CRITICAL ISSUES IN ECCLESIOLOGY...
Seeking to Shape Christian Common Life
Critical Issues in Ecclesiology: Christian Community and Ministry in the Third Millennium was the 'sexy' title for a re-vamped Harvest Bible College (Victoria) course (their version: "Church and Ministry") that I taught in first semester 2001 at Harvest West Bible College in Belmont, WA.
The course sought to go behind the multiple meanings of ‘church’ in order to find out about Christian community, with a practical concern to seek reform and renewal in Christian common life, and especially to foster and embody practices that witness to the presence of God’s kingdom. Guiding this was a theological-ethical vision of the people of God rather than a pragmatic "what works" 'Church' program. That theological-ethical vision held that following Jesus commits us to a live as an alternative counter-cultural disciple community.
The liveliness of the course was due to an extraordinary class of open-minded and questioning students who were concerned with the real-life implications of what they learnt. Visit Wellspring Christian Community's Web Page for one example.
Some useful readings along the way were:
- John Howard Yoder, Body Politics.
- Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society.
- Alan Kreider, The Change in Conversion and the Origin of Christendom.
- Tom Sine, Mustard Seed vs McWorld.
- Duane K. Friesen, Artists, Citizens, Philosophers: Seeking the Peace of the City: An Anabaptist Theology of Culture.
- Marva Dawn, Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down.
- Rodney Clapp, A Peculiar People.
- Articles by Richard Hays, John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, N. T. Wright... and others...
The Course Outline and an extensive course Bibliography are available here. [Formatting still to be done properly though -- sorry!]
Some of my tutorial topics are available for On-line Discussion at Ecclesial Visions, a forum supported by our discussion group network, the Dead Apologists' Society.
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