What is Fresh Expressions and what might we learn from it?

A guest post by Mark Johnston.

For some time now, Fresh Expressions UK has been getting people’s attention as snippets of what the Church of England and other mainline denominations are doing in the UK reaches these shores. This year in July, Bishop Graham Cray, the leader of the Fresh Expressions movement in the UK was in New Zealand at the invitation of a couple of Anglican Diocese and several of us Presbyterians jumped on board to hear Bishop Cray, along with several Methodists and Baptists.

What is Fresh Expressions?

Fresh Expressions is best summed up as a movement in church planting that has taken off since the publication of a Church of England report in 2004 called “Mission Shaped Church”[1]. It’s not often that a CofE report releases energy and momentum in the church but this one did. It initially was written to sum up the state of the Church of England in its mission context and clarify its thinking about church planting as a strategy of parish mission. It however became a document that captured something of the challenge to re-think the parish principle and put forward theological and missiological reasons for endorsing and resourcing a whole host of experiments in church life and forming of new communities of faith. These experiments might have previously fallen outside the inherited ecclesial and economic unit definitions of a “church”. Mission Shaped Church reclaimed them as real expressions of church, genuine attempts to embody the life of Christ in new and changing cultural circumstances.

Fresh Expressions emerged out of the coalescing of various interest and energies identified both by the research and writing that went into the report and a desire to work the report’s practical suggestions to the CofE into something tangible on the ground. When Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury made the report a centrepiece of his episcopal leadership, official energies, resources and permission-giving became available to sustain a movement of common interest. It is noteworthy however those leaders in the movement found themselves less propelled by the official endorsement than a sense of the Spirit of God doing something serendipitously and they were caught up in it. Fresh Expressions seemed to emerge and evolve from a collaborative intent and joining of hands rather than driven by top down policy or a strategic plan of any kind. The subsequent addition of Methodist, URC, Congregational and Baptist partners indicated there was more to this movement than a one church’s re-thinking local mission.

What makes Fresh Expressions interesting and more durable than a single church growth strategy or method is its umbrella like nature. Rather than prescribing a particular approach it has welcomed diversity in approach, form and to a certain extent theological colour. For instance there are tales of church planting an Anglo-Catholic expression in a city supermarket, the formation of new social justice communities, new rural faith communities, “goth” church, a church that makes bread, as well as more conventional congregational plants. But this is not without being held together by a central idea and some key theological reference points. The big idea that defines Fresh Expressions is “establishing a form of church for our changing cultures, established primarily for the benefit of people who are not yet members of any church”.

It is church planting in a broad sense. Fresh Expressions defines Church Planting as “the process by which the seed of the life and message of Jesus embodied by a community of Christians is immersed for mission reasons in a particular cultural or geographic context”[2]. It includes the efforts of inherited congregations to plant a new expression alongside the old, intended to engage different cultures, generations and sub-cultures, in other words people “not like them”. It affirms pioneer individual or teams who feel called to start from scratch and establish a new form of witness in marginalised areas of cities often left behind by middle class churches. It provides support for new cultural expressions of church amongst 2^nd and 3^rd generation immigrants who are seeking to find culturally appropriate ways of engaging “third culture” peers and friends, who shun both traditional immigrant churches and the “white” churches. It also encourages the emerging attempts at new monastic and lifestyle communities to embody Christ in the midst of culture.

Missiologically “Fresh Expressions” arises out of the recognition that the attractional mode the church operates in is flawed and contributes now to a major disconnection between churches and huge sections of society. Society has changed and the church is finding itself stranded. This is exacerbated by operational theologies which make mission a tack on church activity or duty rather than a gift of participating in the mission of God in Christ towards the world. “It is not the Church of God that has a mission in the world, but the God of mission who has a church in the world” [3]. If the church belongs to the mission of God then the church is no longer the centre of mission and has no reason to draw energy towards itself and its own preservation. This frees the church for a more light-footed and responsive form of existence, to become sent, to cross boundaries into new spaces, to be expressed in new shapes and forms suited to the context.

