I was in a fascinating meeting on Monday with Timothy Gorringe, Professor of Theology at Exeter University, the meeting was part of MTAG and Prof. Gorringe was reflecting on missiology in a culture of disposession.
He made six points with wrt mission and so i thought that I'd share them with you as they correlate with a large amount of my thinking about contemporary missiology.
1 - What is Gospel? What is Good news? Good news needs to be understood in relation to hurt. Good news heals past hurts, Christ touched a raw nerve and brought good news to it. What therefore are the raw nerves in contemporary society that the good news of Christ needs to speak to. Gorringe claimed a raw nerve was 'environmentalism and the denial the facts of it'. We explored as a group that perhaps 'Fear' was the raw nerve and that environmental destruction was one manifestation of that. Other recent ones include the destruction of the planet due to the big bang experiment last week.
2 - Community - the role of community in contemporary missiology. I've written a bit about this here. But my experience of coming to faith was through the witness of one particular community, and how they lived together and sought reconciliation within their conflicts. There were significant people along the journey but i was evangelized by a community rather than a professional evangelist...
3 - Integrity - Mission is living with integrity. We had Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmat to stay recently and the thing that struck me most about them was the way that they lived outworked their values. Therefore when they spoke about environmentalism etc. this was outworked in a localised context for them.
4 - Depth - Human beings are deep water creatures that dies in the shallows. Faith needs to be of a depth that people need. We cannot have that depth if the issue of justice is ducked...
5 - Life - Where is the life in the church? Life attracts people, worship needs to energise people for life.
6 - Resistance - The church must become a community of resistance. A community that subverts the cultural norm, a community that dismantles the dominant consciousness and offers an alternative to it.
