Introduction
The vitality
and well-being of a congregation depends greatly on its leadership and missional identity. To discuss the nature and meaning of being a missional
church and its related missional leadership in congregations is the main focus
of this paper. The term “missional” is still relatively new in the context of
Myanmar. Therefore, this paper aims at introducing what it means to be
missional leadership in the context of Myanmar.
This paper is divided into four
parts: a brief introduction of the meaning of missional leadership in light of
social relational trinity; the missionary nature of the church that demands the
church to change its conversation in two areas: the importance of the
trinitarian understanding of leadership and its related missional theology;
reframing the leadership methods in two dimensions: the church and missio Dei and the church and the
kingdom of God; and four dimensions of congregational leadership proposed by
Craig Van Gelder such as communally discerned, biblically-theologically
informed, theoretically framed, and strategic actions.
1. What is Missional Leadership?
Before answering the question, “What
is Missional Leadership?,” the term missional
should be explained, because it is a relatively new term especially for
Christians in Myanmar. Traditionally, many Christians, including Christians of
Myanmar, have assumed that the word “mission” has to do only with the church
sending its missionaries to other places — the so called mission fields. Unlike
this traditional view, however, the word missional
has a distinct and dynamic meaning in itself. It is an adjective form of the
word mission that expresses the
concept of Christians’ participation in God’s mission in the world. Darrell
Guder rightly explains the use of the suffix
"al" with the word "mission," saying that it is to “foster
an understanding of the church as fundamentally and comprehensively defined by
its calling and sending, its purpose to serve God's healing purposes for all
the world as God's witnessing people to all the world.”[1] The main argument here is
that the church is missionary by nature in the world, as the second
Vatican advanced this concept, sent by God to live according to the patterns
and ways of the kingdom of God. This paper uses the terms “missional
leadership” and “missional church” interchangeably.
As to the question, “What is
missional church?” Craig Van Gelder gives a profound answer, saying that a
missional church is a church led by the Holy Spirit, representing the reign of
God by participating in the God’s intended mission in the world. There are
three important characteristics of missional church depicted in the biblical
story: “one that begins with creation, followed by re-creation (redemption)
after the fall, and culminating in a final consummation that introduces a new
heaven and a new earth”—the sign of the kingdom of God.[2]
Hence, Van Gelder asserts that “an understanding of the church must start with
the kingdom of God, the redemptive reign in the person and presence of Jesus.”[3]
God is always initiative in the field of missional leadership. Guder explains
that “mission is not merely an activity of the church. Rather, mission is the
result of God’s initiative, rooted in God’s purposes to restore and heal
creation.”[4]
In Lois Barrett et al., Treasure in Clay
Jars, “a missional church is a church that is shaped by participating in
God’s mission, which is to set things right in a broken, sinful world, to
redeem it, and to restore it to what God has always intended for the world.”[5]
The ministry of restoring and healing is therefore the main emphasis of a
missional church.
Traditionally,
the church has been understood as a place, or a building, where believers
gather to do things together. Under this view, the church becomes static and
its emphasis is on functional: what the church does. While the functions of a
church are important for the vitality and well-being of the church, it is more
important to understand that the church is not just a place where people meet
with others, but that the church is a people of God created by the Spirit to
live as a missionary community. A missional church, in this sense, is dynamic
and always developing and changing. Its emphasis is more on what the church is rather than what the church does, focusing on the unique nature and
identity of the church as missionary by nature.[6]
The church is not just a “place where certain things happen and a vendor of
religious goods and services, it is a body of people sent on a mission”[7]
with a “distinct purpose of carrying out a ministry of participating fully in
the redemptive work of God in the world.”[8]
Hence, the concept of the church as a sending church is to be understood as the
church participating in God’s mission in the world where God is already
present.