Church planting with a theological underpinning

However “Fresh Expressions” is not interested in reducing church planting to strategy. It is a theological intention after the pattern of Christ. Authentic church planting is shaped by the incarnation. The incarnational principle calls the church to identify with and enter the world as it is, to give up its own power, preferences and likes in order that Christ might be embodied in contexts where people no longer relate to our expressions of church. The issue is not relevance, it is incarnation. Irrelevance is a symptom of churches that have become non-incarnational. The incarnational principle expresses itself as church dies to self (John 12:24) and gives up its preferences and privileges for the sake of being Christ to the other (1 Corinthians 9:19-23). It is not church or worship or community as we would like it. It is not cloning. It is discovering what church could be for and with others who may not be like us. This is difficult DNA for us Presbyterians, since our origins as a colonial settler church were seldom sourced in this way. Fresh Expressions is recalling the church to one of its core DNA.

Fresh Expressions are not immune to the criticism that this call to contextualised mission can lead to a loss of distinctiveness, the message and form of the gospel so accommodated to the language and forms of the hearers that it loses its content and edge. It recognises that planting in the pattern of Christ is also the pattern of the cross, there is a world to counter. There is always a tension between adapting and identifying with context and becoming colonised by that culture. That is the tightrope walked both by inherited forms of church and fresh expressions. Church planting from the incarnational principle begins in a journey of cross shaped sacrifice and planting with this DNA will determine how a fresh expression wrestles with syncretistic temptations in the future.

Lastly the pattern of Christ shapes church planting by the resurrection. There is a world to anticipate and whatever a fresh expression becomes – it is called to become a pointer to God’s future. Fresh Expressions reminds the church that too much attention can be given to the passing on of the inheritance of the past and too little as an anticipation and foretaste of God’s future. What Fresh Expression’s celebrate is the possibility of church as hopeful and expressive of what salvation means in the ordinary and everyday realities of many different kinds of context. For dispirited and disbelieving people in those contexts, Fresh Expressions are attempts to offer another kind of lense to see God and God’s purposes by, a foretaste sufficient for people to say, “whatever eternal life means, if it means life like what I see here then …”.

This does not come about by good intentions or churches with creative ideas. Fresh Expressions is a movement that regards mission as a Spirit event. It requires discerning the Spirit of God and allowing God to bring forth the future in fresh and “ready to be surprised” ways. This does not mean the entire abandonment of inherited church, but rather the intention to take incarnationally motivated risks, to corporately practice deep listening to God, context and one another and to connect this to shapes of common life, activity and obedience. Fresh Expressions challenges the church to begin with “divine listening” in mission and relativise our dominant default practices of strategic analysis and planning. The biblical narrative reminds us that God creates new futures in the most inauspicious of places.

Six years down the track, “Fresh Expressions” has become a large network of support, story sharing and research, intentional collaboration and training that is spread across the major mainline denominations in England. Individual ventures to form and plant a new expression of church can register with the Fresh Expressions network and currently about 2000 Church of England and 1000 Methodist Fresh Expressions are on the books. Figures for other denominations are not available yet. Telling and publicising stories of what ordinary people and churches are doing on the ground is an important vehicle for spreading encouragement and vision. Professionally produced DVD’s of these stories have been released to spread the word. The website acts as a hub. Individual denominations make their own decisions about what funding they will make available to their own fresh expression projects. Ecumenical cooperation takes place at the training, equipping and support level through regional “FEASTS”. Several denominations have now developed ordained pioneer ministry tracks in their theological colleges and selection criteria processes have been modified to take account of and discern “church planting” or pioneer gifting and callings. Resources for church leader and planting teams and short-term course have been developed. Critiques[4] and research of Fresh Expressions has continued to be published and this is regarded as healthy addition to a movement which is evolving as a practice based and learning organisation. Its structures are lightweight, based on high levels of trust and collaborative working.

