Tuesday, September 27, 2011

UK adventures 6 – cliff college, emerging and fresh?

I’m at the lovely Cliff College. The views are fabulous and there are some lovely trees to hug. I’m here for two things.

First, to input into their Master of Mission programme, in particular their Emerging Church stream. Which has produced a fairly healthy twitter stream of folk debating how to define emerging church cf fresh expressions. Obviously quite a contested field in this part of the world!

I have gone with a world/God/church formulation; which provides a way to frame the Gibbs and Bolger definition –

communities that practice the way of Jesus within postmodern cultures (Emerging Churches, 33).

I am then taking a mission perspective on that, using the six paradigms of mission in David Bosch’s Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (American Society of Missiology Series). I will animate that with six mission stories, ways that the world/God/church formulation has been made concrete in history. Which I hope will generate some real mission thinking around “emerging.”

The second reason I am here is to help kick of their new PhD in Missiology. This sounds an exciting development, a professional research degree in mission and to their first cohort, I’ll be offering them some of my recent research. More on that tomorrow. For now, I must pop outside once again and enjoy sun, views, trees. With a cup of tea!

Posted by steve at 11:17 PM

2 Comments

  1. nice definintion 🙂

    Comment by lynne — September 28, 2011 @ 9:59 am

  2. always cups of tea (milk no sugar, right?) 🙂

    Comment by lorna — September 29, 2011 @ 5:27 am

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