2. Changing the Conversation: The Church as Missionary by Nature
The concept
that the church is missionary by nature, being sent into the world to represent
and witness the reign of God, requires the church to change its conversation on
the nature of mission and leadership. The fact is that the church is no longer
a sending church, but is itself sent by the triune God to implement God’s
intended mission in the world. This section focuses on the missionary nature of
the church in two areas: first on the leadership of the church from a social
relational aspect of the trinity; and second on the concept of missional
theology as opposed to the theology of missions, which focus is on functional
in the sense that the church does mission on behalf of God.
2.1. The Trinity as the Foundation for
Missional Leadership
Mission is
rooted in the sending activity of God as the continuing movement of God’s
trinitarian life: from the Father who sends his Son into the world through the
sending of the Spirit, so that the church in turn can be sent into the world.
Moltmann rightly explains the meaning of the Trinity and relates it to the
mission of God, saying that “it is not the Church that has a mission of
salvation to fulfill in the world; it is the mission of the Son and the Spirit
through the Father that includes the Church.”[9]
John Stott also affirms this idea that “Christian mission is rooted in the
nature of God himself. The Bible reveals him as a missionary God (Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit), who creates a missionary people, is working towards a
missionary consummation.”[10]
Hence, the very nature of missional leadership in the church is directly related
to the mission of the triune God.
The
missional understanding of the Trinity is related to the social trinity that
emphasizes the love which flows among the three persons of the Trinity in
community and is primarily a relational view of the Trinity as a committed
community. This relational understanding of Trinity is different from the
immanent trinity and economic trinity, each of which has its own emphasis. The
immanent trinity emphasizes the being of God as God is in God-self who seeks to
draw humanity into God’s eternal glory. In this concept, the gospel focuses on the
promise of eternal life and the mission concentrates on bringing people into
personal relationship with God. This view has a Christology from above and a
world-denying spirituality. By comparison, the economic trinity focuses on the
distinctive roles of the three persons, and it tends towards a dynamic,
incarnational view of a God who reveals his identity through the historical
development of God’s kingdom. This view has a Christology from below and
world-affirming spirituality. Hence, the gospel becomes good news of life in
all its fullness in this world; mission concentrates on cultural engagement and
social transformation.[11]
Both the immanent and economic trinity offer limited means of understanding
missional leadership, which is not quite helpful in practical situations and
contexts.
Unlike the immanent and economic
trinity concepts, the social trinity concept has a different understanding of
missional leadership. In the social trinity concept, the gospel assures
believers of their share in the divine koinonia
and, draws them into both the love of God and fellowship with one another. The
goal of missional leadership becomes the creation of a social relational
community in which there is freedom for one another and fellowship with one
another in commitment to one another. In this concept, mission has an
irresistible social dimension, because of the desire for all human society to
reflect the perfect community of the Trinity.[12]
There is mutual dependence among the three persons of the triune God. “The
triune God creates the world for communion and draws the creation, under the
travail of suffering, sin, and evil, into eschatological communion at the end
of history.”[13]
This notion of communion is what holds the believers together, as the body of
Christ—the church.
2.2. Toward a Missional Theology
Missional theology is a theology that
focuses not on church growth alone, but on the growth of God’s kingdom on
earth. Many churches, especially many right wing evangelical churches in
Myanmar, focus their mission only on growth of membership. What these churches
fail to recognize, however, is the essential task assigned by Jesus to make
“disciples in relation to God’s kingdom, helping people grow in their faith and
equipping them to participate more fully in God’s mission in the world.”[14]
Similarly, Rouse and Van Gelder observe that congregations in America are good
enough in recruiting and training people to serve the needs of the
institutional church. What they usually fail is to see a wider horizon of God’s
mission in the world in which they should put their missional interest.[15]
This is true in other places in the world, including in the churches in
Myanmar. We live in a world that has been consciously embracing a postmodern
secular worldview, where Christianity is viewed as only a private and
individual matter. The church needs to reject this narrow view of Christianity
and create a new kind of community, where love, peace, and justice prevail so
that all people may be able to taste the goodness of the reign of God.
The essence of the message of
missional theology is that it emphasizes the importance of both the word and
deed in witness, integrating both the liberal and conservative notions of the
kingdom of God. Many Christians in Myanmar, like many Christians elsewhere in
the world, do not clearly comprehend what the mission of the church is about.
