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Missio Dei has become a common and valued expression in most wings of the church. To what extent do we mean the same thing when we use this term? This article explores the understanding of the concept missio Dei in contemporary conciliar and evangelical contexts, with special emphasis on The Cape Town Commitment and Together towards Life. Although missio Dei has had a turbulent life with diverse definitions and connected interests in the relatively short time span of the term, there seems to be a growing convergence in its usage. This common ground is primarily connected to the change from an ecclesiocentric to a Trinitarian paradigm of mission and to understanding the kingdom of God as the goal of mission. There are, however, differences in the documents, and these are evident in the relative emphases they give to the centrality of Christ and the role of the Spirit. Resumen: La missio Dei se ha convertido en una expresión común y valorada en la mayoría de las ramas de la iglesia. ¿Hasta qué punto se le adjudica el mismo significado al utilizar este término? Este artículo examina la comprensión del concepto missio Dei en los contextos conciliares y evangélicos contemporáneos, poniendo una atención especial a El compromiso de Ciudad del Cabo y a Juntos por la vida. Aunque la missio Dei ha tenido una vidabastante agitada con diversas definiciones e intereses vinculados, en el tiempo relativamente corto de la terminología, parece haber una creciente convergencia en su uso. Estos puntos de coincidencia están relacionados principalmente con el cambio de un paradigma eclesiocéntrico de la misión a uno trinitario y con la comprensión del reino de Dios comoobjetivo de la misión. 摘要: Missio Dei 已成为教会大多数分支中常见且受重视的表达方式。 当我们使用这个词时，我们在多大程度上是指同一件事吗？ 本文探讨在当代公会和福音派背景下对 missio Dei 概念的理解，特别强调《开普敦的承诺》和《共同迈向生活》这些文件。 尽管在相对较短的时间跨度内， missio Dei 经历了动荡的生活，定义多样，兴趣多种，但其用法似乎越来越趋同。 这个共同点主要与从以教会为中心到三位一体的使命范式的转变，以及将上帝的国度理解为使命的目标有关。 然而，这些文件存在差异，这些差异在它们对基督的中心地位和圣灵的角色的相对强调中显而易见的。 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phrase missio Dei represents a significant advance in contemporary missiology: recognizing that God's agency and impulse precedes and lies behind human engagement in mission. While missiological research can help Christians discover how God is at work in the world, in order to become involved in the missio Dei, missiology generally borrows its methodology from the social sciences, which focus on human processes: potentially desacralizing faith and discounting the agency of God. This article explores how critical realism offers an ontological framework within which to explore the missio Dei. It further shows that grounded theory provides a rigorous methodology for areas of study that have previously not sought to discern God's agency. Finally, the article provides an example of research attentive to the missio Dei: exploring why previously secular (unchurched) Australians are becoming Christians today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sydney Anglican theology has a number of distinctive motifs, including its ecclesiology and theology of the gospel. These motifs inform a theology of mission as proclamation that stands in a tradition that places a priority on evangelism. Where does such a missiological construction locate a theology of care for the poor? Answers to this question were explored through semi-structured interviews with faculty at Moore Theological College. The significance of caring for the poor is affirmed. Care for the poor is located in the life of the disciple of Jesus Christ and in the community life of the local church. The implications of this theological view for an understanding of the missio Dei are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While theologies of missio Dei and their divergent missiological developments have been refined and contested in the academy over the past seven decades, the theoretical discussions and even the term itself are still far from commonplace in the life and discourse of many local congregations. Nonetheless, among such congregations there are examples of changing practice and new modes of local mission engagement that seem to be in alignment with aspects of a missio Dei orientation. In this article the experience of one congregation will be considered, asking whether a missio Dei perspective might be discerned in recent initiatives and developments in its engagement with its local community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Missio Dei ("the mission of God"), and grounding the mission of the church in the character of God as a missionary God, is one of the most important theological (re-)discoveries of the twentieth-century. The concept is limited, however, if focused on one aspect of God as sending God, model of incarnational mission or empowerment for mission. This article argues that missio Dei is missio Trinitas ("the mission of the Trinity"). It explores the richness of missio Dei from an explicitly trinitarian perspective and its implications for local congregations, in conversation with missional church writers. The article argues that missio Trinitas places primary responsibility for mission with a Trinitarian God, invites the church to join God in the dance of (co-)mission, moves mission beyond church programs to a spirituality of mission, turns church attention to a whole gospel for the whole world, and calls all Christians into mission as communities rather than individuals. Ensuring a Trinitarian understanding of God and mission helps the church to remember the importance of divine agency, spirituality of mission, holistic mission and the mission of the whole people of God. