Church, Mission and Culture

Mission is the story of the Bible, the over-arching hermeneutic of the whole of Scripture – God rescuing people and his world. Amazingly, Jesus has given to his followers the keys that unlock this Good News. Yet few today, with a western mindset, have much of a God-framework. The Good News is incomprehensible to many: it seems too narrow in an age of pluralism, too certain in an age of relativism, too challenging in an age of consumerism and too hopeful in an age of skepticism.

But God has ways for us to engage with our times and places. And this is the setting for this course. We will grapple diligently with both our cultural realities and our theological foundations, and discover in doing so that we are driven afresh to the Jesus of the gospels. We find that his 1st century world is strikingly like ours – secular, urbanized and global. The missional dynamics of Jesus lie at the heart of the church’s way forward in the 21st century. The task of contextualizing Jesus’ approach does need doing, but requires far less adjustment than many would lead us to believe.

Jesus builds his church, and he builds from the bottom up, starting with the smallest unit, the making of a disciple. From this growing number of disciples he demonstrated and called out an altogether different kind of leader: ordinary men and women, but equipped and filled with the Holy Spirit. The challenge for us, like them, is to go on learning, experimenting and risking our lives for the sake of the unsurpassable pearl of God’s Kingdom mission, expressed through church communities shaped for gathering and scattering in our particular world.