Imaginatively Missional
As Advent moves us toward Christmas, we find ourselves immersed in familiar rhythms: carols, candles, nativity scenes, and Scripture readings proclaiming “unto us a child is born.” It's a season of joyful worship and remembrance. But it’s also an invitation. It’s a summons to reorient our lives and communities around the one at the center …
Back in the late 1900s, Gailyn Van Rheenen published a regular missiology newsletter. In one edition, he recounted the experience of walking into a church in the Philippines only to be confronted with an unsettling reality: it looked just like his church at home. Nearly forty years later, we are still confronting that same unwelcome …
In the rich tapestry of Asia Minor’s religious and cultural milieu, the early church faced a formidable challenge—how to faithfully embody the gospel in a context saturated with temples, gods, and ritualized expressions of devotion. From Ephesos to Sardis, from Pergamon to Philadelphia, every city was a stage for divine pageantry. The architecture, the numismatic …
Continue reading "The Philosophical School as Ecclesial Safeguard"
As Christianity spread across the Roman Empire, it did more than change hearts—it redefined space. The architectural legacy of Roman religion, once dedicated to a pantheon of gods, came under new ownership. The church, as it emerged from the margins, began to repurpose temple space—places previously reserved for empire and cult—and imbued them with new …
Years ago, I visited a church in South Asia. It quickly became evident that the rectangular building where we met—complete with a cross above the entrance, rows of red plastic chairs facing a handcrafted wooden pulpit, a drum set, loudspeakers, microphones and stands, as well as a soundboard—bore a striking resemblance to a Western church …
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