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Missional hermeneutics is a relatively recent development in the field of biblical hermeneutics, emerging from several decades of scholarly engagement with the concept and frame of missio Dei. In a key recent publication in the field, Reading the Bible Missionally , edited by Michael Goheen, the voices of the Global South and of women – and certainly of women from Oceania – do not feature. In this article the authors, both Oceanic women, interrupt the discourse to read biblical text from their twice-under perspective. The Beatitudes provide the frame and the lens for a spiralling discussion of the missio Dei as, to borrow from Letty M. Russell, "calculated inefficiency." Stories of faithful Oceanic women interweave with those of God and of biblical women, offering their complexities to challenge assumptions and simplicities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From space, the Pacific glitters in ocean blue. What might the world's largest ocean contribute to missio Dei? A spiral methodology is used to trace connections between the baptism of Jesus, early Christian art, recent legal (Treaty of Waitangi Tribunal) research and indigenous knowing, including ocean voyaging, ancestor understandings of whirlpools, Māori water rites and oral history of river beings (taniwha). The argument is that indigenous Oceanic (Māori) understandings of water, in conversation with baptismal narratives, present missio Dei as an immersion in God. Mission is located not in the activity of the church – and hence mission expansion as part of European colonisation – but in the being and becoming of God. Creation and redemption are interconnected and an environmental ethic is expected. Children of the waters (ngā tamariki o te Moana nui a Kiwa) listen to creation's voice (taniwha speaking) and act for the life (waiora) of water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, an inclusive Christian vision for the development sector is sketched. A clearer understanding of the Christian vision is useful to guide Christian development institutions as they deliberate their priorities in the broader development sector. This vision appropriates the Trinity, a core Christian doctrine that is included in all Christian orthodox traditions. It focuses on the revelation of God in this world and the understanding of the missio Dei. The article clarifies the particular way that development institutions participate in this mission, through social justice. Justice is understood as the pursuing of the wellbeing of the other in light of God's love. For a fuller understanding of God's love, the way that each divine person clarifies the understanding of social justice, and therefore the subsequent development sector, is outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses and discusses what constitutes the central difficulty (crux) of a surrogate apology – a corporate apology where a leader apologizes vicariously on behalf of an organization. Starting with a rhetorical analysis of the surrogate apology given by Norwegian mission leaders to children going to mission boarding schools (2009), the article proceeds to evaluate the theological status of such a surrogate apology in the light of forgiveness as a key practice in a theology of missio Dei. Drawing on rhetorical and theological analysis, the article concludes that the central difficulty lies in the aporetic nature of the response. It is therefore essential to acknowledge and address this aporia , even as a theological challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of the missional church has been increasingly spread among the Korean Protestant churches and especially to those who are deeply concerned about the true nature of church and mission in the midst of the critical situation faced by the Korean Church. This article articulates the doctrine of the Trinity in relation to the concept of missio Dei. In terms of dealing with conversion and transformation of the church, it explains the understanding of the church and mission of the Korean Church that tends to be inclined to reduce salvation. In this sense, the Korean Church needs radical conversion and transformation to missio Dei. This article suggests some key factors of the Korean missional church movement: authentic worship, community and discipleship. It also explores various aspects and streams of the missional church movement in the Korean Church as it participates in the life of neighbors. It suggests ways in which the Korean Church can rediscover the nature of the church through authentic conversion and transformation to become the people of God who are called and sent into the world by the triune God. