“Missional Viewpoints” – A summer blog series
Over July and August, on the blog I’ll be going through a series looking at our definition of mission, and particularly some specific keywords that inform our understanding.
With university work finally out of the way after the final push to get everything finished, and with The Lab beginning to quieten down for the summer, I thought it was about time to get back into blogging. So, in order to become more focused, and to get myself “back into shape” in terms of blogging, I thought it’d be good to work through a fairly simple, but quite interesting summer series.
Our understanding of mission is coloured so much by the different words we use to describe it and to understand it better. These are theological words – tranformation, salvation, liberation etc. – which, I think, all open different windows through which we build up a picture of mission. The plan is to dissect and explore some of these windows/words, and to look at how they should inform what we understand mission to be.
Here are the different posts that right now I intend to work through:
Mission as…
- Liberation
- Salvation
- Healing (including why I’ve chosen to cover this separately to salvation)
- Transformation
- Proclamation
- Redemption
- Glorification
I’m planning to come at each of these viewpoints from three angles. Firstly the theological, doing the groundwork into what each term means and where in the biblical narrative it comes from. Secondly, the sociological, looking at each term’s relevance to today’s culture and finding evidence within the way society and culture works to back up or challenge the theological perspective. And finally, a practical look at what this means for the Church as we seek to be the bearer of the Mission of God.
So that’s the plan, anyway. I intend to put some real thought and research into these posts, so will be trying to average one every 1-2 weeks. If we overrun into September then it’s no biggie.
Let me know what you think.
-
easyrew
