Missional God

Last year Ross Hastings published the book, Missional God, Missional Church, Hope for re-evangelising the West.

Kevin Ward, from the Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership, in Dunedin, has written a very good review of the book, one that makes you want to go out and buy it straightaway- especially if you've got any interest in mission. The review appears as a guest post on Jason Goroncy's blog. 

Ross Hastings may not be a name that's familiar to you: here's the biography that appears on the Regent College website:

Ross Hastings holds a PhD in organo-metallic chemistry from Queen’s University, Kingston and a PhD in theology from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, his native country. He has a vested interest in helping the Christian church understand contemporary science and in helping the scientific community benefit from theological and philosophical scholarship. Dr. Hastings teaches in the areas of pastoral theology, the theology and spirituality of mission, ethics, and the interface between science and Trinitarian theology. He has taught chemistry at high schools in England and South Africa, and also at Trinity Western University. He has served as a senior pastor in Kingston, Ontario; Montreal, Quebec; and Burnaby, British Columbia (BC). For eleven years, Dr. Hastings served in this capacity at Peace Portal Alliance Church in White Rock, BC. His theological dissertation is a comparative study of the Trinitarian theology of Jonathan Edwards and Karl Barth and is in the publication process. His first book, Missional God, Missional Church: Hope for Re-evangelizing the West, was released in 2012 with IVP Academic. Dr. Hastings serves as Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology at Regent College.

Chuck Olsen visit

“Transforming Sessions and Parish Councils Into Communities of Spiritual Leaders” a seminar led by Dr. Charles (Chuck) Olsen

Thursday 24 March 2011, from 3:30 to 5 p.m at Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership

All welcome. No charge.

A native Nebraskan, Dr. Olsen is a retired minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA). He has twenty-two years of pastoral and teaching experience. His special interests are church renewal and revitalization – both on a national and local church level. He was director of Project Base Church, a Lilly Endowment funded effort with the Institute of Church Renewal. Two books, The Base Church, and Cultivating Religious Growth Groups, were products of this venture into new and small group forms of Christian community.

As program director with the Heartland Presbyterian Center in Kansas City, Dr. Olsen directed the Lilly Endowment funded “Set Apart Lay Leader Project,” a four-year effort focusing on the integration of spirituality and administration in church boards and councils. His book, Transforming Church Boards Into Communities of Spiritual Leaders (Alban), tells that story. It was selected as one of the top ten religious books in 1997 by the Academy of Parish Clergy and is one of Alban’s all time best sellers.

Dr. Olsen founded Worshipful-Work: Center for Transforming Religious Leadership, an inclusive ecumenical ministry focusing on the integration of spirituality and administration. He teaches, writes, and facilitates the practice of spiritual discernment in religious bodies. And he is co-author, with Danny E. Morris, of Discerning God’s Will Together and, with Sister Ellen Morseth, of Selecting Church Leaders: A Practice in Spiritual Discernment, both from Alban and Upper Room. His latest book, The Wisdom of the Seasons: How The Church Year Helps Us Understand Our Congregational Stories, was released by Alban in October of 2009.

This will be Dr. Olsen’s second visit to Dunedin. He was last here in 2001.

Closing and listening

Things are a little up and down at the office here at present...hence not quite so many posts as usual, but hopefully over the next couple of weeks we'll settle into the rather odd routine of being here but not officially existing any longer.

John Daniel and I both finish at the end of March, for the record, but the National Mission Team/Office was officially closed a week ago last Friday. So it's a bit like a couple of phantoms wandering around an old house, haunting anyone who comes by, but not being particularly scary.

Jason Goroncy (pictured at right in a contemplative mood) presented the annual Inaugural Lecture at Knox College for Ministry and Leadership yesterday. It was centred around the Eucharist, had a rather odd title which currently escapes me, and hopefully will turn up as text on his blog in the next few days. At which point I'll pick up on all the things I missed either through finding neither of my pens worked, or through trying to think about something he'd just said and then missing the next bit, or through the couple of moments when I nodded off - having slept very badly the previous night. No fault of the lecture, Jason!

No offence, Jason! It was a great lecture. I just need a bit more time to absorb it...

STAANZ Conference 2010

The Annual conference of STAANZ (Systematic Theology Association of Aotearoa New Zealand) will be held at the Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership, Knox College, Arden Street, Dunedin on November 11-12, 2010.

Registration Details:

Conference Registration Fee: $25.00

Student Fee: $15.00

Optional Conference Dinner (Nanking Palace): $30.00

Accommodation is available within walking distance at motels around the north end of George Street, Great King Street and Cumberland Street. You will find a link to accommodation options on the Registration Page.

