I am wrestling with the ministry that my efforts are producing from this perspective: some of the planters that I work with seem to go much farther in producing a missional church than others...what's the difference?  I came across a short section of Alan Hirsch's Forgotten Ways that speaks to this issue loud and clear:  

"one of the major blockages to unleashing Apostolic Genius is our adherence to an obsolete understanding of the church...[We must] push past the pat historical answers that so easily suggest themselves to a people whose imagination of what it means to be God's people has been taken hostage to a less than Biblical imagination of church."

It seems to me, and I speak as a church practitioner and participant of some 35 years, that our conception of what it means to be the church is in bondage.  While we might reject stained glass or forms of church that seem antiquated, our real imagination of what it means to be God's people in this time and in this place is in chains to what we know or have experienced, not based on what Jesus planted in the earth.  

How do we reverse this trend?  We have to go through the painful process of shaking up our ideas, allowing what is frozen to thaw out and then placing ourselves in a position to be reformed in a new conception of church.  To use a rather inelegant metaphor--it the same as with ice cubes.  Reshaping requires both heat and a new ice cube tray.  We can melt the water, but if we leave it in the same external form, it will refreeze in the same old shape- over and over again. 

The heat of realization that the church in the West is in steep decline on its way to a European style presence, and the conviction that we are called to something higher is enough to thaw me out, but the only new kind of form that I am willing to be reshaped in, is a form that is shaped from Jesus' conception of his church.  I am afraid that might not look anything like what I've experienced before.