sustain:if:able kiwi

missional church learning is on the road

One of my key tasks this year is teaching a new course, Missional Church Leadership.

Define missional church Steve? Missional church is about the future of God among the people of God.

So what Steve? Well, since course design should follow course theology, that means you can never teach missional church as a theory or set of ideas. Rather, you must allow learners to pay attention to the work of God among the people of God.

Practically this has included quite a number of innovations. One of my hopes was that we would be able to push the learning envelope by moving out of the classroom and going to a students’ context, to hear them, in context, talk about their context. Well, today is the first attempt.

I have just written the following for the lecture notes:
Welcome to Phil’s space. Being here reminds us that
1. Missional church is about real, living communities, and being present in their narratives NOT classroom learning of intellectual ideas.

2. Spaces shape learning. Be alert to how our interaction and your learning changes in new places. In Luke 10, Jesus sends us to other people’s spaces. A key skill of missional leaders will be the ability to create learning communities in other people’s spaces.

As part of the class Phil will talk about his local context. The class will be asked to reflect back to him the narratives they are hearing. We will then dwell in Scripture together. And so together I hope we will be increasing our skills around the cultivation of a missional imagination among real, living contexts.