Scoville, Gordon. Into the Vacuum: Being the Church in a Age of Barbarism.

This small book has largely been ignored by Missional Christians. While Scoville is not a scholar, the book provides a scholarly and experiencial approach to the problems facing mainline Christian churches. His "voice from the trenches" will resonate with disaffected post-liberals and while being a serious book, at times provide some dry humour regarding how woefully pathetic the state of discipleship has become in many mainline churches. When as a leader in the United Church of Canada (a denomination ironically in deep division amongst non-theistic spiritualists, old style liberals, a few conservatives and Christian post-liberals) I preceive my denomination as insane, I return to Scoville's little book and am reminded of the importance of small faithful groups of disciples on the margins of the Empire. Although not a poet, I see Scoville somewhat as late modernity's John of Patmos. - James Love, Editor of Sent Church

Book Cover: "Gordon Scoville's thesis is that we have entered an age of barbarism, stepping into a process that involves disintegrating into a moral vacuum from which the only exit is to become the church of committed disciples. He attempts to ground his argument in a variety of experiential, historical, and theological materials. First, he offers personal glimpses of pastoral ministry in the vacuum. Then follow examples from nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history that demonstrate a comprehensive process in which bureaucracy feeds on cultural disintegration while advancing into barbarism. Next, he attempts to exemplify the vacuum in the ongoing development of mainline Protestant decline and in his own pastoral experience amid this deterioration. He points to seeds of comparable disintegration also among evangelical churches, though numerical prosperity tends to mask a serious condition of decadence. Finally, he sets forth prescriptions regarding what the post-Enlightenment church must do to get itself right."