Nomad, Christian Community, Mission and the Future of the Church.

Welcome back to Nomad podcast. We're a group of friends in Nottingham, England, who are pondering community,

mission, and the future of the church. This month, we're joined by Stuart Murray, who will be guiding

our thinking in the area of mission in post-Christendom. So there you go, another 40 minutes or so

of distraction, courtesy of Nomad Podcast. podcast.

Delighted to welcome on this month's podcast, Stuart Murray, who is the chair of the Anna Baptist Network in the UK and also oversees a urban church planting network.

Stuart is also the author of numerous books, including one entitled Post-Christendom.

And it's that subject that we hope to explore with Stuart over the next few minutes.

Stuart, welcome to the show.

Thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you.

First of all, could you tell us what post-Christendom is and perhaps what

Christendom is to start with? Yes, post-cristened is one of the many words that begin with

post that sociologists and miscellologists use to describe our current situation. And the post words

all point backwards to something that used to be but is beginning to fade.

So it's one of these transitional words that suggests that we're not quite sure where we're going,

but we certainly aren't where we used to be.

So to understand post-Christendom, we do need some understanding of what Christendom was.

And essentially it was a rather long period in the history of European Christianity, which you can trace back to about the fourth century, when the church moved in from the margins to the centre, became part of the establishments, forged an alliance with First Empire and then the emerging nation states,

and became caught up in the use of power and wealth and, sadly, violence as well.

Forming a Christian civilization that meant that for many centuries to be European was assumed in almost all cases to be Christian.

So a Christianized culture, a culture which was shaped by the Christian story,

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