In the spring of my senior year at Luther Seminary, I took a course called “Transforming Congregations for Mission,” taught by Mary Sue Dreier. The class launched both a deep and broad conversation among my classmates and me about how to help churches sharpen their practices and theology so they could better follow Jesus especially in this new era where the church is losing privilege and nothing can be assumed about the people who go there or don’t go there.
This group of students buzzed with excitement the whole semester as we dared to dream about what God might be up to (and what we might get to experience in our own ministries). It was hard to gather us all back in from our discussion time. Our final assignment was to write an essay about some aspect of the missional church movement with real people and real churches in mind — a paper with solid grounding in real life.
Now I am happy to announce that it has been my honor to compile and edit the articles from our final papers. In the blog posts that follow, my classmates and I cover topics from change, to failure, to worship, and new leadership models.
My hope is to post one or two of these articles per week. My bigger hope is that you get to experience and join in some of the excitement and thoughtfulness of my classmates as we all discern where Jesus might be leading each and every church community in this new era.
The blog posts in this Missional Lab series are drawn from those papers. Thanks to the contributors, to Prof. Dreier, and to Luther Seminary’s Center for Missional Leadership.
—
Image: Transformations in China’s Growth Model
(Creative Commons image by World Economic Forum on Flickr)