They regard the building as being the church and persuade people to come to the
church building. The sense of God’s mission in a wider horizon, the whole
world, is absent from their thinking. The ministry focus of missional
leadership is incarnational, rather than attractional, and is always willing to
identify with ordinary people. Missional leadership is always involved with the
world, creating new relationships among people and bearing witness in society to
the lordship of Christ.[16]
Creating such a new social relationship requires missional leaders to focus on
the holistic growth of the church and its community.
As the church is missionary by
nature, everything the church does has to do with the mission of God, not
necessarily the mission of the church; the church is only participating in the
mission of God. Hence, the church becomes “God’s demonstration plot in the
world . . . . [Its] very presence invites the world to watch, listen, examine,
and consider accepting God’s reign as a superior way of living.”[17]
The main purpose of God’s mission is this: “God is seeking to bring his
kingdom, the redemptive reign of God in Christ, to bear on every dimension of
life within the entire world so that the larger creation purposes of God can be
fulfilled—the missio Dei. The church
is called for this ministry.”[18] Simply put, the church is called to reproduce
communities of authentic disciples, being equipped as missionaries sent by God,
to live and proclaim his kingdom in their respective neighborhoods. The core
characteristic of a missional church, according to Patrick Keifert, is none
other than “being, not just doing, mission.” For Keifert, “being mission” does
not so much focus on “bringing people to church, but being the church in, with,
and under the friends, neighbors, coworkers, and strangers of people’s everyday
lives.” Put a different way, “missional churches see themselves not so much
sending, but as being sent.”[19]
This notion of missional theology is apparently quite different from the
traditional understanding of mission in which mission is just a function of the
church. This is a new challenge for the churches in Myanmar to reframe their
mission methods in the light of doing mission in a missional way.
3. Reframing the Method: The Church in Missio
Dei and the Kingdom of God
The idea that the church is missionary by nature challenges the
traditional church to reframe its mission method: from being a sending church
to being sent to be part of God’s mission in the world. In the past, many
Christians believed that God relates the world to himself through the church.
In this view, the church was believed to be the center, responsible to do mission on behalf of God. There are
many Christians in Myanmar who still hold this view, being unaware of the idea that
the world is the center of God’s mission and that the church is participating
in the mission of God as an agent of the kingdom of God. It is important for
the church to recognize that this involves a paradigm change from the God-church-world concept to the God-world-church concept. It is not the
church that owns and does mission, but God alone is the One who has the mission
and does God’s mission. This section focuses on these two important areas: the
church and missio Dei and the church
and the kingdom of God.
3.1. The Church and Missio Dei
The term missio Dei is a significant term and has
special meaning in missional theology. It is a Latin word for “the mission of
God” (or the sending of God), which was used in the Western Church referring to
the Trinity for the sent-ness of God (the
Son) by the Father (John 3:17; 5:30; 11:42; 17:18). The missio Dei has been popular in ecumenical
circles because it means [or includes] everything God does for the
communication of salvation, and everything the church itself is sent to do.[20]
Based on the sending of one divine Person by another in the doctrine of the
Trinity, the idea of missionary formation and practice is now related to the
church’s participation in the activity of divine sending into the world. David
Bosch rightly describes, “The classical doctrine on the missio Dei as God the Father sending the Son, and God the Father
and the Son sending the Spirit was expanded to include yet another movement:
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit sending the church into the world.”[21]
Bosch also talks about how the Spirit initiated, guided, and empowered believers
in the early church to be witnesses for the gospel of the resurrection of Jesus
Christ.[22]
That same Spirit was the one who brought the Jews and Gentiles together,
regardless of their differences in socio-economic status and political
worldview.
