The Half-life of Missiological Facts

Luke 10:1–16 records Jesus sending a group of 70 (in some texts 72) disciples to proclaim the kingdom. If an open-hearted “child of peace” welcomed them, the messengers were to stay with them, blessing and evangelizing them and their household. Since the 1960s, proponents of the “person of peace strategy” have derived from this text a methodology for contemporary disciple-making. Matthews, writing in this journal, critiques the strategy as a hermeneutically weak misreading of the text, which hijacks instructions intended only for the original hearers, and uncritically applies them today. Matthews does accept that Luke 10 contains principles relevant to contemporary mission, but for reasons of space he declines to say what these principles may be. I attempt to identify these principles through a missional reading approach and ask how Luke 10 forms communities for mission then and now. I conclude that its prime purpose is to form Christians to be interdependent messengers of profound peace, who seek out interdependent children of hospitable peace. I then apply these insights to our current missiological moment. Finally, in light of this discussion I assess the specific “person of peace strategy” itself. While I offer some criticisms, I find more to appreciate about the strategy than Matthews does.

Section: How Does Luke 10 Form Us For Mission Today?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting the person of peace: A response to A. Matthews

Robinson¹

2021

“…McGavran applied his missiological research first to the planting of new overseas congregations, with his research quickly being appropriated for existing congregations in North America as an opportunity to increase attendance. Church planting efforts developed as an extension of church growth through the starting of new congregations within the North American context, and eventually became a replacement term for domestic church growth (Nehrbass, 2014: 290–91).…”

Section: A Critical Evaluation Of Church Plantingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Virtue ethics and church planting: A critical assessment and reevaluation of church planting utilizing Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue

Niebauer

2016

This article proposes a critical reevaluation of church planting utilizing the philosophical area of virtue ethics. The article begins first with a critique of modern church planting based primarily upon Alasdair MacIntyre's assessment of the social sciences in After Virtue. MacIntyre's critique of the social sciences as having the potential to be both manipulative and overconfident bears striking parallels to the current moral issues surrounding church planting. Such a critique paves the way for a rehabilitation of the practice of church planting. The second part of this article begins a process of rebuilding an understanding of church planting from the ground up. Utilizing a Thomistic understanding of virtue, I will demonstrate how the individual missional actions that compromise church planting are in accordance with our natural and supernatural ends, and thus promote human flourishing. Following this, I will begin to build a definition of church planting coherent with Alasdair MacIntyre's notion of a practice (activities with goods internal to them). Such a definition necessitates the need for the practice of church planting to be authorized by Scripture, church, and tradition. Last, I will show how the practice of church planting must be embedded within the broader narrative of the church and the individual Christian life.

“…Today, the world's surging currents involve human trafficking, global partnerships, and oral learners; and missiologists are in touch with those global needs and trends. Some streams within missiology rise and then wane; some disappear at the bottom of the river, others have a long "tail life" (Nehrbass, 2013). There are many hidden treasures in a riverbed, and eddies bring up those sediments.…”

Section: Missiology Like a Rivermentioning

confidence: 99%

Does missiology have three legs to stand on? The upsurge of interdisciplinarity

Nehrbass

2015

Self Cite

A common heuristic device for depicting the interdisciplinary nature of missiology is the metaphor of a stool that stands on three legs (or academic disciplines). However, missiologists have disagreed on exactly which disciplines comprise those legs. That theology is central is hardly contested; but there is less agreement about the role of the social sciences, history, education, mission strategy, and so forth. Here, I argue that we should move beyond the three-legged stool metaphor, as it fails to describe the true interdisciplinary nature of missiology: The academic influences on missiology are more numerous than the stool metaphor allows for; the borders between these disciplines are fuzzy and changing; and the influence of academic theories on mission strategy is not merely one-way. In quest of a more satisfactory metaphor, I begin by suggesting a definition of missiology as the utilization of multiple academic disciplines to develop strategies for making disciples across cultures. Drawing on that definition, I develop the image of missiology as a river with countless tributaries (theoretical disciplines) that converge for this common goal. Since scholars of Christian mission cannot be experts in many fields, we must be intentional with the sort of interdisciplinarity that is most useful for designing effective mission strategies.