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.
A decolonial practice and understanding of education (whether theological or otherwise) requires engaging, subverting, deposing and reimagining a whole ecology of imaginaries, practices, structures, institutionalities, traditions, power asymmetries etc.: a task that is far beyond the capacities of any individual, community or even generation. Cognisant of this reality, the article foregrounds the question of pedagogy in theological education (but only as an integral part of the colonial/decolonial ecology of education) and argues that in so far as our pedagogies in theological education treat students primarily as ‘thinking creatures’, we are engaging in a dis-membering pedagogy that reproduces the coloniality of being. I identify a Cartesian anthropology (‘ego cogito sum’) – engendering a host of dualisms giving artificial supremacy to certain dimensions of reality over others – as a key animating source of dis-membering pedagogies. Drawing on the ‘pedagogical excess’ (i.e. underexplored pedagogical themes) in the theological anthropology of Simon Maimela in conversation with pedagogical visions that cohere and extend his anthropological commitments, I argue that a re-membering pedagogy is, at minimum: a pedagogy of performative action, embodiment and (community based) liminality. I argue throughout the article that in the work of re-sourcing our animating anthropologies and re-imagining our pedagogies, we are engaged in the healing work of re-membering that which coloniality has torn apart: theory and practice, mind and body, the individual and relationality, the student and the teacher, the theological school and society.Contribution: This article outlines my attempts to theoretically and theologically ground (and extend) my espoused pedagogical commitments forged at the intersection of my community work and teaching as a theological educator in an undergraduate BTh programme. This article invites other theological educators to become conscious of the theological anthropology that their espoused pedagogical commitments assume and reflect on the pedagogical commitments that their theological anthropology entails, especially as it relates to the ongoing calls for the Africanisation/decolonisation of theological education in South Africa.
Arising from nearly three decades of experience in theological education, including 10 years as academic dean at Duke Divinity School and current Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale Divinity School, Jennings describes this work as an "extended essay" aimed at sharing "Secrets" (the title of the prologue) of theological education, engaged in a kind of "… institutional Gnosticism, revealing the hidden meaning in the words, actions, counteractions, and conversations that constitute theological academic life" (2020, p. 25). His analysis is especially attentive to those who pass through theological education but who do not conform to its telos of producing an "educated" person.Through a combination of poetry, story and searching prose this work is a disorienting, wise, prophetic, generous, and vulnerable exposition of the possibility of theological education's future, beyond the distorting formation of whiteness. Moving through the work felt like an immersive baptism in which I was not sure whether I was going to drown under the weight of his haunting analysis or emerge "saved"-a new creation! Avoiding the temptation to be drawn into theological education's obsessive focus on "decline" (although he does not shy from some very "practical" questions that pester theological education institutions today), he is clear that the deeper and more important crisis to attend to is the distortion that animates theological education. He spends the rest of the book attempting to show what this distortion is and how it is "woven into [our] theological institutions and into our deepest pedagogical impulses" (2020, p. 14).Jennings argues, building on his magisterial work in The Christian Imagination: Christian Theology and the Origins
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