A congregation that is created and
led by the Spirit is not a place where only sacred people meet and do things
together. It is also a representation of the reign of God in the world, where
peace, justice, and love can be experienced. This is how Inagrace Dietterich describes
the church as a missional community, a community called to “represent the
compassion, justice, and peace of the reign of God.”[23]
This kind of community is a community where the rich and the poor, the weak and
the strong can come together, without any discrimination because of gender,
race, and the color of their skin. The church is called to form this kind of
community, where different people can find hope and meaning of life, which
would “become a social reality in Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy
Spirit.”[24]
Forming such a significant “Christian community is not an option but is the
very lifestyle and vocation of the church.”[25]
In doing so, the church can redefine its identity and represent the meaning and
foretaste of the reign of God in the world.
As the church is forming a new kind
of community, a community that represents God’s reign, believers can be easily
tempted to see their new community as limited to their own immediate members.
In reality, the church should not be a place where salvation is restricted. In
this kind of new community, as Bosch says, “believers, as a corporate body, are
charged to practice bodily obedience (Romans 12:1) and serve Christ in their
daily lives, in the secularity of the world, thus bearing witness.”[26]
By living out their faith in public spheres, practicing Christian obedience,
and bearing witness for Christ, Christians are “creating new relationships
among themselves and in society at large, and in doing this, bearing witness to
the lordship of Christ.”[27]
In order to be able to form this new kind of community where the reign of God
is to be experienced, the church needs to invite the Holy Spirit who has the
power and ability to inspire and encourage believers to live in a corporate
community.
The Holy Spirit is the catalyst and
driving force for the mission of God in the world. As such, Bosch says that “the
church’s mission is both inspired and confirmed by manifestations of the Spirit”[28]
who is the source of life in creating and sustaining the church. This same
Spirit is the one who has the power to bring different people together,
regardless of their social and religious backgrounds, in order to create a community
that is distinct but not distant from people in the larger community. After
embracing this Spirit, the church needs to “nurture the social relationships
that embody the reconciliation and healing of the world in Jesus Christ.”[29]
Hence, the missional church is called to redefine its missional identity and
build a new kind of community, where people can find peace and justice
regardless of their race, religious worldview, gender, or the color of their
skin.
3.2. The Church and the Kingdom of God
The church
and the kingdom of God cannot be separated; they are always in relation.
However, whenever most congregations talk about the kingdom of God, they are
considering only the kingdom beyond this present life. This after-life-kingdom
concept often leads them to focus only on life beyond this world, and to
neglect and ignore the real struggles of life in the world. The church as the
real essence of the kingdom of God has an obligation to show the world what it is
like for people to live in community under the reign of God in every aspect of
life. The missional church attends to the reality of human suffering and the
sinful nature of the world. The missional church has become a new culture,
pointing toward the kingdom of God and the nature of the new heavens and the
new earth. The missional church always lives with the anticipation of that
kingdom while participating in God’s mission in the world.
A missional
theology views God as a missionary God whose desire is to transform the whole
of humanity and creation for his own and to use the church as the means by
which to accomplish this mission. Thus, the church is an agent of God in transforming
the world. To put it another way, the church is a missionary by nature sent by
God to engage and incarnate in the world to represent the kingdom of God. The
church in relation to the kingdom of God always focuses on people becoming
servants of God rather than programs and events. Rouse and Van Gelder clearly
point out that “ministry is more than what happens in the church. It also
includes what takes place through the vocations of today’s disciples within
their daily lives for the sake of the world.”[30]
Real ministry happens after the Sunday morning church service, where real life
begins in the world of struggles. Believers’ lives are tested not necessarily
in the worship service inside the church building, but in the midst of real
life situations.
4. Missional Leadership in Congregations
Having
discussed the nature of missional leadership and its related issues above, this
section focuses on four essential dimensions of missional leadership in
congregations proposed by Craig Van Gelder. These four dimensions are: text,
context, community, and strategic action with which missional leaders make
decisions in leading congregations. The main emphasis is on the essentiality of
an integrative approach of these dimensions in missional leadership. Van Gelder
assures that “Christian leaders can most effectively lead in mission in
Christian congregations by integrating these four dimensions in a shared
process and by understanding the hermeneutical nature of this process.”[31]
Missional
leaders always need to keep in mind the nature of missional church, a community
created and led by the Holy Spirit who are in relation with one another,
discerning the presence of God in their community, engaging in the form of
“discernment process in order to understand their purpose (mission), and how
they are being called through this purpose to participate in God’s mission in
the world (missio Dei).”[32]
This describes a process of communal discernment in the missional church as
opposed to individual discernment.