Benefits of Fresh Expressions in our own situation

So what does Fresh Expressions bring into a local situation where church members or a leader is keen to develop a new way of engaging the community or un-churched people? Fresh Expressions firstly helps to give some language and framework to this desire. It recasts it as matter of embodiment. How is the life of God to be expressed amongst these people in such a way that they might encounter Christ for themselves? Fresh Expressions affirms that one way forward may be to intentionally plant a communal expression of the gospel that is more responsive to their realities and context. Many of our churches planted and grown in one kind of soil find themselves amidst increased cultural and lifestyle diversity, in much changed soil conditions, and limited in their ability to grow an engagement with people unlike themselves. The reality is while some churches adapt, planting the seeds of church into the changed conditions allows for more people in more conditions and cultures to find a welcome and a home.

Secondly Fresh Expressions is positive about the role that inherited and present modes of church have to play. This is not a prescription for ditching the old and embracing only what is new and different. There is an affirmation of the catholicity of the church and the need for new alongside and in relationship with the inherited modes of the church. Churches are encouraged to plant new expressions within “parishes” and to creatively maintain the apostolic link to tradition to fund their imaginations and faithfulness to the Gospel. However at the same time inherited churches are urged to practice cultural hospitality by allowing space and permission for experimentation and radical developments to emerge.

Thirdly Fresh Expressions has developed a sense of “best practice” to aid in the church planting task. Tellingly it urges church planting normally not to begin with corporate worship. Beginning with worship events has tended to perpetuate attractional models of church, often growing by transfer growth from other churches, failing to evolve as contextual rooted expressions and resembling cloning of church than genuine fresh expressions. A process of intense listening to context and God is urged accompanied by loving and serving people in the desired locations or social contexts. This becomes a formative journey for community to emerge, the exploration of what discipleship means and finally the public shaping of church.

Fourthly Fresh Expressions as a movement is developing resources that build capacity in churches concerned for church planting. Their development of “Mission shaped Intro” and “Mission shaped ministry” training materials are designed to introduce people to church planting and equip motivated members of churches who may go on to form a team for church planting. Much of the story-telling material, available in DVD form, offer a catalogue of what God is doing through ordinary people taking risks to innovate and grow new expressions of God’s life in their communities. It is hoped that the production of a New Zealand equivalent will provide a diverse range of stories which can inspire and illuminate the art of the possible.

Fifthly, Fresh Expressions is building up a considerable body of research and reflection upon church planting from a mainline denominational base. It does not claim to have all the answers and is intent on learning from the grass-roots activity of experimentation, theological reflection and a praxis based learning cycle. For instance Graham Cray drew attention to possible sources of failure in church planting due to attempts at cloning, being too event centred and burning people out in resource hungry “attractive” events, lacking long term investment of people and funding, lone ranger, personality centred and CEO type leadership models, and the failure to start with key DNA (expressive of the Trinitarian God, incarnational, transformative, disciple-making and relational).

That is a good place to finish. Fresh Expressions is not a new word for contemporary worship services or community projects. Fresh Expressions in the end is not a focus on “forms” or “expressions” but the kind of intentionality that accompanies church becoming the embodiment of Christ in the world. A church can only grow from the DNA present in the seed. “Unless and until the Kingdom and mission are in the DNA of the seed of the church what is planted will prove to be sterile. If mission is not located in the identity of the church, planting is very unlikely to recover it.”[5]

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[1] Mission Shaped Church (London: Church House Publishing, 2004).

[2] Mission Shaped Church, p. 32.

[3] Mission Shaped Church, p. 85.

[4] Louise Nelstrop & Martyn Percy. Evaluating Fresh Expressions: explorations in emerging church: responses to the changing face of ecclesiology in the Church of  England (London: Canterbury Press, 2009).

[5] Mission Shaped Church, p. 33.

‘”What Happened Next?”: Vincent Donovan, Thirty-five Years On’

Dear Bishop,

… Suddenly I feel the urgent need to cast aside all theories and discussions, all efforts at strategy, and simply go to these people and do the work among them for which I came to Africa. I would propose cutting myself off from the schools and the hospital and just go and talk to them about God and the Christian message. Outside of this, I have no theory, no plan, no strategy, no gimmick, no idea of what will come. I feel rather naked. I will begin as soon as possible … (Vincent J. Donovan)

