Don’t Be an Ekklesaphobe

David Fitch in full flight on getting a proper balance between what's wrong with the church...and what's right with it....

It happens on facebook when I give the slightest indication the church is God’s instrument in the world. It happens frequently when I am speaking and assert that God has empowered the church to extend Christ’s presence in the world. It happens when I coach church planters that are missionally oriented and ask them when they gather for worship. It happens when I engage my missional friends on one of the variants of the formula “missiology precedes ecclesiology.” It happens each time I meet someone who has been abused by the traditional church. Each time there is a out-sized reaction against organizing people into practices traditionally associated with being the church (this is especially true of the public worship gathering, or the ordination of clergy).


See the rest of his blog post here. 

Walk Humbly with the Lord

Viggo Mortensen is probably best-known as an actor and all-round artist. But as a theologian? Too intriguing for words. Yet his name appears as one of the editors (and also one of the contributors) of a newish book called Walk Humbly with the Lord: Church and Mission Engaging Plurality.

However, it turns out that the Viggo the actor isn't Viggo the theologian. The latter is a thelogian at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. He's published several books on theology.

The book has other familiar names amongst the contributors, including Stanley Hauerwas, John Drane, Andrew Walls, and Darrell Guder.

The essays cover the 1910 World Missionary Conference (an attempt to sift the history from the myth); Hauerwas on the Church is Mission; community, the fluidity of mission, the church in a multireligious Europe, the Canadian Church in the third millennium, being a Christian minority in a Muslim land, Andrew Walls on missiology as vocation, and much more. You can see a full list of the contents and contributors here.

The book is also available on Google books (in part, at least). Bruce Hamill has written a post about Hauerwas' essay, and there is more about that essay on the Prodigal Kiwis site.

Rose Uchem and missiology

A recent interview on the Sophia Network begins this way:

My name is Rose Uchem and I am from Nigeria.

I am a missionary and a senior lecturer at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka where I teach post-graduate and undergraduate courses in Christian Religious Education as well as Comparative and International Education. Before I got my present position in the university, I was involved in the training of missionaries; first with my order (Missionary Sisters of the Holy Rosary) for seven years and later with a male order, training seminarians (future priests) applying gender-sensitive perspectives at the Spiritan International School of Theology, Attakwu-Enugu for eight years.

I also set up an NGO called IFENDU which addresses issues of women’s human identity and seeks to create the necessary awareness on women‘s assigned subordinate status and to change this to that of equal partnership with men. It has special consultative status with the UN, and in the capacity of executive director of IFENDU, I create awareness on gender, culture and religion through workshops, seminars, conferences at national and international levels

I am currently in Oxford as a ‘Missiologist in Residence’ for a period of three months at the invitation of the Church Mission Society. While in Oxford I will give lectures and seminars with a focus on cross-cutting gender issues in mission both to CMS staff and to other centres for theological programmes.

Read the rest of this intriguing interview on the Sophia website