Moving from the theological tower to the churchplanting trenches, more than my clothes have changed. In this transition I have been exposed to the broken-in look of various theological concepts. In particular, I have in mind the theological notion and practical understanding and expression of being missional. If “missional” is hot and hip among young evangelicals, its blazing and blown-up among churchplanters. I guess I am hot and hip, if in using the word missional we are referring to taking part in the Missio Dei by participating in the triune God’s activity to redeem all peoples and cultures (personal definition).

Discussions and definitions for missional abound. However, how we participate in the Missio Dei, how we responsibly mobilize and strategize in God’s sovereign redemptive activity requires more than people who definitize.

Being a “missionary” in N. America is common parlance among churchplanters and missional advocates, and though center of gravity of global christianity has shifted to the south and east, I don’t think that puts the West on an even mission field with many non-Western places, more importantly, peoples. To be sure, we should all redemptively engage peoples and cultures with Pauline missionary passion, but more than passion is at play.

To mobilize and strategize for the cause of global evangelization effectively, it seems that the missional movement needs to hold Missio Dei in one hand and Missio ad Gentes in the other. Missio ad Gentes is a Latin phrase that refers to mission to the “pagans” “nations” or “non-Christians.” It is frequently used by Catholic missiologists and appears in the Vatican II documents. To engage in missio ad gentes is to make a distinction between evangelism and mission, advancing the notion of priority in missions to peoples receiving a first proclamation of the gospel of Christ, not unlike Winter’s E 1.2.3 paradigm.

There are still over 8,000 people groups that have not heard the first proclamation of the gospel. Thousands more do not have the Scriptures in their language. Add to that the cultural corruption in many unreached nations that fosters poverty, disease, crime, sex trafficking and so on. The frontiers of missions must not be lost in the homeland of the West. We need people and churches that will be missional both locally and globally, joining with the triune God in pursuit of his global glory. We need Missio Dei in our hearts and Missio ad Gentes in our hands.

Justin posted this list of questions by Douglas Wilson for father’s to interrogate ask their daughter’s potential boyfriends suitors. I really liked number twelve about the guy’s GPA in college (!). Read them and consider whether or not they are questions you would ask. Why or why not?

1. Tell me about your spiritual background. What was your church upbringing like? At what point did your spiritual experience become real to you? Have you ever had a period of spiritual rebellion?

2. When was the last time you read through the entire Bible? The New Testament?

3. Do you attend worship every Lord’s Day?

4. Describe your parents’ marriage for me. What are the most valuable lessons you have you learned from your parents? [In cases of divorce, or other severe marriage problems] What did you learn from these problems? Have you learned what not to do? [In cases where dad wronged mom] What did you do to support and encourage your mother?

5. What is your relationship like with your dad? With your mom?

6. If I were given a fly-on-the-wall glimpse of a typical conversation that you might have with your mom, would you agree that this will likely be the way you will be treating my daughter ten years from now? Why or why not?

7. How many brothers and sisters do you have? How do you get along them?

8. What kind of worker are you?

9. How many jobs have you had in your life, and what did your bosses think of you? Were those bosses sorry to see you go, or glad to see you go?

10. What do you believe God has called you to do vocationally? Ten years from now, what you believe you will be doing?

11. What steps have you taken to reach that goal?

12. What was your GPA in college? How come?

13. How much money did you make last year? Do you pay your bills on time? How much debt have you accumulated? (more…)

Has anyone read The Forgotten Ways, by Alan Hirsch?  It looks very interesting in its proposed retooling of current paradigms and expressions of N American church.

Aaron recently asked for my recommendations on missiology texts, so I thought I would post for anyone to check them out. Aaron, please feel free to specify, if you are interested in a particular aspect of missions and missiology. I will try to recommend texts from several different angles. I will leave many out but include books that I have found particularly insightful or helpful. Feel free to add to the list!

In no particular order:

1) Anthropological Reflections on Missiological Issues, Paul Hiebert – a diverse collection of chapters with profound insights in every one, ranging from contextualization to metatheology. (this is one of my favorites)

2) From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya, Tucker, a biographical study of the history of missions.

3) Whose Religion is Christianity?, Lamin Sanneh – a dialogical presentation of questions and concepts that rightly and wrongly undermine Western trends in missions. Sanneh is not an evangelical but is a profoundly insightful African missiologist.

