Church Without Walls: Moving Beyond Traditional Boundaries - Softcover

THE POPULAR DEFINITION OF CHURCH PUTS TOO MANY ESSENTIAL FUNCTONS OF THE BODY OUTSIDE THE DEFINITION, AND THEREFORE OUTSIDE THE CHURCH. By habit, the church has come to mean a place. A place where we congregate, a place where we build up believers. But as long as that’s our whole understanding of church, we miss one of our primary functions as the people of God: being out in the world for the sake of the lost. “The sad reality is that going to the lost and living Christlike lives among them is not in our ecclesiology,” says author Jim Petersen. Throughout its history, the church has pushed for institutionalism in an effort to preserve the purity of the gospel. As a result, we’ve evolved into congregations that meet inside the walls of a building-rather than vital communities that live among the lost. In Church Without Walls, Jim Petersen offers an exciting definition of the church that pushes beyond the too-small boundaries we’ve inherited from the past. The first-century Christians had to sort out Jesus from Judaism in order to become a people for all nations. Today, we have to sort out Jesus from our religious traditions in order to make Him available to our nation. That’s the challenge we face: Will we be the church without walls, communicating a gospel free of traditional and cultural trappings? Or will we continue to reproduce our forms and structures, hiding the essence of the gospel within?

JIM PETERSEN is an associate to the general director of The Navigators. In 1963 the Petersen's pioneered The Navigator ministry in Brazil. They began with university students and then followed them as they started families and moved into their careers. This, in time, expended the ministry into a movement across Brazil. In 1973 Jim began to recruit and coach missionary teams for other Latin American countries. From 1986 to 2000, he served as a vice president on the International Executive Team of The Navigators. In those years, he coached ministry teams in the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Africa as well as in Latin America. Through living and ministering in many cultures, Jim has acquired a wealth of experience in reaching and discipling people who are normally outside the Christian context. He shares what he has learned in his books Living Proof, Church Without Walls, Lifestyle Discipleship, The Insider and Mor e Than Me. (all Navpress). Jim and his wife, Marge, have raised four children and live in Colorado Springs.