Alan and Eleanor Kreider have done a great job with Worship and Mission after Christendom in providing an account of mission, worship and their connection that is reflective, informed by scholarship but is at the same time really accessible. Discussion of the contents in detail will haveto wait for another time.
A quote on the globalization of the church caught my attention.
Civil authorities may perceive the globalization of the church as subversive. The nation state attempts to constrict the freedom of affinity groups that come between the individual citizen and the nation, particularly if they are transnational. This is what the church of pre-Christendom was and the church of post-Christendom can be. William Cavanaugh rightly notes, "Christianity produces divisions within the state body precisely because it pretends to be a body which transcends state boundaries." We Christians have a prior loyalty and a larger loyalty than the nation state. (p177)
Indeed. One other implication beside the relativisation of the claims of national identity is that the consumer capitalism shares with the nation state an interest in the creation of "the individual"who can more easily be shaped as a consumer if there are no intermediate bodies that might provide an alternative shaping of desires to that offered by advertising.
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