What would a theology of the Church look like that took seriously the fact that North America is now itself a mission field? This question lies at the foundation of this volume written by an ecumenical team of six noted missiologists—Lois Barrett, Inagrace T. Dietterich, Darrell L. Guder, George R. Hunsberger, Alan J. Roxburgh, and Craig Van Gelder. The result of a three-year research project undertaken by The Gospel and Our Culture Network, this book issues a firm challenge for the church to recover its missional call right here in North America, while also offering the tools to help it do so. The authors examine North America s secular culture and the church s loss of dominance in today s society. They then present a biblically based theology that takes seriously the church s missional vocation and draw out the consequences of this theology for the structure and institutions of the church.

Planting Missional Churches is an instruction book for planting biblically faithful and culturally relevant churches. It addresses the “how-to” and “why” issues of church planting by providing practical guidance through all the phases of a church plant while taking a missional look at existing and emerging cultures.

Missiologist and church planter JR Woodward offers a blueprint for the missional church--not small adjustments around the periphery of the infrastructure but a radical revisioning of how a church ought to look that entails changing how we think about leadership and what we expect out of discipleship.

There is a growing body of literature about the missional church, but the word missional is often defined in competing ways with little attempt to ground it deeply in Scripture. Michael Goheen, a dynamic speaker and the coauthor of two popular texts on the biblical narrative, unpacks the missional identity of the church by tracing the role God's people are called to play in the biblical story. Goheen shows that the church's identity can be understood only when its role is articulated in the context of the whole biblical story--not just the New Testament, but the Old Testament as well. He also explores practical outworkings and implications, offering field-tested suggestions for contemporary churches.

In this book, two leading ministry experts place the missional church conversation in historical perspective and offer fresh insights for its further development. They begin by providing a helpful review of the genesis of the missional church and offering an insightful critique of the Gospel and Our Culture Network's seminal book Missional Church, which set the conversation in motion. They map the diverse paths this discussion has taken over the past decade, identifying four primary branches and ten sub-branches of the conversation and placing over one hundred published titles and websites into this framework. The authors then utilize recent developments in biblical and theological perspectives to strengthen and extend the conversation about missional theology, the church's interaction with culture and cultures, and church organization and leadership in relation to the formation of believers as disciples. Professors, students, and church leaders will value this comprehensive overview of the missional movement. It includes a foreword by Alan J. Roxburgh.

In this volume the third book in the Missional Church series eminent missional church expert Craig Van Gelder continues to track and contribute to the expanding missional church conversation, inviting today s brightest minds in the field to speak to key questions concerning church leadership.

Description: Cross-cultural mission has always been a primary learning experience for the church. It pulls us out of a mono-cultural understanding and helps us discover a legitimate theological pluralism that opens up for new perspectives in the Gospel. Translating the Gospel into new languages and cultures is a human and divine means of making us learn new 'incarnations' of the Good News. This book is compiled by contributions from young missiologists from different parts of the world. It is written from the perspective of youth to be a fresh breath of air into more traditional mission thinking and mission paradigms. The flavor of this fresh breath of air, coming from the younger generation, is ""learning from others and from one another"" How may traditional sending churches and organizations see themselves as receivers? How may we bring experiences from outside into our own context? What may we learn across geographical borders-North learning from South, South learning from North, South learning from South? What can we learn from one another in a process of reciprocity? 'Mission as learning' is not just a welcome addendum to mission, but also a necessity if we want God's Spirit to reveal to us some new dimensions of Jesus as he comes to be known and loved in ""every nation, tribe, people and language."" A church that aims at being A Learning Missional Church sorely needs Reflections from Young Missiologists, as this book is entitled. The reflections are valuable because of the content and substance, because they deal with relevant issues; they are valuable because they depict the church as a 'learning organization' cross-culturally; and they are valuable because they raise signs of youthful willingness to challenge and change. In this way these reflections may show the way towards Edinburgh 2110. About the Contributor(s): Beate Fagerli is adviser on theology and ecumenical relations with the Church of Norway Council on Ecumenical and International Relations. Knud Jorgensen is Adjunct Professor at the MF Norwegian School of Theology and the Lutheran Theological Seminary, Hong Kong. He was chair of the Edinburgh 2010 Study Process Monitoring Group. Kari Storstein Haug is Associate Professor of Missiology at the School of Mission and Theology, Stavanger, Norway. Knut Tveitereid is a PhD student at NLA University College/School of Mission and Theology, Bergen, Norway. Rolv Olsen is director of the Egede Institute in Norway and a parish pastor."