The Sky is Falling
Andrew has posted this little review of Alan Roxburgh latest book:
The Sky is Falling:
I posted this review on Alan Roxburgh’s book a couple of weeks back on the Amazon site seeing no one else had…Alan Roxburgh is a pastor, teacher, writer, mentor and intellectual. He has had various professorships in distinguished academies and seminaries and currently teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary and has been engaged in research on the connection between the Gospel and Western culture for much of three decades. Roxburgh travels widely through much of the West and brings a genuine global perspective. He is the author of titles including Reaching a New Generation (1993), Crossing the Bridge: Leadership in a Time of Change (2000), Leadership, Liminality and the Missionary Congregation (1998), Missional Leadership: Equipping your church to serve a changing world (2006) and now The Sky is Falling: Leaders Lost in Transition. He has co-authored and contributed in many other publications.
Roxburgh is ignored at our peril and in The Sky is Falling book he traces the seeds of the Emergent and Missional Conversations and where they could lead. In many senses this is building upon his previous publications however this book contains an important addition. Roxburgh imagines how those inside church systems and those who have left for new endeavors can help each other.
The Sky is Falling opens an imagination for new possibilities through the idea of local missional networks under something like an abbot. The Sky is Falling develops the possibilities of this cultural moment through unpacking what occurs in and through communitas and liminality. This is very helpful territory to any leader who is struggling in a church or denominational structure or who has left theses structures for new horizons. It helps explain some of what and why this occurs and the possibilities for missional imagination because of and in spite of these systems. It isn’t a long book but what Roxburgh covers in 150 pages could have saved me about 50 other Missional and Emergent books worth of time and money!