So this week in Missional Church Leadership class at Uniting College for Leadership & Theology we started exploring (a) what might be missional practices (yes, a debatable distinction) and (b) God’s call to dwell in a place, which seems counter-cultural these days. The theme in a sense was mission as incarnation expresssed in one’s local neighbourhood.
We had the wonderful Joanna Hubbard come and talk about her work at the Aldgate Village Well as a church-based comnmunity worker.
We explored Lesslie Newbigin, Susan Hope, Karina Kreminski, Simon Carey Holt, and Alan Roxburgh.
We pondered Luke 10 again.
We talked about the benefits and limitations of gathering demographic data, including from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the National Church Life Survey. I showed them how to do a Google Maps neighbourhood walk.
We discussed communities of geography and communities of affinity. We began to explore the practice of prayerfully listening and seeing in your local neighbourhood. This will be practiced by students over several weeks.
It has been nice to inherit a unit design by Steve Taylor and understand from the outset what kind of design is behind it, and to be able to bring my own spin to that as well. Plus the experience, albeit made extremely difficult by COVID, of helping churches start mission experiments while I was in Port Phillip East Presbytery, and consulting with other churches about their mission contexts.
It’s also nice that what I’m doing parallels what Paul Dongwon Goh is doing with his Awaken Adelaide cohorts.
If you’ve never seen the 2019 ABC Compass episode with Karina Kreminski you really should. And she’s here in SA next week.