Monday 10 February 2014
Missional:Impossible! post-missional practices for living in a neotribal society
Sunday 12 May 2013
Bio: Francis Rothery
About the Author: Francis Rothery is a New Monastic and a Community Franciscan in the European Province of the Anglican Communion. His mission experience emerges from delivering leadership training and development with Partners in Mission International. In collaboration with leaders and churches in Russia, Africa and Pakistan he exercised a ministry of teaching, guidance, governance and spiritual companionship for over 10 years. From 2008 in partnership with the NightChurch Community he developed an ecumenical and contemplative Fresh Expression based in Exeter Cathedral. In this sacred space he initiated new approaches to conversational learning and communal spiritual development. In 2012 he co-started the South West Emergent Cohort as a conversation hub for people of all faiths and none. Francis is also rooted and connected with/in the ‘Simply Hub’; a movement for the development of small communities. Alongside spiritual teaching and development Francis has a lifelong involvement in professional social work, alcohol counselling and psychotherapy as a practitioner and in management. He has also lectured in Philosophy and Religious Studies in Further Education and Psychology and Counselling in Adult and Higher Education.
Domination Christianity: mission mishaped church
There are several streams of mission attempting to reverse Christianity’s decline in the United Kingdom, Europe and the USA.
DOMINATION CHRISTIANITY considers the way practices of hierarchical bureaucracy and management
have perpetuated decline in mainline Christian institutional churches. Mainline mission practices aim to increase denominational membership by
inviting people to services and stage managed worship and preaching events. In
the United Kingdom the Mission Shaped Church is a stream within mainline
Christianity that is attempting to reverse decline through creating churches
around the needs of the unchurched. Frustratingly all mission initiative is enmeshed
in in centralised finance and management structures. Therefore Church law,
policy, regulation and financial priorities control and curb innovation and
growth. Mission Shaped Church has been formalised as the term Fresh Expressions.
It includes initiatives by the Church of England, The Methodist Church, The
United Reformed Church, the Congregational Federation and Ground Level Network.
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Domination
Christianity: mission mishaped church: 1 (Missional: Impossible!) by Francis Rothery
Permalink:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1484834631
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Missional Mirage: New Christian West
Einstein said 'We cannot solve our problems with the same kind of thinking that created them.' MISSIONAL MIRAGE highlights the way in which the Missional Movement contains the socially fragmenting seeds of modernity and Christian social dominance. Its goal is remaking a New Christian West. Alan Roxburgh quotes Wittgenstein; 'a picture held us captive and it lay in our language and our language repeated it to us inexorably.' Ironically the missional language of leadership, mapping, planning and of mission itself keep Christianity captive in a picture of its past. It is one mishaped by the language and practices of colonial mission. The Missional Movement, the Mission Shaped Church and mainline Christianity are also trapped in pictures of cultural superiority and of Christ as a conquering King. They therefore perpetuate a socially fragmenting picture of Christian social dominance. This picture is absent from the Gospels and the example and teaching of Christ. Protestantism and its bureaucratic capitalism gave birth to the consumerism and fragmentation of modern society. Therefore its social effects cannot be healed by the language and practices of a Missional Movement trapped in the language and practices of modernity.
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Reconciliation Communities: beyond missional map-making
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There are several streams of mission attempting to reverse Christianity’s decline in the United Kingdom, Europe and the USA. RECONCILIATION COMMUNITIES offers an alternative to the language and practices of the Mission Shaped Church and the Missional Movement. It is through the recovery of the central practices of CONVERSATION, RECONCILIATION and EMPOWERMENT in small communities. This is a Way of Life that follows Christ’s practices of eternal dialogue, reciprocity, mutuality, partnership and companionship. Such practices rebirth our identity, meaning and purpose in the atomised neotribal democracies of the globalised West.
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Reconciliation
Communities: beyond missional map-making: 3 (Missional: Impossible!)
by Francis Rothery
Permalink:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1484919866
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Our Un/Known G-d: neotribal spirituality
The Missional Movement and the Mission Shaped Church are attempting to reverse mainline Christianity’s decline in
the United Kingdom, Europe and the USA. OUR UN/KNOWN G-D considers an alternative vision of faith rooted in our common experience of G-d as Un/Known. A
recognition of G-d as Un/Known for people of all faiths and none moves society
beyond Christianity’s mission-mishaped past. It is to a future where G-d is in
all and through all; the rebirth of a G-d of Everybody in the neotribal societies of the globalised West. This empowers a Way of Life and Truth that brings wholeness
and integration with/in neighbourhoods, towns and cities.
Sunday 21 April 2013
Christianity in the West is dying. Addiction to hierarchical and bureaucratic power is killing it. The Management-God and the Mission-God have usurped the Way of Christ. In the midst of decline the Missional Movement is attempting to reboot the Church. Its goal is to remake a New Christian West through mission, leadership, mapping and planning. Yet it is trapped in the language and methods of modernity. Its final solution is a polarising vision of cultural domination by one social group; the Christians.
The Way of Life and Truth has been forgotten. Christ is not a conquering King, a written Word or an absolute Idea-but a divine Human Being. Social wholeness can only be realised through a rediscovery of Conversation, Reconciliation and Empowerment. These reflect Christ’s practices of eternal dialogue and reciprocal giving in small communities. Through this mutual Way of Life people of all faiths and none can discover deep within themselves Our Un/Known G-d. A gentle voice is whispering in the heart of all humanity; ‘I am …the Way.’
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