Why (and where) you should get some theological (by which I really mean biblical) education

The term “polycrisis” gets used a lot these days to name a peculiar consequence of globalisation: the collision of expanding systems in shock—energy, climate, geo-politics, finance, etc., with AI accelerating the chaos—in a confined planetary space.

The world has reached some sort of tipping point, which may or may not prove to be catastrophic but which arguably signals the irreversible transition from an age during which humanity has flourished within the natural order to an age of human domination over the natural order. This new age is often called the Anthropocene, though ironically the dominance of the anthropos is already being threatened by an AI insurgency. Serves us right!

The church also has to navigate this difficult transition—these birth pains of a new and very uncertain age.

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The stones will cry out
I have Daniel Hoffman to thank for this little aperçu. Jesus is riding on a young horse (pōlon), perhaps awkwardly on a young donkey, descending the Mount of Olives towards Jerusalem (Lk. 19:37). There is no explicit reference to Zechariah 9:9, but presumably the allusion was not lost on… ()
Why the “missional church” must also be prophetic
The books I’ve been reading on “missional church” have a couple of key objectives in common: to describe the progress of the Western church towards a new “missional” paradigm, and to map that paradigm on to an expansive reading of the biblical narrative. It’s an obvious, perhaps inevitable,… ( | 6 comments)
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A significant tranche of missional church thinking centres on the APEST paradigm. The argument is that if the church is to become a movement again after the sclerotic institutionalism of the Christendom era, it needs urgently to reactivate the gifts of apostle, prophet, and evangelist. Shepherds… ( | 2 comments)
Is there any hope of redemption in Genesis 1-11?
It is clear from reading recent books on missional church that a missional theology needs to extend in two directions. It needs to extend in a social direction to encompass the existence of churches as communities interacting with societies; and it needs to give an account of the… ()
More on missional theology: was Jesus a liberation theologian?
If you’re looking for a primer on missional theology, John Franke’s Missional Theology: An Introduction is not a bad option. It’s clearly presented and to the point, with just five chapters on “Missional God,” “Missional Church,” “Missional Theology,” “Missional Multiplicity,” and “… ()
John R. Franke’s missional theology: understanding church, image, and kingdom
John Franke’s Missional Theology: An Introduction starts with the idea associated with Karl Barth and the missiologist Karl Hartenstein that the biblical God is in his very nature a missional God. Mission is not primarily what the church does; it is what God does, expressed most fully in… ()
The two modes of “mission” (for want of a better word) in the Bible
I am trying to give serious thought these days to how the church goes about its “mission” (for want of a better word). The methodology is usually pragmatic: the church as it currently is, in its various institutional forms, faces challenges of numerical decline or social irrelevance, and asks what… ( | 2 comments)