4) The Mission of God, Chris Wright – a great biblical theology of mission by a fine scholar, missionary, theologian and Englishman.

5) Transforming Mission, David Bosch – a massive work that I have barely cracked

6) The Next Christendom, Jenkins – a look at the present center of gravity in global Christianity in the south and east

* Non-Western: Kuwame Bediako, Lamin Sanneh, Kosuke Koyama, R. S. Sugirtharajah, Rene Padilla

**Anything by Newbigin, Andrew Walls, Charles Kraft, Ralph Winter

I just checked out two new books published in 2001 and 2006 respectively: Figured Out: Typology and Providence in Christian Scripture by Seitz and Concepts of Mission by Oborji.  Anyone who likes academic biblical theology should check out Seitz in general and specific.  Oborji is an African Catholic missiologist who reviews recent missiology from an historical perspective. JRWoodward will appreciate the chapter on Missio Dei.

Cultural Encounters Journal looks very interesting.  The purpose of the journal is as follows:

Cultural Encounters — A Journal for the Theology of Culture is committed to pursuing a biblically informed, Christ-centered, trinitarian engagement of contemporary culture.

The latest issue of Encounters Journal devoted to Theology of Culture includes:

• “The Scopes Trial, Fundamentalism, and the Creation of an Anti-Culture Culture: Can Evangelical Christians Transcend Their History in the Culture Wars?” (abstract)
  Brad Harper
• “‘Who’s Fighting and for What?’: Finding a Use for the Culture Wars” (abstract)
  Christopher Zinn
• “Bumping into Ourselves: Awakening from the Sound-Bite Stupor” (abstract)
  Nathan A. Baxter
• “Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?” (abstract)
  Marilyn Sewell
• “Getting Along in the 21st Century: Building Beloved Community” (abstract)
  Georgina Rice
• “Venturing out of the Comfort Zone” (abstract)
  Zach Dundas
• “Mutuality and Particularity: Contours of Authentic Dialogue” (abstract)
  Paul Louis Metzger
• “All Wounds are Our Own” (abstract)
  Kyogen Carlson
• “Dining with the ‘Other’” (abstract)
  Domyo Sater and Matthew Farlow
• “Building the Bridge Back” (abstract)
  Donald Miller

Uncomfortable providences have a way of awakening us to God’s kind providences, better yet even to God himself. Over the past five months my family of four has been contentedly yet eagerly anticipating escape from our small two bedroom apartment into a 2,100 square foot home. The last three days have been housecentric. Negotiating, Closing, Painting, Boxing, Cleaning, Moving, Unpacking, Settling…well we haven’t reached the last stage yet.

In the midst of the first-time thrill of purchasing a home, my son was diagnosed with bronchitis and my wife with a flu. Just before closing, our fence line was moved to a very awkward location, and our first day in the house, we had flooding that destroyed the flooring in a bathroom, study, and part of the living room. As i write this “Total Restoration” is downstairs ripping up our soppy carpet and pad and setting up an industrial dehumidifier and those big fans that look like a seashell.

Fortunately, we have a two year warranty on the home, so all repairs will be covered. Fortunately, we had generous family and friends help us in the move. Fortunately, we can afford good medicine to nurse our family to health. Fortunately, we have a home, at an outstanding interest rate. Fortunately, we ended up with a home much nicer than we could have afforded. With all this fortune amidst some unfortunate circumstances, shouldn’t we praise God? Well, yes and no.

Certainly, the super-intending God who ordains calamity (Isa 45.17) and orders our days (Ps 139; Prov 20.24) should be praised, but should I praise him simply because the good providences outweighed the bad ones? Is the way we glorify God in adversity analgous to tallying the plus and minus columns of life, and the praising him on the condition that there are more pluses than minuses, more dry carpet than wet carpet?

This kind of “praise” is conditional, relative to the terms of life’s pluses outnumbering life’s minuses. This puts me in the driver’s seat of praise, making me the determiner of when God should be praised. It hardly rings of Scripture. What if, like Job, my house gets flattened (along with my family) and no restoration is in sight, what will I do? I hope that I will praise the sovereign Creator, not just because I had a house and a family, but because my Creator is sovereign, wise, and good; because my Creator is also a repairing Redeemer; because my Redeemer is a cosmic Consummator, bringing all things to a purposeful, God-glorifying end.

