An Ordinary Mission of God Theology: Challenging Missional Church Idealism

Product Description

The mission church literature seems to be dominated by idealized conceptions of the benefits of equipping congregations to participate in local mission work. This investigation challenges this idealism, by paying critical attention to congregants’ ordinary theologies that develop in reaction to the communication of Missio Dei theology to them. Their voices are absent from the formal literature. The study employs rescripting methodology to modify key assumptions made in the formal ecclesiological literature by drawing on insights that come from Christians’ ordinary theological voices.

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Reviews:

“Dr. Hardy is to be congratulated for tackling the vitally important subject of mission theology with sensitivity and insight. Using original empirical data, his study provides a corrective to idealized mission theology and advances the academic conversation in ordinary theology. I commend it most warmly to students, church leaders, and scholars.”

–Mark J. Cartledge, London School of Theology

“In this important congregational study, Andy Hardy dares to test his professional practice as a mission educator by investigating what happens when his graduates work out their missio Dei theology of mission in a church. He skillfully identifies the complex reactions to such a theology; its highs and lows; its unintended and unexpected costs and consequences. As an innovative study of ordinary missiology, there is challenge and encouragement here for mission practitioners and educators alike.”

–Andrew Rogers, University of Roehampton

About the Author:

Andrew Hardy has been involved in planting missional churches and developing missional leaders for about thirty years. He has had extensive experience in leading churches, as well as having been the chair of the National Leadership Team of a UK-based Christian denomination. He has spent the last fourteen years in designing and offering degree-level missional leadership programs for a UK-based mission college. He currently works as Director of Research for ForMission College. He has also been extensively involved in mentoring missional church leaders and doing consultancy work in the field of missional education and missional church change management processes.