There are two dimensions of Christian
existence that help inform and guide the process of discernment and decision
making. First, it is the Spirit who gives diverse gifts to each member of a
congregation to come to a shared understanding, which requires a certain form
of communal activity (1 Cor. 12; Romans 12). Second, since there are different
values, biases, interpretations, and power dynamics involved in this communal
activity, it is important to “learn the practice of communal discernment.”[33]
Jurgen Habermas’s theory of communicative reason brings a fruitful contribution
to the practice of communal discernment. For Habermas, communal discernment can
be reached in the public sphere where opinions are exchanged and public
opinions are formed without discrimination against race, religion, and gender. This
is what he calls “life together in communication free from domination” [34]
in which people may rationally discuss the common good for the people. It is
vital for missional leaders to use what Richard Osmer calls “priestly
listening” which is “attending to what is going on in the lives of individuals,
families, and communities.”[35]
It is a challenge for missional leaders to pay attention to the motivations and
opinions of every member in the church so that, as a body of people, they are
able to make important decisions.
Van Gelder
connects communally discerned
leadership with biblically and theologically framed leadership, which demonstrates
an understanding of the missio Dei,
the history of God’s mission in the Bible, in relation to the kingdom of God.
The biblical story has direct implications for Christian leaders as they seek
to relate God’s purpose in the Scripture to their own congregations and
contexts.[36]
In this regard, the Scripture becomes the authority and norm (a long with
history and tradition) for making decisions in congregational leadership. This
requires “wise judgment” on the leaders’ part, to interpret situations,
contexts, and events before making decisions.[37]
Attention to the formation of biblically-informed
in making judgment is important because it plays a significant role in decision
making.
The nature of the triune God is
emphasized in biblically and
theologically framed leadership, which is fundamentally collaborative in the sense that the
Spirit gives a variety of gifts (Rom. 12, 1 Cor. 12; Eph. 4) which believers
are expected to use collaboratively to build up the body of Christ, until all
reach maturity.[38]
This is where the triune nature of God and the missional aspect of the church
best fit: the creator, redeemer, and the One who brings the kingdom of God in
the world.[39]
Dwight J. Zscheile says, “At the heart of the biblical narrative of the life of
the Trinity are the incarnation and cross.”[40]
There is a sense of self-emptying power in the cross and incarnation,
discovered in the life of Jesus (Philippians 2). Quoting Bonheoffer, Dwight
states that “the Son of God bore our flesh, he bore the cross, he bore our
sins, thus making atonement for us. In the same way, his followers are also
called upon to bear, for that is precisely what it means to be a Christian.”[41]
This is the main purpose of missional leadership in congregations to make
disciples in the form of service for the world and for the good of others.
Van Gelder clearly sees the need for
a theoretically informed leadership
in the church, which is to be informed by diverse perspectives from the social
sciences.[42]
In this, the social location of a congregation in relationship to its larger
cultural context plays an important role.[43]
Thus, it is imperative to be aware of the fact that there are diversity of
interpretations of reality, which challenge missional leaders to be engaged in
these perspectives by paying attention to a variety of methods that can help
inform the discernment and decision making process.[44]
Van Gelder emphasizes that missional leaders should be able to integrate a variety
of methods and approaches in leading congregations in order to keep God in
their conversation.[45]
Scriptures and doctrines alone are not sufficient in helping congregations to make
important decisions; missional leaders should pay attention to important
information from the social and cultural context provided by social sciences.
In this way, the decision a congregation makes will be effective because they
will directly touch the real situations and contexts where God is present. This
is what missional leadership all about—being part of God’s intended ministry in
the world.
