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Awakenings 2019 Topical Forum Ancient Future Panel 2 Rich Villodas, Efrem Smith, Greg Boyd, Jo Anne Lyon, Moderator: Carey Sims

When we talk about the “ancient-future” dynamic of the church, we are talking about much more than surface-level adaptations of worship styles. We are talking about the profound reality that to be part of the church is to be part of something that has a 2000 year old, global history to it. And even that history is grounded in an even deeper tradition of God’s creation and formation of a people called to be a “light to the nations.”
In other words, we neither get to, nor do we have to, just “make it up as we go along!” We are inheritors of a very great and diverse Christian tradition that provides tremendous wisdom and rich resources for our journey. At the same time, we face issues and challenges of ever-increasing complexity. That complexity is cultural as well as theological. How exactly we access the great tradition of the church, across its many iterations and expressions, and seek to apply that learning to our contemporary realities is an enormous task! Yet if we are wise, we receive that task as an opportunity to bring us closer to one another rather than an occasion to keep to ourselves.
In all this, these forums are meant to give us an opportunity to imagine together what it might mean to pursue a socially engaged orthodoxy, nurtured by its rootedness in a diverse, yet shared Christian history.