i am a little behind in the blog world but things stick around so better late than never...
there has been a whole debate around the word missional - follow the links from bill kinnon to get a flavour. be warned it will take a while if you want to follow the links. and it may just seem like semantics. language is problematic. something new is used and it doesn't take long before it feels over used and co-opted and watered down. alternative worship, emerging church, incarnational etc are terms i have felt precious about but have faced this challenge... and i guess missional may suffer this problem. one of the posts with a lot of comments is al hirsch, mission-al as i'll call him, who is at pains to separate missional from emerging church which is probably a good thing. (i don't actually agree with why he distinguishes them - i think the emerging church descibes communties who practice the way of jesus in postmodern cultures which is gibbs/bloger's definition. hopefully most of them are missional i.e. have mission at heart. but it would be possible to be missional in totally different contexts.) what i like about mission-Al is that he has helped swing the pendulum in the conversation to being around mission. that's one of the surprising and even astonishing things in the uk - mission is so much more on the church's agenda all over which is great news...
That is great news. Hey Jonny, can you do me a huge favor and direct me to your top 5 list of emerging-missional conversationalists who currently live in England? People who blog about mission shaped faith in that context?
Posted by: Makeesha | July 03, 2008 at 06:43 PM
Yes I would be interested in that too
Posted by: Matt Stone | July 04, 2008 at 08:11 AM
Top 5? Bit top-down, that, isn't it? Isn't 'emerging' about bottom-up? ;)
Posted by: steve lancaster | July 04, 2008 at 12:53 PM
i'll go with steve and resist the question!...
Posted by: jonny | July 04, 2008 at 05:04 PM
ok, give me your bottom 5 ;) resist the question?! that's just mean. Come on, give an american girl a break now. Oh by the by Jonny, would love to visit anything you guys have going on when we head your way in Nov. now give me those blogs...please?
Posted by: Makeesha | July 05, 2008 at 11:42 PM