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Roxburgh, Alan J., and Robinson Martin. 2018. 

Practices for the Refounding  
of God’s People: The Missional 
Challenge of the West. 

New York: Church Publishing.

ISBN: 978-0-8192-3384-4

Reviewed by Christopher B. James
University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, Dubuque, IA 
cjames@dbq.edu

Discovering the future of church in the West calls for a jour-
ney of refounding—not tinkering around with efforts at reforma-
tion, renewal or revitalization, or so Alan Roxburgh and Martin 
Robinson assert in their first co-authored book. Roxburgh has 
been writing, speaking and consulting since he contributed to 
the seminal Missional Church in 1998. Robinson is principal of 
ForMission College in Birmingham, England. The two have been 
collaborating for several years as lead editors of the online Journal 
of Missional Practice. 

This book offers a serious, fresh, and promising engagement 
with Newbigin’s enduring question: Can the West be converted? 
While answering “yes,” the book paints the situation as much more 
dire than the gloss typically found in ministry titles. Warning 



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against the reflex to direct missional energies toward fixing the 
church to make it work in the world as it is, they invite readers to 
see the missional challenge as grappling with the unviable nature 
of the modern West. They propose the vocation of the Church in 
the midst of the unraveling of the West is to join with God in the 
refounding of an unmoored society. 

Roxburgh and Robinson identify the heart of the problem 
as Modernity’s wager—the bet that life and society could flourish 
without God. While modernity laudably yielded scientific prog-
ress and democracy, there is a growing awareness that the modern 
West is coming apart at all its seams—economically, culturally, 
socially, and politically.

How did we get here? With an impressive range of citations 
from sociologists, economists, and philosophers, the first five 
chapters offer a retrospective. Chapters 1 to 3 chart the emergence, 
ascent, and crisis of the modern West. Contradicting the secular-
ization thesis, these chapters insist that “the modern is not a radi-
cal rejection of the West’s Christian past, but a transformation of 
the location of its meaning an identity . . . a migration of the sacred 
from Christian structures into the state, the economy, and the Self ” 
(30). With the elevation of the state and individual, the mediating 
institutions that constituted social life and made human flourish-
ing possible withered. God, meanwhile, did not disappear but was 
rendered useful, an asset to the individual’s self-actualization and 
the nation-state’s legitimation. 

Chapter 4 explores the signs of unrest and hope for transfor-
mation that bubbled up in the 1960s—but which were ultimately 
assimilated into a standard feature of West, the quest for self-
actualization. Chapter 5 asks “Where were the churches?” during 
the twentieth century, concluding that in myriad ways the Western 
church’s responses remained locked inside of modernity’s wager, 
anxiously searching for ways to fix the church and make them rel-
evant within a world that had made God a useful tool for the Self. 

In framing the nature of the challenge facing God’s people, 
chapter 6 exposes the historical break Modernity represents in its 
formation of society apart from some sacred frame. Individuals, 



Christopher B. James—Practices for the Refounding of God’s People 

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the state and the market are now seen as the primary agents in 
the world. In chapter 7, lessons are drawn from the reflections of 
a leading Occupy activist who concludes that real revolution re-
quires divine intervention. This intuition of a transcendent other is 
widespread in the draw of spirituality, and it is among these people, 
drop-outs from formal churches, Roxburgh and Robinson suggest, 
that God’s people ought to attend to the possibility of refounding. 

Chapter 8 critiques metaphors commonly used understand 
the church’s situation—exile, resident alien, diaspora—and pro-
poses journey, like that unknown trek of Abram and Sarai, as a 
more fruitful source of imagination. In addition to unraveling—
the primary metaphor they use to describe what is happening to 
the West—the book evocatively describes the evidence of God’s 
agency as fermenting and bubbling. These metaphors indicate that 
long before signs rose to the surface, a process began out of the 
public eye that is now bursting forth all over. 

Chapters 9 and 10 offer a sense of a way forward, proposing 
that the “vocation of the Euro-tribal churches is to fuel an insur-
rection against the dominant lie of modernity’s wager. They can 
live into that vocation to the extent that they create spaces wherein 
God’s people hear, practice, recapitulate and engage the invitation 
to awaken to God’s agency in the world” (131). While refusing the 
existence of a blueprint for any future other than the persistent 
remembering of God’s agency, the authors do highlight several 
practices for the refounding of God’s people. 

First, they propose a shift in language and practice from 
congregations to parishes. Churches comprised of Christians 
living in the same geographical neighborhood are, in their view, 
“the minimum requisite for refounding” (148). Communal pray-
ing of the Daily Office is the second practice they propose as the 
grounding needed before discernment. Third, they insist on stabil-
ity, the willing commitment to reside and remain in a place. For 
stability “provides us a place from which to see, listen to, and dwell 
with the people around us” and thus rediscover “how to discern 
and respond to God’s agency” (153). The fourth practice calls on 
Euro-tribal churches to surrender their comfortable positions of 



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“meeting needs” and instead enter into relationship with neigh-
bors as guests rather than hosts, as God has done. To resist the 
privatization of Christian life, Roxburgh and Robinson propose 
making eucharistic liturgies, common meals and hospitality key 
practices. Finally, seeking the common good of all in the local 
is proposed as an eschatological way of embodying the hope of 
Christ’s renewal of all things. 

Chapter 11 celebrates the “blessed reflex” of missionaries 
coming to the West from Africa, Asia and Latin America under 
the conviction that it will only be through a “humble readiness 
to become learners and guests among those other Christians that 
God is bringing among us today—the migrant, the immigrant, 
the people who were in this land before the colonizations began” 
that the Euro-tribal churches will find their way (169). Chapter 12 
briefly reflects on the role of church planting in refounding, noting 
that most efforts at innovation remain captive to the impulse to 
make the church work. 

Those familiar with Roxburgh’s Joining God, Remaking Church, 
Changing the World will find similarities but this is a much more 
sober and scholarly account. The former makes a great study in a 
church group as I can attest. I can also testify that this book makes 
for great discussion among masters and doctoral students as well 
as the precious pastor or denominational leader who is looking for 
relief from the monotony of mission technique publications. 

The gift of this book is its combination of unflinching sobri-
ety about the gravity of the challenge facing God’s people and the 
hope that echoes in the conviction that the unraveling of our time 
is in fact not simply things falling apart, but the disruptive work 
of the Spirit in which God is inviting the churches to “come to 
their senses and embrace this gospel call to join with God in the 
refounding, the reweaving, the remaking of social life in an emerg-
ing West” (5). Roxburgh and Robinson have given a serious diag-
nosis that I suspect will be widely welcomed. Their prescription, 
however, is sure to disappoint those looking for a way to adapt 
their church for success. It is not that the practices they propose 
are themselves particularly onerous, it is that they are out of step 



Christopher B. James—Practices for the Refounding of God’s People 

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with the world in which we live. That is, of course, the point. The 
practices are intended to prepare a people to join God in remaking 
the world, and in so doing to discover themselves refounded.


