Transformasi komunitas misi: Gereja sebagai ciptaan baru dalam Roh Kudus

Transformation is the key to the growth of the church and mission. Transformation is a positive change toward Christ that marks believers’ life, as indicated by Paul’s exhortation in Romans 12:2. The church refers to the people who believe in Christ so they are renewed by the power of the Holy Spirit. That transformation or renewal empowers the church to function as the light of the world, as a missional community through the power of the Holy Spirit. This article seeks to present the strong correlation between the spiritual transformation of the church by the power of the Holy Spirit with her function as a missional community. This article elaborates the meaning of transformation in the New Testament, the meaning of transformation from the perspective of systematic theology, and the strong correlation between spiritual transformation and the function of the church as a missional community. Abstrak Transformasi adalah kunci dari pertumbuhan gereja dan misi. Hal tersebut merupakan perubahan positif yang menjadi ciri kehidupan orang percaya kearah Kristus, sebagaimana nasehat Paulus dalam Kitab Roma 12:2. Gereja adalah orang-orang yang percaya kepada Kristus sehingga dibaharui oleh kuasa Roh Kudus. Transformasi atau pembaharuan tersebut merupakan hal yang memampukan Gereja untuk berfungsi sebagai terang dunia, sebagai komunitas misional oleh kuasa Roh Kudus. Artikel ini melihat relasi yang erat antara transformasi Gereja oleh kuasa Roh Kudus dengan berfungsinya Gereja sebagai suatu komunitas misi. Artikel ini memaparkan makna transformasi spiritual di dalam Perjanjian Baru, makna transformasi spiritual dari perspektif teologi sistematika, dan relasi erat antara transformasi spiritual dengan fungsi Gereja sebagai suatu komunitas misi.

Leadership development for missions in poor urban communities

Leadership development is an ongoing need in Africa. Good leadership is key to the building of any society. This article is written from the perspective of someone who lives in an African community of poverty. As he or she observes the many problems the African continent faces, he or she wonders about the role of the church to participate in seeking solutions to these problems. The article stresses that effective leadership development should equip people to be participants of the flourishing of their communities. It discusses the theological and missiological foundations of leadership as avenues to align leadership formation with the improvement of the quality of life of Africans living in communities of poverty. The researcher belongs to a missional community which focuses on discipling local residents, with the hope of nurturing agency from inside out. He uses the autoethnographic methodology to describe this case study of his missional community efforts.

Born from below: Urban regeneration through incarnational theological formation in Guatemala City and beyond

This article sets out to describe the development of and engagement with a global training collaborative around the formation of urban ministry leadership committed to the act of loving cities and working for peace. The collaborative is an initiative of Street Psalms called the Urban Training Collaborative and each urban training hub has agreed to be shaped and formed by an Incarnational Training Framework (ITF). The ITF was constructed over a 20-year period in the midst of a global missional community made up of leaders from cities all over the world. The ITF is infused by an incarnational theology as interpreted from below and focused on the message, method and manner as exemplified in the life and mission of Jesus Christ such that messengers are free of fear and unleashed to love their cities and seek their peace. The Incarnation of Jesus Christ animates faith-based engagement around the complex issues of poverty, injustice, social inequity and violence, and shifts paradigms from scarcity to abundance, theory to practice and rivalry to peacemaking. To shed light on the practical outworking of an incarnational theology from below, we will critically reflect on Guatemala City as a case study to illustrate how the formation of a city-wide missional community was developed through engagement around the aforementioned ITF which led to the corresponding paradigm shifts and then subsequently seeding a global training collaborative

Led by the Spirit: Missional Communities and the Quakers on communal vocation discernment

This article argues that the term missional is an expression of the global shift towards a theocentric (rather than ecclesiocentric) understanding of mission. A Missional Community is a concrete, local embodiment of this missional ecclesiology and it comes to be through discerning its particular and ongoing vocation in the cosmic missio Dei. It is for this reason that we argued that communal vocation discernment lies at the heart of the Missional Community’s life and practice. This practice births, energises and renews the Missional Community in the wake of the boundary-breaking Spirit’s work in the local neighbourhood or context. Because communal vocation discernment is central to Missional Communities it seemed prudent to ask which other communities or traditions see discernment as central to their life and practice. In Western Christianity, the Quakers stand out as a significant example of communal discernment as their normal way of making decisions. We sought to answer whether the Quaker practice of communal discernment, in the Meeting for Worship in which Business is Conducted, is a suitable model for communal vocation discernment in Missional Communities. We suggested that it was not suitable in so far as it did not express an explicit commitment to being grounded and connected to a place or neighbourhood as a prerequisite for discernment. We suggested that it was suitable in so far as it continually reminds the community that communal discernment is not simply about making decisions or finding your vocation but at its heart is an act of worship. This awareness in the Quakers is primarily achieved through naming communal discernment spaces as worship spaces and through the strategic use of silence. We also suggested that the Quaker commitment to unity anddissent creates space for belonging, agency and responsibility in the community and that this is something which Missional Communities would do well to appropriate in their own communal vocation discernment.

‘Community’: A Postmodern Mission Paradigm?

ABSTRACTTo answer the question of the title of this article, the words ‘community’, ‘postmodern’, ‘mission’ and ‘paradigm’ are examined in turn and defined. The central place of the ‘local church’ in contemporary missiology is discussed, and the need for a missional and communitarian ecclesiology is argued with positive but critical reference to the approach of the Gospel and Our Culture Network of North America. The article ends by suggesting that ‘community’ can indeed be seen as a mission paradigm for postmodernity, and by posing some key questions facing the local church if it is to become a missional community.