Borderland Churches: A Congregation's Introduction to Missional Living

by Gary Nelson

Borderland Churches is a call to embrace the pluralistic, post Christian and postmodern culture with a sense of opportunity and hope. The author uses the image of the church crossing over into an "in -between time", a place where faith is lived outside the walls of the church engaging the community in incarnational ways. To live in that "precarious but exhilarating place where faith and other faiths and no faith meet." Only individuals and congregations that accept this new reality will be able to carry on Christian ministry in this new cultural situation. A TCP Leadership Series title.

166 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 2008

Reviews

[James Boyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is fantastic. It explores the possibilities that come with an incarnational and outward focused church- seeking the good of the community through transformational discipleship from a Canadian context. The idea of "borderlands" refers to moving from churchy activities in our religious buildings to engaging with the community in long-term, faithful, and positive ways that point to our good and transformational King. I really enjoyed and have been inspired with new ideas about how we can be present and creatively seeking what God is doing around us.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

A helpful look at the church within the Canadian context. Nelson offers some great resources into neighbourhood analysis in the appendices.

[Robert D. Cornwall · Rating 5 out of 5]

We live and work and have our being in a very different world than that of our parents or grand parents. You can make that claim whether you are 18, 35, 50, or maybe even 60. The fact is that the world has changed and the place of Christianity and the church has diminished. We hear a lot about theocratic pretensions, but by and large those voices, while loud, are rather small in number. Gary Nelson writes from a Canadian context, where secularization is much further along than in the United States. There, more than here, religion is private. The number of those claiming no religion, while growing in the US, hasn’t reached a national number of 16% as in Canada. But what is happening there is quickly moving south. With this growing marginalization of the church, old paradigms of church life and church growth must change.

The title of the book is key. It is about missional living, about the church engaging the culture that surrounds it. The image of the borderland helps give life to this new understanding of church. Borderlands tend to be wild and untamed. Borderland areas are often inconvenient and uncomfortable. For the church to live out its mission in the borderlands, and that is where most of our churches now sit, we will have to understand that the mission field isn’t over there, it’s in our back yard. Borderland ministries, to be successful, must move from a “come to” understanding, that is, a “build it and they’ll come,” to a “go to” one. The challenge is that while missionary work my sound romantic, for us to engage in it requires a great deal of willingness to embrace radical change.

“Missionary life is full of inconvenience and discomfort. It will require that we work outside ourselves. It will require that we substitute ‘that which is comfortable to us’ for ‘that which will be comfortable for you’” (p. 5).


If we are to become a missional church, which many churches are talking about, we must risk ourselves in embracing the community around us. We must engage it and impact it. And the leaders of such churches must thrive in borderland situations. That is, they must be willing to go out where the people are present, rather than stay inside the safety of the faith community.

To continue reading click -- http://www.bobcornwall.com/2009/01/bo...

[Daunavan Buyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book on mission, specifically in the Canadian context.

[Jared Braun · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book gave a very good challenge to the church of today to get engaged in missional living. Coming from a Canadian perspective made it even more real for me.