Missional Notes

I was recently visited by Prof Germanos Marani of the Gregorian University in Rome, and he proposed holding a symposium of Catholic and Orthodox missiologists.
There are more details of the proposal on my other blog, here. Comments and suggestions welcome.

I’ve just had a busy week with a team of clergy and students leading a teaching week at Atteridgeville, west of Pretoria. There are a number of
people there preparing for baptism, and some of those already baptised wanted a refersher course, so we’ve been teaching from Monday to Friday.
The course was held in an orphanage [...]

For the last couple of days I’ve been attending the Amahoro conference at Hekpoort, west of Pretoria, South Africa. About 250 people, mostly young, were discussing post-colonialism, truth & reconciliation, homelessness, xenophobia and Christian responses to these.
They come from various countries, mostly from Africa.
I hope it might be possible to continue the conversation on Usenet [...]

An English bishop writes about the concept of a local church, and the effect of gated communities on this, and refers to it as a missional problem.
There has been a rapid growth in gated communities in South Africa, and I’ve looked at some of the ways in which they are a missional problem in this [...]

I’ve previously observed that most of those I’ve met in South Africa who talk about the “emerging church” are white. The emerging conversation seems to be a largely white conversation, in South Africa at least. But what is emerging in African Christianity is somewhat different, both in colour and in content.
One of the things I [...]

The Pretoria Emerging Cohort met on Tuesday evening to discuss “A theology for Tshwane”.
I’m not sure how far we got with that, but it was an interesting discussion none the less. I’m not even sure one could call it a “cohort” — surely a cohort must have some cohesion, but in this one every time [...]

Tom Smith has written a very important piece in his blog Soul Gardeners about rich Christians in South Africa who want to have a ministry among poor people, and, from his account, there is an unseemly competition among those who want to do so.
Tom doesn’t go into details about what has been going on, but [...]

I’ve started a missional Tweetfeed - you can have a look at it, or start your own.
It shows Twitter tweets that deal with missiological or missional subjects.

I’ve got several blogs already, so do I really need another one?
Until I find a more definite purpose for it, I’ll just be posting here sporadically, odd missional notes.
For anyone who may be interested, I post more regularly on the following blogs:

Khanya
Notes from underground