By John Cole

What sort of World?

Important clues were contained in Chapter One.

But there are wider issues about how western European society is changing.

These relate to cultures and patterns of thought.

Churches still tend to look at the post-modern scene through 'modernist' eyes.

We want 'modernist' solutions, comprehensive plans, re-organisation of structures, integrated strategies that will 'turn the tide' - or else we want to do battle with this new 'many-headed Hydra' in the forlorn hope that we can create a complete 'counter-culture' in its place.

Yet Christians must face the tension. We are not called to be wholly counter-cultural, although what we are and what we aspire to will always tend to upend cultures when it connects with them.

We are called to be 'in the world but not of the world' - 'engaged' as well as 'distinctive'.

In Western Europe there are far more varieties of 'world', far more cultures, than any one form of church can interact with.  For the modernist and pre-modernist institutions which are our inherited denominations, the task is well nigh hopeless.

Hence we must understand our world (or at least the particular bits we are closest to), and then God's mission in it, before we can begin to recognise the 'church' that will come about as we get involved in that mission.