I will always be grateful for my being introduced to Christianity Rediscovered: An Epistle to the Masai by Vincent J. Donovan, who I’ve posted on before. I can’t recall how many copies that I’ve given away over the years but it runs well into double figures (a wee plea: this is not a gloat but an indication of how highly I view this book). The book continues to have a profound influence on the way I think about Church, mission and the Gospel. Yet like many readers of this wonderful story, I was always left with a set of frustrating questions: ‘What happened next?’ ‘Did the Masai Donovan encountered go on to do the self-theologising and self-ecclesiologicalising that he (in the spirit of Roland Allen) had hoped that they would?’ ‘What happened to Donovan himself?’ etc. So I was absolutely thrilled yesterday to pick up the latest copy of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research (33/2 April 2009) and read John P. Bowen’s article entitled ‘”What Happened Next?”: Vincent Donovan, Thirty-five Years On’. The story is significantly sadder than I had hoped, but Bowen’s piece is no less important for that. Bowen also draws attention to his forthcoming edited book The Letters of Vincent Donovan, to be published by Orbis Books.

And while I’m drawing attention to newies, here’s two more to look out for:

• A new journal: Wunderkammer
• A new book: ‘What’s Wrong with Sin?’ by Derek R. Nelson

Bruce Hamill: ‘Response to Kevin Ward’s Inaugural Lecture’

Rev Dr Kevin Ward’s recent lecture – ‘It may be emerging, but is it church?’ – has sparked a good deal of constructive conversation, a conversation that was kicked off by a brief public response to the lecture by one who had enquired after one of Kevin’s earlier lectures – ‘So where’s the theology in all this? – the Rev Dr Bruce Hamill. Here’s Bruce’s gracious and insightful response to Kevin’s paper:

Introduction

Thanks for the privilege of responding to today very briefly, in just 10 minutes… Kevin, those who know you expect nothing less than a broad-visioned, scholarly, insightful, pastoral, provocative but conciliatory lecture, grounded in your passion for the church and the gospel. You have not disappointed us…

Since I am expected to ask theological questions I will try not to disappoint.

Right Question?

I particularly liked the provocative title… however, as I have thought about the relation between the title and the concluding answer, I reached the conclusion that, for all its provocation this question is not quite right. Not that I want to avoid your question, but perhaps to narrow down the scope of my response…a better question might be: Does this movement within the church (or among the churches) point the way forward for reform of the body of Christ? Does this movement with its 3 foci of (1) alignment with postmodernism (2) relevance (3) incarnationalism have the theological resources for a missional church in our time? Now my suspicion is that your answer to this question would be a nuanced one, but probably, like mine, a ‘no’. Indeed the last half of your paper demonstrates how the emergent church consistently shows a conflict with the classical marks of the church – a strong indicator that its theological principles and direction is fundamentally flawed. In this respect my response is, I suspect in basic agreement with your view (particularly in the latter half of your paper)

Incarnation and Mission

However, if this is the case, then I fear that the framework you inherit from Niebuhr and others in the missiology movement is too close to that used by the emergent church itself, to really expose its flaws. In what remains of my few minutes response I want to indicate some of the tensions within your argument.

To begin with I would note that your adoption of the term incarnation, as an adjective (‘incarnational’) to represent a stance which is neither isolationist nor accomodationist, raises my theological antennae. This appears to me to be a sociologising of the language of theology – of incarnation – which trades on its theological background.

So to a more directly theological question: What is the incarnation? (in just 5 minutes!) And how does it relate to the church’s cultural existence and mission?

David Congdon, a Princeton theologian who has influenced my response to this, says:

‘the incarnation is sui generis, i.e., it is wholly unique and unrepeatable. In short, the incarnation is an event, not an idea that can be applied or a process that can be completed or a reality that can be replicated.’

What I believe lies behind this is the whole doctrine of divine grace emerging from the church’s experience of salvation in the raising of the crucified Jesus. Namely, that the life of Jesus originated unnecessarily (contingently) and freely from God’s transcendent act and being. In the incarnation God’s freedom from us is the basis for God’s freedom for us in the life of Jesus.