Limited accommodation will be available at Salmond College, a University of Otago student residence. Bed and Breakfast will be charged at $52.00 per night. Those wishing to book at Salmond College, please contact sc_admin@salmondcollege.ac.nz, and advise that you are attending the STAANZ Conference at Knox College.

For any further enquiries please contact Murray Rae at: murray.rae@otago.ac.nz

You can see the full details of the programme (has a distinctly ecclesiological bent) on the Otago University's Theology Dept page.

Being Christian in the South Pacific....and more!

2010 Conference - Being Christian in the South Pacific: Kiwi Christian Practice
Pastoral/Practical Theology in Aotearoa New Zealand
Monday and Tuesday, November 8 and 9
Monday, 9:30 to 5:00
Tuesday, 9:30 to 3:30

Location: Knox Centre Seminar Room, Hewitson Wing, Knox College
Arden Street, off Opoho Road, Dunedin

Cost: $10 donation to cover morning and afternoon tea/coffee/biscuits
Optional group dinner on Monday night at a local restaurant

Pastoral/practical theology stands at the intersection of Christian ministry and academic research. In pastoral/practical theology, we critically examine the practices of Christian ministry using theological and historical analysis as well as humanities and social science research methods.

Please forward this email to anyone who you think would enjoy this conference. Please consider proposing a paper, and please encourage post-graduate students to think about offering a paper. If you wish to register for the conference, please email Mary Somerville with your contact information: msomer@orcon.net.nz

Looking forward to seeing you in Dunedin,

Lynne Baab, Jacky Sewell, Anne Thomson, Chris Lee, and Mary Somerville -Steering Committee


Call for Papers
Pastoral/Practical Theology in Aotearoa New Zealand, 2010 Conference

We are seeking presentations that address a wide variety of topics related to congregational life in Aotearoa. We hope that graduates and current students of MMin, MTheol, DMin and PhD programs who studied topics related to congregations will consider presenting a summary of their research or one aspect of their research.

We are seeking papers for 20 and 40 minute slots. In a 20 minute slot, please plan on speaking for 15 minutes and allow five minutes for discussion. In a 40 minute slot, please plan on a 30 minute presentation and 10 minutes for discussion.

As a rule of thumb, you talk at about 100 words a minute, so a 15 minute paper (in a 20 minute slot) should equate to roughly 1,500 words, and a 30 minute paper (in a 40 minute slot) to about 3,000 words.

In submitting a proposed paper, please,
• indicate what sort of time slot you are applying for, remembering that most of us suffer from the occupational hazard of nearly always saying more than we think we’re going to.
• include a 50-100 word abstract of the proposed paper.

These should be sent to Lynne Baab at lynne.baab@otago.ac.nz, or if necessary by post to her at the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin, and should be received by July 30.

Take Overs, Journeys, Arts, Theology

It takes nothing for the 'pseud' to take over language; church jargon itself is full of it.

A colleague at work passed on the link to Andrew Rumsey's piece on the word, 'Journey' to me today, and I thought it was worth sharing. Rumsey writes with nifty English wit, and a surreal imagination that sometimes slides off the edge of intelligibility. I've been reading a few of his other pieces (there are only about two a year on the Ship of Fools site) and in general find him good company.

Having attended Lynne Baab's Knox Inaugural Lecture on Monday, which was about the Arts and Christianity, I was interested to find that Rumsey's first piece on the list, written back back in 2000, is about the same subject: how do the arts and Christianity mesh together without stomping on each other's toes?

He talks about the group, Theology Through the Arts (the link he gives is now out of date), so I went exploring a little further, found that this group's work is now 'pursued' under the aegis of Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts (which kind of makes it feel as though it's been taken over by the academics - or even hunted down?).

Theology Through the Arts' first major achievement was a festival of the arts entitled Sounding the Depths. You can still see the original programme online. Sounding the Depths was the culmination of the first phase of Theology Through the Arts. It aimed to draw together the strands of the project that [had]been most fruitful over the [previous] three years, and present them publicly in the form of a week of multi-media events.

Their second phase spanned from 2001 to 2008, when the group had its theological home at the University of St Andrews, and its church-related work at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. From there it seems to have shifted to Duke. During their second phase they engaged in rigorous academic research, as well as pursuing more fully the implications of 'theology through the arts' for the Church's engagement with culture and for 'grass roots' education.

To me this all sounds very academic - almost the antithesis of what the arts are about. And their primary aim was listed as:

to discover and demonstrate ways in which the arts can contribute towards the renewal of Christian theology

In the process, they sought:

• to find ways in which the arts can contribute to a sensitive and rigorous engagement of the Church with modern and postmodern culture
• to generate, through the arts, new methods of Christian education for use in the Church and wider community

Am I being picky, or does this all seem a bit too ivory tower for its own good? I know there are plenty of thinking artists - but do they think in the way academics think? Or is much/most of their thinking more of the reflective-active kind? Some artists, I suspect, don't 'think' in either sense; they work almost intuitively and make mistakes until they find what they're looking for.