I guess what I’m getting at is the idea of conditional praise–that we praise God on our terms, not his, which is rather backwards. It’s like a pilot telling air traffic control that he is going to land when he wants to. In so doing, he smugly tosses the authority and wisdom of air traffic control to the side, to his own and others’ detriment and danger. I am prone to be this pilot, to conditional praise.

Instead of making the story of my life the controlling narrative for God’s praise, I will be much happier if I locate my story within the wider providential story of the Creatior-Redeemer-Consummator. By acknowling his purposeful and good rights to my life, I can bank not on pluses outnumbering minuses in this life, but a God who will be with me in the minuses and will eventually redeem them to bring about soul-satisfying, glory and praise in the consummation of the creation project. Triune Total restoration will far exceed teh power of industrial blowers; it will redeem and renews, cleanse and create again, not just my life, but lives of all who hope in Jesus, agent of new creation.

It’s starting in Germany. with Eva Herman.

Check it out here.

Eleven years ago, famed evangelical church historian and Wheaton professor, Mark Noll published a book entitled The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, in which he indicted the superficial mindset of Evangelicals who, in pursuit of “souls,” belittled the life of the mind. The result, Noll argues, was an atrophy of serious biblical and theological thinking that engages the world and the spectrum of the disciplines. In all of this shallow thinking about God and His world, Noll claims that the greatest scandal of all is the scorning of “the good gifts of a loving God.” He writes: “For an entire Christian community to neglect, generation after generation, serious attention to the mind, nature, society, the arts – all spheres created by God and sustained for his own glory – may be, in fact, sinful.”[1]

Now, I suppose it is possible that renegade sub-groups within Western evangelicalism could have escaped this scandal. Perhaps you and your church are some of them. However, there is another scandal which, according to statistics, no Christian sub-group has escaped. Earlier this year Ron Sider published a short book entitled, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience. It is a simple book with a simple but profound message – on matters of biblical morality such as marriage and divorce, sexual promiscuity, racism and neglect of the poor, evangelicals rank no better, if not worse, than non-Christians. (more…)

What is theology? As a seminary student, I was exposed to various explanations of theology, good and bad. Helmut Thielicke’s, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians and David Wells’ article entitled “Theologians Craft,” in Doing Theology in Today’s World were among the better, well-balanced essays.

However, while reading last night I came across one of the most stimulating essays on theology I have read. In an address to the Free Protestant Theology Faculty in Paris in 1934, Barth said:

Of all the sciences that stir the head and heart, theology is the fairest. It is closest to human reality and gives us the clearest view of the truth after which science quests…It is a landscape, like the landscape of Umbria or Tuscany in which the distant perspective are always clear. Theology is a masterpiece, as well-planned and yet as bizzare as the cathedrals of Cologne and Milan…but of all the sciences there is none which is so beset with difficulties, none which is so beset with dangers, as theology.”

First the masterpiece, then the dangers.

Note that Barth joins head and heart, intellect and affection, in the quest for truth and knowing God. Elsewhere Barth has written, “the theologian that does his work without joy is no theologian at all.” True theologizing requires more than a half man, no head or heart. In knowing God we do well to steer clear of cold intellectualism and directionless emotionalism. God demands that we know him with all our faculties, including our wills, and seeks to enliven our affections through the organ of truth.

Barth is also aware of the dangers when man tries to articulate God. He writes that theology does not exist in a vacuum…but “in that providence between baptism and communion, in the realm between the Scriptures and their exposition and proclamation.” In other words, theology is not inspired, and theologians must eat and drink God, as well as read of Him.

Theology is not inspired, though there are traditions that cling to their confessions so tightly, one wonders if this has truly dawned upon denominations. Divine inspiration is reserved for the Bible, and interpretation relegated to humans. As a result, in the movement from Text to theology, from Scripture to proclamation, the way is fraught with perilous precipices and breathtaking vistas. Therefore, theology should always be “an act of repentant humility, which is presented to men through this fact.”

Thus, theology requires rigorous mental energy, a tender heart and eager hands. It demands and produces humility and repentance before an awesome and holy God. It is not to be confused with the God-revealing Word, though it can draw us into the finest of settings.

Thoughts?