WAKING UP IN BABYLON: RECOVERING OUR IDENTITY AND FORMATION

"What are the key challenges to Christian faith and witness in the socio-cultural context in which you expect to live after completing your Regent education? How do you expect to respond to these challenges?" The complex trajectory of our middle-class multicultural late-Western cultural context presents significant challenges to Christian faith and witness, requiring substantial re-visioning of our identity and re-tooling of our practices of formation. Two specific challenges are: a loss of effective missional Christian identity, and the drastic formative power of Western culture. In two specific responses we first propose the biblical story of the exiled Jews in Babylon as a rubric restoring missional identity and meaning for our current situation; and secondly we propose a renewed focus on Christian formation within our church community beginning with refreshed catechesis, baptism and Eucharist which holistically engages Christians individually and together in church communities, in an intentionally counter-culturally formative way appropriate to our time.