Featured Articles
Editorial: Place, Time and Identity
This issue of JMP has focused on the meaning of place in contemporary societies and its implications for the life and witness of Christian communities. Each of us, as we read this, are situated in some place – our home, work place, local coffee shop, etc., that locates and gives shape to our everyday lives. We have learned through this issue that the places where we dwell are complicated geographies that in our late modern contexts, raise complex questions...
The Fragility of Goodness: Brexit Viewed from the North East
Perched on a stool at the end of the bar, just beneath an enormous screen showing Britain's Got Talent for those whose interests quite understandably lay elsewhere, I gave a talk on the way that Catholic social thought provides resources for thinking about the current migrant crisis. It was an evening when I was (unsurprisingly) cheered and heckled in equal measure: political theology as a fittingly extreme sport. At the end of my talk I suggested to the crowd...
Book Review: ‘Between the World and Me’ by Ta-Nehisis Coates.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a self-proclaimed atheist who rejects the Christian God, and yet his book, Between the World and Me, is what happens when God draws the curtains to unveil the evil of racism that prevails across the world. This book is a critical social commentary on life in the United States that should inform every conversation concerned with mission in places that live with racial and economic oppression.
Reflection: A Remainer’s Perspective on Mission and Moving
At one time mission meant moving; sending, exile and crossing cultural boundaries inferred physical journeys. The ‘sent out’ were the pioneers. Today, the ‘remainers’ in the inner city beg to differ. My family have lived in the same four streets...
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Reclaiming the Commons: What it is and Why it’s Important.
An understanding that all of creation is God’s shapes Scripture. There is a deep, fundamental covenant that human beings hold the creation as a gift for all and ensure that every human being is cared for with dignity and honor. This is about the common good. As stated in the Jeremiah passage, it is part of the vocation of God’s people to seek the welfare of the city in which we abide. Connected to this basic framing of Christian vocation is the critical question of how it can be practiced. At one level the challenges confronting Western societies are immense...
The Editorial Think Tank: A Reflection on Two Meetings
The Journal of Missional Practice was born out of a common interest in the work of Lesslie Newbigin, the attempt of the Gospel and Our Culture programme to produce a wider debate about mission in the West, and the subsequent development of what has become known as ‘the missional conversation’. To help the Journal frame those concerns the principle participants have been joined each year by some additional friends and colleagues who together form an editorial Think Tank that offers both a critical and a constructive edge…
Book Review: ‘Inventing the Individual’ by Larry Siedentop
Review of Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Milton Keynes; UK: Penguin Random House, 2015)
First published in 2014 this is a must read for anyone committed to addressing Newbigin’s question about a missionary engagement with the late, modern West, especially its North Atlantic form. True confession - this book reads like a good thriller...
Community Building as Spiritual Practice
When I arrived as vicar of Hodge Hill four and a half years ago, again and again congregation members asked me, ‘why on earth do you want to come here? We haven't even got a building!’...
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Joshua T. Searle - A Rapid Response to 'Community Building as Spiritual Practice'
Faith in the Public Square
Abstract Lord Glasman begins by organizing his thoughts around three key TMN concepts. Discerning our common good takes relationship and time. It has to be located in and with in our local communities. Forming happens inside a shared imaginative space that has been shaped...
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Together at God’s Table: How Practicing Hospitality Shapes Our Imagination
In the missional conversation, there has been a lot of talk about the need for a new imagination in the church but less attention to how imagination is actually formed and how we might get there. This paper will examine the bodily formation of imagination and will suggest that Jesus was on to something vital when he sent his disciples two by two to be hosted by Samaritans...
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