Rather than focusing primarily on its missions function and missionary organization, the church needs to rediscover its essential nature as missional, according to author and seminary professor Craig Van Gelder. If it is a reconciled community of the living God, then by nature it passes on reconciliation. It puts missions into the hands of a few trained persons.
All organization is contextual and provisional.
But basic theology does not change, he continued. We need to return to biblical and theological foundations to sort out what to take and what to leave as we shape our ecclesiology and polity. Then the church's challenge is to discern unchanging principles from forms that are shaped by cultural contexts, he said. The period from the birth of the Industrial Revolution to the Great Depression was a time of the urbanization of the church. Since the mid-1980s, Van Gelder identified the current phase as the congregationalization of the church.