The main purpose of missional
leadership, according to Van Gelder, is to create “an intentional community,”[46]
which requires missional leaders to develop strategic
action plans. This activity is what Osmer calls “the pragmatic task . . .
that will influence situations in ways that are desirable.”[47]
Creating an intentional community means creating a new desirable community in
the light of service to the world. The ability to help create this desirable
community is so important in congregational leadership. Osmer proposes three
forms of leadership: task competence, transactional, and transforming
leadership. The first two forms of leadership focus respectively on the ability
to excel in performance and to influence others through mutual exchange,
whereas transforming leadership involves “deep change” in terms of missional
and social-cultural identity.[48]
While all three forms of leadership are needed in congregations, missional
leadership is more inclined toward the need for transformational type of
leadership in the church.
Transforming
leadership is costly and risky because there is always a possibility of
resistance and conflict, failures and disappointments in the process.[49]
Missional leadership in congregations is also costly and risky because it takes
the cross of Jesus Christ very seriously. There is always suffering attached to
the cross of Christ as well as the true meaning of being a disciple of Christ.
Missional leadership demands costly and risky service, to live one’s life for
the good of others like Jesus has already done: “For the Son of man also came
not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark
10:45, RSV). The church must live as a body of people sent by God in the world
to preach, demonstrate, and invite others to enter into the kingdom of God by
offering service for and to them.
Conclusion
In
conclusion, it is worth mentioning four elements which missional leaders need
to keep in mind: the missional church is sent into the world with the cross of Jesus Christ; it is sent in community where there are particular cultures in which it has to preach about
the coming of the kingdom of God. As
mentioned elsewhere in this paper, the church is by nature missional, sent out
to a particular culture with the gospel of Christ to participate in the mission
of God in the world. It is not the church that does mission; the church can
only participate in the mission of God.
The purpose of God’s mission is to transform
the entire sinful humanity and to announce the coming of God’s kingdom on
earth. In fact, the central message of the missional church is about “preaching
the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ quite openly and
unhindered” (Acts 28:31 RSV). For this purpose, the church is sent into the
world to continue what Jesus came to do, in the power of the Spirit,
reconciling people to God.[50]
Jesus said, “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you” (John 20:21 RSV).
As long as the church understands that it is sent by God into the world to
participate in the mission of God, it understands the true meaning of being a
missional church, a church for the world, representing God’s kingdom
on earth.
[1]
Darrell L. Guder, “Walking Worthily: Missional Leadership after Christendom,” in Princeton
Seminary Bulletin, vol. xxviii, No. 3 (November, 2007): 252. (Emphasis
original).
[2]
Craig Van Gelder, The Ministry of the
Missional Church: A Community Led by the Spirit (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker
Books, 2007), 26. Van Gelder is professor of congregational missional
leadership at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. His ministry background
includes ten years of campus ministry and ten years of serving as a church
consultant.
[3]
Craig Van Gelder, The Essence of the
Church: A Community Created by the Spirit (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books,
2000), 74.
[4]
Darrell Guder, ed. Missional Church: A
Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Grand Rapids, MI: W.
B. Eerdmans, 1998), 4.
[5]
Lois Y. Barrett et al., Treasure in Clay
Jars: Patterns in Missional Faithfulness (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans,
2004), x.
[6]
Craig Van Gelder, The Ministry of the
Missional Church, 17, 18.
[7]
George R. Hunsberger and Craig Van Gelder, eds., The Church Between Gospel and Culture: The Emerging Mission in North
America (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 1996), 338. See also Darrell
Guder, ed., Missional Church, 79ff.
[8]
Craig Van Gelder, The Essence of the
Church, 89.
[9]
Jurgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power
of the Spirit: A Contribution to
Messianic Ecclesiology (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 64.
[10]
John Stott, The Contemporary Christian:
Applying God’s Word to Today’s World (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity
Press, 1992), 325.
[11]
John Corrie, ed., Dictionary of Mission
Theology: Evangelical Foundations (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press,
2007), 397. See also Jurgen Moltmann, The
Trinity and the Kingdom of God (London: SCM, 1981).
[12]
Ibid., 397.
