LITMIR.BIZ

The author's focus and intention for this book was provoked by several stimuli. One is that more than 50 percent of the world's population is under twenty-five years of age, and for the most part not formed by the church. Secondly, in the coffee shop where he hangs out, when his conversation partners learn of his long career as a pastor, they inevitably ask about the church: «What in the world is the church? What is its purpose?» And thirdly, it is provoked by the lament of a very gifted journalist and editor who rejected his strict Christian upbringing and has been in his adult years an avowed agnostic–but who recently, while visiting a monastery in Spain and hearing the monks chant their evening prayers, sensed a longing for what he had forsaken. These three stimuli have inspired this attempt at an alternative narrative to the essence of the church, an attempt to give a definition to an inquirer from square one. This book may not resonate with those who are content with religious Christianity and its familiar institutions. Its timely message is this: the church has got to be a thrilling and purposeful dimension of the good news of Jesus Christ.

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As the Christian church in the West moves further into the post-Christian era a dilemma rises for those thoughtful followers of Jesus Christ who find themselves in venerable, older church institutions that have become forgetful of their reason for being in the purpose of God. Such Christendom church institutions, as Henderson designates them, rather become somewhat idolatrous of their traditions, their sanctuaries, their ecclesiastical accoutrements, not to mention their dependence on a questionable category of persons called clergy. A younger generation, involved in many of these churches, is raising insistent questions about the integrity of so much of this–while at the same time being appreciative of so much that is good.
Henderson's long career as a teaching pastor and mentor to the younger generations help us walk through this dilemma with refreshing insights about purpose (teleology), Kingdom integrity, form, and the disciplines necessary to transform these communities from the underside. He employs the term refounding as indicating something much more profound than renewal–a reclaiming of its original intent in the heart and mind of God.

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With the continual appearance of evidence that the emerging generation (the iGens) is not at all enamored of institutional churches, and is ignoring or forsaking them, it seemed a good time to take a step back, take a deep breath, and take a fresh look at what the church was intended to be and do in the New Testament document. The author spells out the landscape and reviews the profile of recent generations, and then sets about to set forth the church as the communal component of God's new creation in Christ. He engages in some challenges to the traditional understanding of the church, but sets forth a lively proposal in which every participant becomes interactive with the others, hence small fellowships. The younger iGens are into relationships, not institutions. This book portrays the church in relational terms, i.e., a church delivered from captivity to institutions and church professionals, hence a book that is controversial and perhaps a bit «cheeky» . . . but constructively challenging. The title is somewhat highjacked from the phenomenon known as the homebrew computer club, which is made up of six early computer scientists from whose creativity and relationship emerged much of the present computer and internet age.

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In a period of tumultuous transition for the church as it moves out of the Christendom era and into the unknowns of the post-Christian era, it is strange that so little has been written about the church's calling out of the dominion of darkness (Satan) and into the kingdom of Light (or, God's dear Son). The very word ecclesia speaks of a people «called out.» In the New Testament the theme of spiritual warfare is ubiquitous, and yet is relegated to the margins in our present cultural whitewater. In The Church and the Relentless Darkness, Robert Henderson approaches the topic of spiritual warfare directly, and focuses on its manifestation in local Christian communities. Using the Letter to the Ephesian Christians as his base, Henderson portrays the relentless darkness that comes with all satanic subtlety on unsuspecting communities, but he brings with this a message of hope and encouraging disciplines.

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