Mission of church in an emerging society

In his book “Mandate to Difference” Walter Brueggmann uses Isaiah 56 as a basis for thinking about the mission of the church in emerging society. I’d like to summarize the 5 points he makes about the text.

1. The EXILE as the true character and venue of our humanness is an alternative to the dominant imagination that we live in a centred, coherent, world in which we can establish security on our own terms. The claim of success and security, so powerful among us causes us not to notice the cast out and often not to acknowledge our own displacement or anxiety about coming displacement.
2. OPENNESS TO FOREIGNERS, that is, to welcome others who are not like us is a radical alternative to the ideology of conformity tht takes those not like ourselves to be dangerous and unacceptable deviants.
3. The MEMORY OF THE EXODUS that leads to neighbourly generosity is the primary work of a covenantal society. The memory in practice issues in a subordination of the economy to the social fabric with focal attention to the marginalised who are without social access, social power or social advocacy. The covenant is an assertion of interdependence and an institution of mutuality tht flies in the face of acquisitiveness tht regards everyone else as a competitor for the same commodity or as a threat to myself-securing.
4. The VISIBLE PRACTICE OF SABBATH REST that disengages from the pursuit of commodity is an insistent assertion about the nature of being human. The paue for receptivity of holy gifts that are inscrutably given is a break in the rigor of production and consumption.
5. The PRACTICE OF PRAYER that binds us in love to God and to neighbour beyond our small claim is the resolve to live life on terms other than our own. This is against conventional tribalism that teaches us to yield is to lose.