The air is abuzz with the future. The “coming church” and the “emerging church” are everything. The talk is all of new ways of “doing church” through reinventing, revising, innovating, borrowing, mixing, and experimenting. Everything now has to be “intentional” and “on-purpose.” Ministers are not longer theological authorities but the “chief story-tellers” and “facilitators of a joint spiritual journey.” “Dysfunctional churches” that are not “attuned to the world” are “reinvented for the present age” in a myriad of “intentional” ways, all with their “value propositions” clearly specified and their “measurable outcomes” clarified in advance. Music and worship services are designed for audiences and congregations were “specialized niches on music sales charts” or the newly discovered fruit of demographic research. . . . Is the church ours to reinvent, or is it God’s?
Os Guinness, Prophetic Untimeliness: A Challenge to the Idol of Relevance. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 64.