More data is not always the answer.

Think of mission like the paddles of a defibrillator applied to the chest of a dying church.

This submission to the threshold of a cross is at the very root of our following Jesus; it changes the game completely.

Put simply, the church finds itself in a post-Christendom era, and it had better do some serious reflection or face increasing decline and eventual irrelevance.

Whether we like it or not, we are all on a journey, a Quest if you will, every day of our lives, and the path we must take is full of perils, and our destiny can never be predicted in advance.

If we could be freed from our aversion to loss, our whole outlook on risk would change.

But herein lies the rub: Christianity has been on a long-term trend of decline in every Western cultural context that we can identify.