[13]
Dwight J. Zscheile, “The Trinity, Leadership, and Power,” in Journal of Religious Leadership, Vol. 6,
No. 2 (Fall, 2007): 49.
[14]
Rick Rouse and Craig Van Gelder, A Field
Guide for Missional Congregations: Embracing a Journey of Transformation
(Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2008), 21.
[15]
Ibid., 21.
[16]
David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission:
Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll: Orbis Book, 1991), 169.
[17]
Craig Van Gelder, The Essence of the
Church, 99.
[18]
Craig Van Gelder, The Ministry of the
Missional Church, 73, 85.
[19]
Patrick Keifert, We Are Here Now: A New
Missional Era (Eagle, Idaho: Allecon Publishing, 2006), 28, 29. Keifert is
professor of Systematic Theology at Luther Seminary, teaching courses in
theology and congregational missional leadership. He is also a president,
consultant, and director of Church Innovations. Church Innovations is a
non-profit organization devoted to renewing the Church’s focus on God’s mission
in the world, situated in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA.
[20]
A. Scott Moreau, ed., Evangelical
Dictionary of World Missions (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2000), 631.
[21]
David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission,
390. See also John Corrie, ed., Dictionary
of Mission Theology, 233.
[22]
Ibid., 114.
[23]
Darrell L. Guder, ed., Missional Church,
142.
[24]
Ibid., 153.
[25]
Ibid., 153.
[26]
David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission,
176.
[27]
Ibid., 169.
[28]
Ibid., 113.
[29]
Darrell L. Guder, ed., Missional Church,
149.
[30]
Rick Rouse and Craig Van Gelder, A Field
Guide for Missional Congregation, 24.
[31]
Craig Van Gelder, The Ministry of the
Missional Church, 105-106.
[32]
Craig Van Gelder, “The Hermeneutics of Leading in Mission,” in Journal of Religious Leadership, Vol. 3,
No. 1 & 2 (Spring & Fall 2004): 154. Van Gelder discuses these
dimensions extensively in his book, The
Ministry of the Missional Church, 106ff.
[33]
Craig Van Gelder, The Ministry of the
Missional Church, 108.
[34]
Gary M. Simpson, Critical Social Theory:
Prophetic Reason, Civil Society, and Christian Imagination (Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress Press, 2002), 87. Simpson quotes Habermas’s Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), 8-20. Gary Simpson is professor of Systematic
Theology at Luther Seminary, teaching courses in theology and mission.
[35]
Richard R. Osmer, Practical Theology: An
Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2008), 34, 35. Osmer is
professor of Christian Education in Princeton Theological Seminary. In this
book, he proposes four tasks of practical theology that help leaders in their
practical theological interpretation in leadership, discusses extensively about
the nature of integrating these four tasks that are essential in congregational
leadership. The four theological tasks are: descriptive-empirical,
interpretive, normative, and pragmatic.
[36]
Craig Van Gelder, “Method in Light of Scriptures and in Relation to
Hermeneutics,” in Journal of Religious
Leadership, Vol. 3, No. 1 & 2 (Spring & Fall, 2004): 51. See also
Van Gelder, The Ministry of the Missional
Church, 110.
[37]
Richard R. Osmer, Practical Theology,
84.
[38]
Dwight J. Zscheile, 56. (emphasis original).
[39]
Craig Van Gelder, The Ministry of the
Missional Church, 110.
[40]
Dwight J. Zscheile, 54.
[41]
Ibid. See also Bonheoffer, The Cost of
Discipleship (New York: McMillan, 1959), 92.
[42]
Craig Van Gelder, The Ministry of the
Missional Church, 112.
[43]
Craig Van Gelder, “The Hermeneutics of Leading in Mission,” 151.
[44]
Ibid. 141.
[45]
Ibid., 143.
[46]
Craig Van Gelder, The Ministry of the
Missional Church, 113.
[47]
Richard R. Osmer, Practical Theology, 4.
(emphasis mine).
[48]
Ibid., 176-178.
[49]
Ibid., 196.
[50]
Leslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a
Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 1989), 230.
