Tag Archives: Hunter

Faithful Presence: Hunter, Fitch and Being Church

In his significant, ironically entitled work, To Change the World, James Davison Hunter offers the following diagnosis of the current cultural moment in which the church finds itself in the United States:

“The problem for Christians—to restate the broader issue once more—is not that their faith is weak or inadequate.  In contemporary America, Christians have faith in God and, by and large, they believe and hold fast to the central truths of the Christian tradition.  But while they have faith, they have also been formed by the larger post-Christian culture, a culture whose habits of life less and less resemble anything like the vision of human flourishing provided by the life of Christ and witness of scripture.  The problem, in other words, is that Christians have not been formed ‘in all wisdom’ that they might rise to the demands of faithfulness in such a time as ours, ‘bearing fruit in every good work.’”1 Continue reading Faithful Presence: Hunter, Fitch and Being Church

  1. James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 227.

James Davison Hunter on “the Central Ministry of the Church”

“Beyond the worship of God and the proclamation of his word, the central ministry of the church is one of formation; of making disciples.  Making disciples, however, is not just one more program—it is not Sunday School, a Wednesday night prayer meeting, or a new book one must read.  Formation is about learning to live the alternative reality of the kingdom of God within the present world order faithfully.  Formation, then, is fundamentally about changing lives. Continue reading James Davison Hunter on “the Central Ministry of the Church”