I'm preaching my final sermon at the village Church in Wing tommorrow morning... so I decided to ditch the lectionary and give them a glimpse of the vision of the project/mission in Telford... Epistle = Acts 17 (it was a toss up between this and 1Thessalonians 2... surprise surprise) and the Gospel = John 4. I think I'll begin with the words in "Mission Shaped Church" which echo something I said at from Greenbelt 2 years ago...
Practitioners working at the edge of the Church are more in favour of planting as a response to what has happened when/where the good news of Christ has been sown in a culture, people group or local area. Some prefer to talk of sowing the gospel and seeing what results. The response shapes the form of Christian community. It is like a process of discerning the prior action of God. As such it is an outcome of the instinct that
Ecclesiology is a subsection of the doctrine of mision.
Planning for predertimned outcomes is legitimate but no longer primary. A mission-informed response, rather than a structural initiative is now seen as authentic.
...and will probably end with the words of Lao Tsu (from 'The shaping of things to come')...
Go to the people,
Live with them,
Learn from them,
Love them.
Start with what they know,
Build with what they have,
But with the best leaders, when the work is done, the task
Accomplished,
The people with say,
We have done it ourselves.
...the bit in between... well time will tell!
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