Thursday, February 02, 2012

a day’s retreat with Uniting world

Today I am spending the day with Uniting World, who are the overseas mission arm of the Uniting Church of Australia. My task is to input into the 19 staff, who have gathered on retreat. (It means a long day, as they are meeting in Sydney, so a 5 am start, back in Adelaide by 7 pm).

I think I will frame my time with them around two questions.

First, what do we do with the word “mission”? I will tell a couple of stories that might be a window into the current mission state of the Uniting Church. One will reflect on how church folk are shaped today by their previous experience of mission, the other on our tendency to reduce mission. I hope that will provoke some discussion on how we frame, imagine and talk mission today.

Second, I will ask them about the Uniting Church Preamble, and what is the missiology embedded in it, and what that might mean.

I also have some global mission stories, which I have prepared as takeaway postcards, along with some recent non-Western mission thinking, which perhaps I might salt through the conversation.

I am not at all sure what and who I will find, and my brief has been fairly vague. So I’m feeling a tad nervous, but am praying that some connection points get made and that we all leave a little richer.

Posted by steve at 05:09 AM

1 Comment

  1. So how did it go? 🙂

    Comment by Mark Illingworth — February 3, 2012 @ 8:54 am

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