In this sense Jesus life represents a break in the fabric of culture and tradition and original sin. It introduces a radical newness from the Word of God. In this sense the church came to talk of him as being born of a virgin and also suggest that the Holy Spirit ‘overshadowed’ even the maternal contribution to Jesus existence. God enters into the physical conditions of human life, adopting, as it were, the human condition, however this is not an accommodation to or adaption to culture, but rather human culture is here accommodated to the Word of God.

So as Congdon argues, the incarnation cannot be a model for us. However, it does transform and con-form our life. As already enfleshed and enculturated, fallen human beings, we are, because of the incarnation and the form and history it took, reculturated (that’s my word) by God.

In Christ we are not made ‘incarnational’, but a given a history that conforms to his history culminating in death and resurrection. It is here that we see the weakness of the link so often made between ‘incarnation’ and ‘adaptation to human culture’. ‘As the Father sent me…’ refers not to his incarnation but to the form of his life culminating in crucifixion and resurrection – a transformative, salvific encounter with culture.

Other Missional Language in Tension

Let me mention some further places where I think the language of the earlier half of your paper leads you closer to the framework of the ‘emerging church’ than the latter half of your paper should allow. You suggest that the aim of missional thinking is a ‘culturally indigenous church’. According to my dictionary “indigenous” means: “born in or originating from where it is found”. If however, the church is created by the crucifixion and resurrection of the incarnate Word it may look like its surrounding culture (like Paul sought to in 1 Cor 9 in order to serve those cultures) but it will not originate from where it is found. The cultural processes that we rely on in the creation of the church are not indigenous processes of human meaning-making. They are the processes whereby God “crunches” from the old order, in all its indigenous and alienated diversity  and constant change, a new social order. Jesus very definitely did take the human context in all its particularity seriously, seriously enough to get crucified by it (as you point out). Seriously enough to spend most of his time with those who functioned as essentially non-representative of the culture – the culturally marginalised. I contend that to take culture seriously as Jesus did, is not to conform to its agenda.

As you say ‘there are limits to how far the culture can set the agenda and determine the shape’. My contention is that the issue is not the presence of a limit, but how that limit is set (and who determines it). I believe it is not by the balancing of principles, especially if one of those principles is Andrew Walls’ rather cosy ‘the gospel is at home in every culture and every culture is at home in the gospel’. Such a principle, even if balanced by the pilgrim principle which says that ‘the gospel is never fully at home’, makes the cross the exception rather than the culmination of Christ’s life. One cannot serve two masters, Christ and Culture (as Walls’s balancing act suggests). Cultural processes must have their limits set for them by Christ in the formation of his body, or our enlightenment culture becomes the default determiner of this process.

Church is not people who ‘have the gospel’ (like some ideal) and then apply it, enlightenment style, to the world’s forms. They are worldly people being re-formed by Spirit and Word and re-culturated into a new creation and an anticipation of the kingdom.

Barth, Form and Content

Which brings me to Karl Barth’s problem. He says that there is no ‘sacred sociology’, however I feel he needs to be challenged, by those like John Milbank, to understand the need of a theological sociology – a fuller ecclesiology.

Quoting Barth you say, “If then the church has been, and indeed should (the should is your addition) have its forms determined by whatever the current “political, economic and cultural models” of “its situation in world history” are, does that mean that anything goes?” [loaded question!] Barth has no “should”. I suspect he does not see such accomodation as an ecclesiological virtue – just an inevitability. However, I want to go beyond Barth and challenge the easy separation between form and content. Not only is it not true that anything goes (as you also clearly argue), but it is true that the form as well as the content should be subject to Christ and the Spirit (as you hinted at in places in your paper). This claim does not, as many seem to fear, imply that it will be a fixed form, or that to believe this requires identifying the form that Christ gives the church with a human form from the post. On the contrary it simply requires a formative process, by which enculturated people attend to Word and Sacrament, not just in their private spiritualities but also in their social habits and structures. This is in my view what it means to be a Reformed Church – constantly being re-formed socially.

Thanks again for the chance to respond to your stimulating lecture.

On Being the Church of Jesus Christ in Tumultuous Times: A Review

Joe R. Jones, ON BEING THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST IN TUMULTUOUS TIMES (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2005). Pp. xxx + 239. $27.00, ISBN: 9781597522762. A review.