Perhaps my use of the word 'theology' is too limited. But I'd hate to feel that art was being ramshackled into some clinical overcoat that ill-fitted it. Art, I suspect, is a much broader theology than what we mostly think of as theology - long-winded words and difficult by-ways -and probably doesn't want to be narrowed down into seminars and conferences and theses.

On the Duke site there's a summary of a lecture Nicholas Wolterstorff (author of Art in Action) gave: With analytical power and winsome directness, Wolterstorff questioned assumptions that often mark the conversation between theology and the arts today. In particular, he drew attention to the enormous changes in thinking about the arts that came about in the late eighteenth century – the appearance of the ‘fine’ arts as objects of ‘disinterested contemplation’, the notion that this represents art ‘coming into its own’, and, not least, the religious aura that art assumed to itself: art becomes the transcendent, social ‘other’, abstracted from the messy materiality of space and time.

This, he stressed is only one way of thinking about the arts, but not the way. He urged his audience to re-discover a wider vision that could embrace forms of art typically demoted (such as ‘mere’ craft), and that could therefore re-frame the theology-arts discussion for the years to come.

Sounds good - but what about the 'distinguished' lecture listed on the same webpage?: Early Visual Art as Patristic Theology: the Trinity, Christology, and the Economy of Salvation in Pictorial Form.

Does that sound like something the average artist would want looking over their shoulder while they were working?

Archives Blog

This notice from the Knox College Archives Research Centre will be of interest to readers of this blog:

We are now officially on the web. A Blog called Presbyterian Research has begun that includes both the Archives Research Centre and the Presbyterian Research Network. So far we have placed a Susan Jones Lecture on-line and over the next week or so other lectures will join hers. You will also enjoy posts from the Archives that will keep you in touch with research possibilities, up-coming events, news that may interest, and the general happenings around the Archives and the Theological site.

Please make the most of the Blog, bookmark it, and do respond; we will love to hear from you. Please tell others who will be interested by passing the address around, linking it to your parish websites, your personal face book page, twitter and any other social network. This way we can reach a wider audience. Our next effort will be an official Facebook page.

I've included a link to this blog in the links in the column on the right for your reference. Looking forward to the Facebook page!

Chasing the rabbit down the hole

I've just added Jason Goroncy's blog, Per-Crucem-ad-Lucem to the list of links at the right hand side of this blog. Things being what they are in the world of blog, I only discovered Jason's blog via the UK Tall Skinny Kiwi blog where a brief mention was made of Kevin Ward's Inaugural Lecture in February, which was given at the Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership.

The link on the UK site led me back to Jason's blog, where he's very helpfully provided the full text of Kevin's lecture, plus the response from Bruce Hamill. It's like travelling halfway around the world to find you're already home.

I'd attended Kevin Ward's lecture (It may be emerging, but is it church?), but my notes were a bit hazy in some areas as to what he'd said, so it's good to be able to pick up the details again. And I hadn't taken any notes of what Bruce said at all, for some reason, so finding his response there as well is a bonus.

One Voice - Malcolm Gordon

When my son was about eleven, he performed in several television skits for a national children's program, Spot On. One of the other young cast members was Malcolm Gordon, who has currently an ordinand at the Knox Centre of Ministry and Leadership.

Malcolm's creative talents are still well to the fore: he's recently brought out an album of songs called: One Voice. I've heard this album, and there are some great songs on it.

One Voice is a lot of things. It’s not only the name of Malcolm Gordon’s new album. It’s the name of an organization set up to help creativity thrive within Christianity. (If you’re wondering about where you can get a copy of the album, head to Manna Christian Stores or email orders@onevoice.org.nz.)

One Voice is a project exploring contemporary expressions of Christian worship.

I quote from the One Voice website: Christianity has had an interesting journey with ‘the arts’, being on the one hand the single avenue of artistic expression for large chunks of our Western history, and at other times, staunchly opposing what it deemed to be idolatrous.

Our spirituality is not easily definable, but it would be safe to say that it can’t be articulated without artistic creativity. Photography, design, poetry, music and dance all have something unique to offer. However we can’t presume that if we let our creativity loose, without parameters or guiding lights, that we’ll end up with something spiritually authentic.

That’s what One Voice is about; encouraging creative expression that is deeply embedded in the Christian story, and guided by the light of Jesus. Art should never be considered an end in itself, it is a mode of communication. It is, however, a mode of communication capable of an even richer palate of expression than language itself, which is precisely why it must be used in the service of the most wondrous story ever told.