Overview

The mission church literature seems to be dominated by idealized conceptions of the benefits of equipping congregations to participate in local mission work. This investigation challenges this idealism, by paying critical attention to congregants' ordinary theologies that develop in reaction to the communication of Missio Dei theology to them. Their voices are absent from the formal literature. The study employs rescripting methodology to modify key assumptions made in the formal ecclesiological literature by drawing on insights that come from Christians' ordinary theological voices. The study traces how the introduction of a Missio Dei theology to a British Reformed congregation had a significant impact on them. A small team of Christian leaders communicated Missio Dei theology to this church over a period of six years. It found that mission changes came at substantial personal cost to the church's members: 1) a schism occurred when congregants attempted to remove the leader responsible for these changes from his office as church pastor, and a third of congregants left the church because they did not want to embrace the church's new mission identity; 2) three divergent groups then emerged--two of them wanted different kinds of churches that seemed incompatible; 3) two thirds of members supported and participated in the church's mission activities, which put strains on some of their families; 4) unresolved tensions continued to impact the congregation throughout the whole change process; 5) unexpectedly, for a Reformed church, a third group made up of women developed prophetic practices that arose due to the mediation of Missio Dei theology. Vitally, this thesis challenges the notion that helping churches to become mission-focused will make them thrive.

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9781666736267

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Dr. Hardy is to be congratulated for tackling the vitally important subject of mission theology with sensitivity and insight. Using original empirical data, his study provides a corrective to idealized mission theology and advances the academic conversation in ordinary theology. I commend it most warmly to students, church leaders, and scholars. --Mark J. Cartledge, London School of Theology In this important congregational study, Andy Hardy dares to test his professional practice as a mission educator by investigating what happens when his graduates work out their missio Dei theology of mission in a church. He skillfully identifies the complex reactions to such a theology; its highs and lows; its unintended and unexpected costs and consequences. As an innovative study of ordinary missiology, there is challenge and encouragement here for mission practitioners and educators alike. --Andrew Rogers, University of Roehampton

Author Information

Andrew Hardy has been involved in planting missional churches and developing missional leaders for about thirty years. He has had extensive experience in leading churches, as well as having been the chair of the National Leadership Team of a UK-based Christian denomination. He has spent the last fourteen years in designing and offering degree-level missional leadership programs for a UK-based mission college. He currently works as Director of Research for ForMission College. He has also been extensively involved in mentoring missional church leaders and doing consultancy work in the field of missional education and missional church change management processes.

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