By Conrad Kanagy — writer of the guide sequence “A Church Dismantled — A Kingdom Restored”
In his extensively acclaimed four-book sequence “A Church Dismantled—A Kingdom Restored,” launched late final yr, the sociologist of faith and long-time pastor Conrad L. Kanagy, means that God’s Spirit is dismantling the socially constructed Western church. This sequence has shortly gained traction amongst readers of all Christian religion traditions and those that have left the church, been wounded by the church, and are marginalized throughout the church.
Kanagy’s thesis that God is eradicating mantles or boundaries which have coated up the “Jesus of the Gospels” has additionally confronted resistance, significantly amongst these in additional fundamentalist evangelical streams. “Mystics and mainliners have been fertile soil for this Gospel message of the required loss of life and resurrection of the institutionalized church,” says the writer.
In his endorsement of the primary guide within the sequence, Professor Walter Brueggemann notes: “Conrad Kanagy is ready to say issues and cross many boundaries not doable in a extra sober mode. Consequently, he is ready to juxtapose odd companions, push the extremities of publicity, and do a broad sweep of scripture. The subtext of his writing is the scriptural account whereby the biblical neighborhood of religion, in its distortion and obduracy, was dismantled as a way to make means for an genuine neighborhood of mission. Kanagy’s topic is the church, in all of its failure and in all its risk, ruled by the Spirit of God. Those that care in regards to the church and its witness will likely be nourished and guided by this clever guide.”
Kanagy is at present writing the primary licensed biography of Walter Brueggemann, Professor Emeritus of Columbia Theological Seminary and lengthy generally known as the main Outdated Testomony theologian and scholar of the previous a number of a long time.
“I’m curious about Walter’s story as a sociologist who first got here to his work fifteen years in the past whereas conducting a analysis challenge inside my very own denomination–Mennonite Church USA. Whereas studying Brueggemann and utilizing the guide of Jeremiah as a body for my writing, I keep in mind considering, ‘Maybe God’s Spirit is dismantling the church as a result of now we have so failed God’s mission to the world that God so cherished and so loves nonetheless.’ And nothing I’ve seen within the final fifteen years has modified my sense that that is what God is as much as!”
Documenting and deciphering Walter’s story is a part of Kanagy’s ongoing seek for solutions about what God is as much as within the church, the world, and God’s Kingdom. His hope is to increase and amplify Walter’s prophetic voice and creativeness for a 21st-century church that Kanagy says “desperately wants a prophetic phrase grounded in an evangelical piety that’s neither formed by the false righteousness of an ‘orthodox-ish’ proper nor lodging to the dominant tradition and an abandonment of Jesus by the novel left.”
The Rev. Dr. Conrad Kanagy is a Professor of Sociology at Elizabethtown Faculty, Elizabethtown, PA. The Younger Heart for Anabaptist and Pietist Research of Elizabethtown Faculty has named Kanagy their Summer time 2022 Fellow. Kanagy expects the guide to be launched in Spring 2023. To subscribe to Kanagy’s weblog, to order the “Church Dismantled” guide sequence, and to register for an April 1 webinar that features a recorded interview with Walter Brueggemann, go to aChurchDismantled.com.
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Contact:
Conrad L. Kanagy
A Church Dismantled
717-669-0074
[email protected]
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on this article are these of the authors and don’t essentially replicate the official coverage or place of Faith Information Service or Faith Information Basis.