 9-week small-group study.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUpper Room Books
    Release dateJul 1, 2016
    ISBN9780835815857
    God Unbound: Wisdom from Galatians for the Anxious Church
    Author

    Elaine Heath

    Elaine A. Heath is the dean of Duke Divinity School. Before that, she was McCreless Professor of Evangelism at the Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University. An ordained elder in The United Methodist Church, she has served as a pastor in local churches as well as in academia. Elaine is the author of several books and contributor to numerous books by multiple authors. She is cofounder of the Missional Wisdom Foundation (www.missionalwisdom.com), a nonprofit that administers a national network of regional hubs of missional learning communities. These communities include new monastic houses, social enterprise, missionally repurposed church spaces, and training programs in missional theology, spiritual formation, and leadership development for a missional church.

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      Book preview

      God Unbound - Elaine Heath

      PRAISE FOR GOD UNBOUND

      Can you imagine a God who wants to bless all the families of the earth? A God who is greater than our anxious fears? A God who is known most completely in the tradition behind our tradition—in the risen Christ, who will never abandon us? In God Unbound, Elaine Heath contemplates the streams of scripture, ecclesiology, family systems, and spiritual practice in the call for a church that is at once mystical and missional. The result is a holy fire, a pearl of great price, an altar call. The church needs this word in the present moment.

      —KEN CARTER

      Resident Bishop, Florida Area

      The United Methodist Church

      Rare is the theologian who can be both clear-eyed about the mess the church is in and genuinely inspiring about what God can yet do. Elaine Heath does both beautifully. She is one of the most important voices we have in Methodism and indeed in the church universal. When new communities of Jesus’ followers emerge from the ruins of Christendom, they’ll have Heath’s work in hand, lovingly dog-eared and underlined.

      —JASON BYASSEE

      Butler Chair in Homiletics and Biblical Hermeneutics

      Vancouver School of Theology

      Elaine Heath provides ancient wisdom for an anxious church. God Unbound will be enormously helpful to those innovating new forms of church and mission and to those in more traditional settings struggling to understand them.

      —GRAHAM HORSLEY

      Connexional Fresh Expressions Missioner

      British Conference of the Methodist Church

      GOD UNBOUND

      WISDOM FROM GALATIANS FOR THE ANXIOUS CHURCH

      Copyright © 2016 by Elaine A. Heath

      All rights reserved.

      No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. For information, write Upper Room Books, 1908 Grand Avenue, Nashville, TN 37212.

      Upper Room Books website: books.upperroom.org

      Upper Room®, Upper Room Books®, and design logos are trademarks owned by The Upper Room®, Nashville, Tennessee. All rights reserved.

      At the time of publication all website references in this book were valid. However, due to the fluid nature of the Internet some addresses may have changed or the content may not longer be relevant.

      Scripture quotations not otherwise identified are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible © 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

      Cover: Bruce Gore, Gorestudio.inc

      Cover illustration: Shutterstock Images

      LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

      Names: Heath, Elaine A., 1954– author.

      Title: God unbound : wisdom from Galatians for the anxious church /

      Elaine A.

      Heath.

      Description: Nashville : Upper Room Books, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2016005204| ISBN 9780835815833 (print) | ISBN 9780835815840 (mobi) | ISBN 9780835815857 (epub)

      Subjects: LCSH: Bible. Galatians—Criticism, interpretation, etc.

      Classification: LCC BS2685.52 .H43 2016 | DDC 227/.406—dc23

      LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016005204

      For

      Reverend Ceciliah Igweta and Reverend Jacob Keega, my beloved friends and colleagues who daily help the church live into Ubuntu wisdom:

      I am because we are; we are because I am.

      CONTENTS

      INTRODUCTION

      An Unexpected Problem with Paul

      ONE

      Loving the Tradition behind the Tradition

      TWO

      Opening Ourselves to God

      THREE

      Authority, Discernment, Call

      FOUR

      When Systems Change

      FIVE

      Responding to Anxiety in the System

      SIX

      Guided by the Spirit

      SEVEN

      Fulfilling the Law of Christ

      EPILOGUE

      A Letter to the Church

      NOTES

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      INTRODUCTION

      An Unexpected Problem with Paul

      I HAVE NEVER BEEN a traditionalist in the the way that most church people understand the word. I have spent the past three decades urging the church to get out of its buildings and into the world. The ancient Celtic monks serve as my heroes because they set out to sea in small boats with neither paddle nor sail, trusting the Wild Goose to guide them along.¹ Wherever they landed became their new home, a place where they created new, gospel-bearing, culturally relevant traditions. I have written about reclaiming the wisdom of the mystics, saints, and martyrs, in part, because they teach us to detach from our death grip on traditions that have taken the place of God.²

      In my work I have exhorted the church to move away from staid traditionalism into dynamic, spiritually deep yet nimble expressions of church—the kind that twentieth-century spiritual giants Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Rahner, Thomas Merton, and Henri Nouwen claimed will be necessary for the church to exist in the decades ahead.³ Bonhoeffer referred to the church of the future as a new kind of monasticism that enfleshes the Sermon on the Mount.

      With these prophets and others I believe we must now take up the gospel-shaped movement of Jesus. We must now live into a new kind of monasticism, one without walls or cloister, one that has little in common with the old monasticism as Bonhoeffer said, one that finds solidarity with the least of these and is accessible to and largely led by laypeople.

      A broad grassroots movement is rising—global and God-breathed. It looks much more like original Methodism (in many ways a lay monastic movement) than what passes for church today. It is imperative that the institutional church that is collapsing beneath bureaucratic top heaviness, clergy-centric practice, and ecclesiastic loss of soul live forward into the original vision of Jesus. Indeed, the gospel-shaped church is the only kind that will birth Jesus-followers in the years ahead. What I see emerging in myriad ways and places is precisely that—a gospel-shaped movement.

      This conviction drives more than my research, writing, and teaching. During the past several years my husband and I have chosen to live in intentional Christian community, taking up new monastic rhythms of prayer, hospitality, and justice. I have worked with friends and students to plant diverse experimental communities that serve as contextual laboratories for on-the-ground learning.⁴ As more and more people developed an interest in our Missional Wisdom communities, we created training opportunities for them. Whether clergy or laity, increasing numbers of people within the church feel called to develop faith communities beyond the walls of the church. They serve as emerging leaders of what God is sprouting from the cracks in the crumbling foundation of church as we’ve known it.

      The incubation, hatching, and flowering of many missional, new-monastic learning initiatives has filled the past decade.⁵ These initiatives help the church move beyond its fearful, clutching, backward-looking stuckness, a malady that the anxious most often describe as "holding on

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