Joe R. Jones, author of the massive The Grammar of Christian Faith and Doctrine, and who Stanley Hauerwas names ‘the best unknown theologian in America’ (how would Hauerwas know?), is well aware of at least two important realities that inform good theology. First, that theology is a discipline not of the academy but of the believing community which is ever to be that ‘sort of community that sustains a vigorous and continuing conversation within itself as to who has called it into being, to whom it is responsible, and what it is called to be and to do’ (p. xiii). Second, that Christian theology has its ground and end in the redeeming economy of the Triune God. These two convictions inform this collection of essays, sermons, and prayers composed over four decades.

The volume is made up of three sections. In the first, he addresses what it means to be the Church, that ‘broken body [which] must strive, in the midst of its brokenness in tumultuous times, to remember its calling and mission as an alternative community living an alternative way of life under the Lordship of Jesus Christ‘ (p. xiv). He repeatedly posits (pp. xvi, 6, 21, 35-6, 51, passim) his working definition of the Church:

The church is that liberative and redemptive
community of persons
called into being
by the Gospel of Jesus Christ
through the Holy Spirit
to witness in word and deed
to the living triune God
for the benefit of the world
to the glory of God.

Jones, a confessing pacifist ‘with many questions about how to be a pacifist’ (p. xxiv), contends that wherever Jesus’ body lives in the world, there the Church is properly a political entity with a distinct theology and ethic, and whose political witness is never for itself but is for the benefit of the world. Thus with definition above before him, Jones, in the tradition of that prisoner on Patmos, pens ‘A letter to the Churches After 9/11′ in which he reminds the church that it is ‘not called into existence by the American way of life, not called into existence in order to punish evildoers, not called into existence to endorse any given political regime, and not called into existence to protect Christians and wreak vengeance on nonchristians. But it does exist for the “benefit of the world,” though not on the world’s own terms regarding what it finds beneficial as an endorsement of the way it prefers to live’. When the Church, either ecumenically or as a particular congregation, is unclear about how to answer the key questions of its own identity ‘then its life will be a miasma of disarray and confusion’ (p. 6). Jones consistently names nationalism for the destructive and deceitful idol that it is, calling the Church to allegiance to its Lord alone, rather than serve two masters.

Jones turns in the second, third and fourth essays to a reflection on the Church’s illiteracy wherein he argues that the Christian community whose ‘language of faith has too often become hallow and empty’ has become ‘illiterate’ and ‘uneducated’ (p. 11). The Church needs to recover its ‘distinctive language’ (p. xv), its own voice – or that of her Lord’s – lest it be repeatedly ‘overwhelmed and held hostage by the nation-state and its political discourses and practices’ (p. xxiv), and whose discourse and practice form a necessary purlieus for doing theology. The witnessing Church requires a literacy in the Gospel: ‘The Gospel is not willy-nilly whatever people choose it to be. It is not just any presumably good or comforting news. But to be able to hear well and to witness well, the church must incessantly cultivate an understanding of the Gospel and the light it throws on the world. Whenever the church has neglected this cultivation, this education, it has itself become a wandering nomad, bedeviled by the mirages of passing fancies and fads’ (p. 14). He calls for a recovery of the Church’s educational processes that accentuate learning the Gospel’s content and giving it intelligent expression for the world. This doing of theology is not a luxury (or responsibility) for a few but for all the people of God. That said, the Church also needs to recover, he argues, a sense of the pastor as teacher and theologian for the community, to equip the community of theologians for ek-static movement towards and in the world as witness to God’s loving life (see pp. 21-34).

In the second of the three sections, ‘Theological Baselines for Doing Church Theology’, Jones explores, among other themes, notions of faith, soteriology, trinity, and Jewish-Christian dialogue. The essay on salvation (chapter 7) outlines the basis upon which believers have good reason to hope in an apokastasis panton. He argues that ‘the logic of a radical incarnation/atonement view centred in Jesus Christ moves resolutely to the final conclusion that all we be ultimately saved by God’s sovereign grace’ (p. 119). It is of little surprise, therefore, to read that Jones lists among his most significant influences and conversation partners, Karl Barth, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne.

