Missional Church

Having been spent part of today preparing a training session on " what we mean by a missional faith" - it was interesting to get some immediate feedback from one of my training colleagues referring me to Alan Roxburgh's latest material on the Allelon site with his excellent material on " what is missional Church" - and of course the differences between our approaches although we both draw on material from Leslie Newbiggen.

Given the audience for the training day I think I am going to have have to add some material which explains the difference in understanding which emerges from an essentially Protestant view of mission ( and how that feeds into the missional definition) and a Catholic or Eastern view of mission.

The most obvious example of this comes with the diagrams at the bottom of Alan's article which adopts Leslie's view of missional, but then puts a contemporary Protestant/Evangelical spin on it that equates Newbiggen's "Gospel" with "Missio Deo".

I find this fundamentally dualistic - and am sure from my discussions with Leslie Newbiggen that he would have seen " missio deo" to be the context for all three axis.

Somewhat ironically in the previous paragraph Alan Roxburgh alerts us the danger of equating "missio deo" with the Church, and then proceeds to equate it with another of the mission axis.

I also think that Newbiggen's view of culture is considerably wider that simply the "missionary context" which is how Alan translates the third of the mission axis.

Perhaps when the move in complete I will find some time to write this up!

I look forward to the training day - my last before the move!

Comments

[len]

Maybe a redrawing of the diagram would help..

how's this?

http://www.nextreformation.com/wp-admin/images/Missional_Church.jpg

[Tom]

Not sure that I follow the theology - the second diagram seems to be a redrawing of the dualism? I think that my point is that the "missio dei" underlies the whole context.

If we are fully to understand the Trinitarian God then we cannot allow for such a dualism. The Father creates the world, The Incarnated Savior redeems the world (from within, and the Spirit continues to inspire the world (moving over the void in Genesis language)

Tom

[len]

Tom, yes, the Missio Dei intersects with life at all dimensions. Maybe I should expand the circle to simply encompass the diagram...

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