gathering in light

This year I will be assisting Ryan Bolger (his new website) in his classes again, for the fall quarter we’re doing Church in Mission. Over the last three years I’ve TA’d a number of different classes with him and he’s always doing some really great things with technology and the classroom. Our typical approach has been to utilize blogs for class discussions, reading reviews and student comments, but in years past we’ve also used delicious.com for web research, and wiki’s for group projects. This year we’re returning to the wiki idea and I’m pretty excited about how it’s turning out (we borrowed lots of great ideas from Michael Wesch). We set up a Church in Mission wiki, using the free service from Wetpaint.com (for educational wiki’s they’ll even turn off the ads), and are structuring the whole course around the website. The class of 70+ students are separated into various groups around various ethnic traditions, each group then spends the whole quarter working on a group wiki around post-colonial issues and their particular traditions. » Read the rest of this entry «

Series contents | Intro | Part Two |

Cattell believes that mission must start from the Great Commission, not only a central theme in the New Testament, but a central theme throughout all of Scripture. He remarks that if the Gospels authors would not have penned the Great Commission, it would not matter because we would still have the implicit command to go (Cattell, 1981:1).  For Cattell, the Gospels offer a full picture of the the commission as it progressed through the various evangelist’s accounts. Mark’s version is a bit simplistic (Mark 16:15) in that it does not discuss disciple-making, which makes Matthew 18-20 a far more complete reading of the commission’s prescription by showing the need for an actual harvest in our missionary act (Cattell, 2). John’s gospel (20:21-22), being the latest and most developed, is what Cattell finally lands on as the central key to mission because of its focus on Jesus. Cattell suggests that Jesus becomes the primary example for the church’s mission, he says: » Read the rest of this entry «