Also, not a few of the essays betray Jones’ indebtedness to Søren Kierkegaard and to that Dane’s insistence that ‘to be a Christian is to learn how to be a Christian’ (p. 51). This American nonconformist does not, however, share Kierkegaard’s despairing thoughts on the Church more generally, or the latter’s over-subjectivism. Instead, Jones persuasively posits that learning how to be a Christian ‘involves being a member of a community that has characteristic discourses and practices about the narrative of God’s grace’ (p. 67). Little doubt, if Kierkegaard had a different model of Church in mind when he made his bold criticisms, he would agree with Jones here. Jones’ collection includes two fine chapters on Kierkegaard: one on Kierkegaard’s thoughts on authority and revelation; the other on Kierkegaard as ‘Spy, Judge, and Friend’ in which he outlines the basic life, contributions and contours of Kierkegaard’s thought. He laments that while Kierkegaard ‘was one of the most influential intellectuals for the twentieth century’ today ‘I find few entering divinity students that can spell his name, fewer still who have read anything of his, fewer yet that have benefited from his friendship’. He describes Kierkegaard as ‘a Spy who will push you into inward places of hiddenness you are reluctant to explore, a Judge who will indict your vagaries of life with inescapable and relentless precision and vivacity, but finally a Friend who might spiritually edify you on the multifaceted journey of becoming a Christian‘ (p. 154). He proceeds:

‘With uncanny prescience, Kierkegaard knew he would someday be famous but feared and loathed the prospect that he would fall into the hands of the professors, who would analyze and reduce his life and writings to a thumbnail sketch or footnote, or even to a voluminous narrative, but would never realize that the whole of his literature was directed even to the professor as an existing person who still had to exist somehow. He criticized professors, philosophers, and theologians unmercifully for building grand mansions of theory and thought only to live their actual, existing lives in the barnyard, feeding daily out of the pig trough. The point here is this: intellectuals are given to the pursuit and development of thought, concepts, and ideas, and they can easily fool themselves into supposing that if they have thought the thought they have also lived the thought. No, says Kierkegaard; to live the thought means to have one’s living passions and decisions shaped by the thought. Intellectuals are inclined to forget the actual passions and concrete decisions that shape their daily living, and therefore are forgetful of their actual existing. Their theories cannot – of themselves – encompass and shape the theorist’s existential reality without decision and persistence in passions’ (p. 155).

The final section is made up largely of pastoral prayers and some moving sermons, including those preached by Jones at ordination and funeral services.

While few will be convinced of all Jones’ claims, this an engaging and at times provocative miscellany properly written with one eye on the Church (and not least his own Disciples of Christ denomination the focus on which, at times, gives the reader a sense that she is reading an in-house review) and one on God as both God and Church direct their engaging gaze to the world. The reader would have been better served with the inclusion of an index and a little more editing out of repetitious material. That said, this book will assist the Church to better understand, celebrate and practice the good and missional news of Jesus Christ in tumultuous times.

David Livingstone on video

The Royal Society has made available online an informative documentary of David Livingstone FRS, missionary, explorer, doctor and natural historian. A team of experts is now publishing Livingstone’s letters online, including those in the Royal Society’s archives. While it is not the most exciting documentary I’ve ever seen, it is a wonderfully informative introduction nevertheless to an important figure in Victorian church, and missiological, history, describing Livingstone’s adventures and introducing us to an exciting new project. The video can be downloaded here.

The website that the documentary refers to is Livingstone Online.

Missiologists meet to Brainstorm on Asia Mission

Today, some prominent western missiologists have met in Bangkok with some of their Asian counterparts for the first international conference of the Asian Society of Missiology. Meetings will take place over the next few days on the theme ‘Asian Mission: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow’. It would be good to remember these meetings in our prayers.

Dr. Timothy K. Park, ASM president and associate professor of Asian Mission at Fuller Theological School of Intercultural Studies has commented: ‘Asian churches are emerging as new forces of world mission, but have not been fully developed to play their unique roles in the missionary movement of the Church’.

More information here.