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper commences with an outline of the vision of the missio Dei that Paul offers to his readers in Rome, taking as a starting point the letter's thesis statement in 1:16-17. The remainder of the paper traces the key pneumatological themes of the letter and orients them in relation to this overarching vision. The picture that emerges is one that highlights the close connectedness between the Spirit's life-giving work and the saving righteousness manifested in Christ, proclaimed in the gospel, and at work within the church. Life without righteousness and righteousness without life are both, for Paul, equally unthinkable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historic 19zo Edinburgh missionary conference was a watershed moment for world Christianity as it established a framework for international cooperation in the task of bringing the whole gospel to the whole world.' That goal has more or less been realized. In fact, with the shift of Christianity's center of gravity from its traditional heartlands in Europe and the US to the "Global South" of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the focus of mission must also shift from a preoccupation with 'transmission' so as to engage the wider issues of the teleology of missio Dei. Using Andrew Walls' depiction of the Ephesian Moment, the author explores mission as God's activity of bringing together diverse social fragments (as bricks of a single building or as parts of the same body) so as to realize what Paul describes as the 'very height of Christ's full stature." In describing the Pilgrimage of Pain and Hope and a visit to an organic farm in Uganda, the author offers "pilgrimage" as an example of mission practice, which reflects and advances this telos. The act of eating together, which pilgrimage fosters, is not only the expression and the test of the Ephesian moment it is the context within which the most pressing theological, pastoral and ecclesiological issues of world Christianity are illumined and engaged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a fresh wave of interest in local churches reshaping themselves around mission, but what does this mean for theological education? This article draws on the author's experience as a student and teacher, and innovative approaches at Australian College of Ministries and Whitley College, two Australian theological colleges. It discusses six principles for reshaping theological education around mission and the local church. Theological courses and classes and informal processes for developing leaders will be at their best if they are communal in the classroom, assessment and shared mission; conversational between students and with other sources; contextual and engaged with contemporary needs in society; cross-cultural and engaged with global issues; character forming as part of the curriculum; contemplative both for prayer and space for reflection; and congregationally connected for faculty, students and their research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After review various approaches and possible interpretations of John 4:4-42 (i.e., christological, pneumatological, sacramental, liturgical, and feminist), the essay presents a missiological reading of John 4:4-42. It shows how the text answers questions about the origin, purpose, contents, and fruits of the church's mission. Finally, it argues that Jesus' and the Samaritan woman's mutual interactions represent a possible paradigm for interreligious dialogue which is an essential part of Christian mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the significance of liturgical worship for the purpose of overcoming the problem of intellectualism and rationalism that have been prevalent in the modern Christian missions since the 19th century. Despite its centrality in Christian life, worship has been given a marginal place in the discussions of Christian mission. The author, however, maintains that it should play a crucial and powerful role in mission at the age when human identity is increasingly becoming fluid and problematic, as it is capable of producing profound spiritual transformation among worshippers and thus establishing in them a new identity centered on Christ without eradicating “primordial attachments.” This is because liturgy has a holistic nature with its rich symbolism and is able to reach the non-rational level of personality where the primordial attachments operate. The author, who teaches courses in Christianity at a Christian college in Kobe, Japan, takes as his starting point the apparent impasse of Christian higher education in today's Japan which still operates on the Enlightenment model of mission with its emphasis on knowledge as the foundation of faith. He takes advantage of some insights of recent Ritual Studies to illuminate the identity-forming character of liturgical rituals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the life of Ignatius of Loyola (c. 1491–1556), founder of the Society of Jesus [Jesuits], whose religious experience defined the contours of Ignatian spirituality. Through an exploration of foundational documents such as Ignatius's “autobiography,” the Spiritual Exercises, the Jesuits' Constitutions, and early Jesuit writings, this essay shows how the diversity of early Jesuit ministries – as spiritual guides, opponents of Protestantism, schoolteachers, and missionaries to lands outside Europe – can be subsumed under the single rubric of “apostolic mission.” Constitutive features of Ignatian spirituality impinging upon the Jesuit notion of and concrete practice of apostolic mission included the priority of prayer, the Trinitarian missio Dei, the positive embrace of creation and culture, a commitment to seek God in all things, go wherever others needed help, form them to help others, and choose ministries according to what most served the universal good. These principles, not always realized in actual Jesuit ministries, prove useful today for theorists and practitioners of Christian mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]