Al Tizon Missiology Sessions - based on the text "Whole and Reconciled"
ONLINE SESSIONS
SEMINARY NOW – Missiology in the 21st Century
PRE/ONLINE TIM2025 – Missiology in the 21st Century
Session 1
Please watch this Trailer AND the Introduction Video BEFORE we meet online.
Introduction – Unchanging Gospel
___OR https://vimeo.com/1171650547?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci
Zoom Discussion – 1-3 May
Session 2
Each week you are asked to watch 2 videos and prepare notes on them for the online session:
1 Post-colonial and Post-christendom
https://vimeo.com/1171651748/4fea074908?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci
What surprised, excited, and/or challenged you from this session?
How would you describe the gospel?
How have you seen the gospel reduced to personal salvation or social liberation?
Think of ways that Jesus embodied the shalom kingdom during his ministry.
What are you anticipating the most as you begin this course? What will you take away from this session?
2 Reconciliation https://vimeo.com/1171651830/603f56d68f?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci
What surprised, excited, and/or challenged you from this session?
Did COLONIALISM impact your own home context? How?
How did colonialism affect the spread of the gospel, both positively and negatively?
How does living in a postcolonial and post-Christendom world give opportunities for Christians to display the gospel in their communities?
What will you take away from this session?
Zoom Discussion – 8-10 May
Session 3
3 Culture and Mission
Assignment – preparation for meeting the others
Gather materials about your culture, so you can tell the story of your culture to others face to face.
Reporting will take place when we gather together in the first week of orientation.
https://vimeo.com/1171652014/c44f494ec1?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci
What surprised, excited, and/or challenged you from this session?
What is the value of being aware of our cultural assumptions?
What are some of your cultural assumptions?
Why is contextualization important? What makes it difficult?
What will you take away from this session?
4 Polycentric and Diverse Mission
Preparation: What two questions would you like to ask each of the others in the TIM group?
https://vimeo.com/1171652043/9c6ba953f6?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci
What surprised, excited, and/or challenged you from this session?
What excites you about the global nature of Christianity?
What role can you in your particular culture play in global missions?
Reflect on the idea that mission is from everywhere to everywhere.
What are the implications of viewing missions with this framework?
What will you take away from this session?
Zoom Discussion – 15-17 May
Session 4
5 Friendship and Mission
https://vimeo.com/1171652063/d77be1f0a1?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci
What surprised, excited, and/or challenged you from this session?
Why is it important to have friendships within TIM and beyond?
What are some of the ways we can build friendships?
How can we overcome the obstacles?
In what ways have you seen the saviour complex displayed in your local church?
What will you take away from this session?
6 Partnership and Mission
https://vimeo.com/1171652082/ea60ff9895?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci
What surprised, excited, and/or challenged you from this session?
Why is it important that partnerships have true friendship as their base?
Which of the partnership guidelines listed in this session stood out to you?
Why are these guidelines important?
Are there any Guidelines you would add?
What will you take away from this session?
Zoom Discussion – 15-17 May
Session 5
7 “Glocal Church” and Mission
https://vimeo.com/1171652107/6646db9fa9?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci
What surprised, excited, and/or challenged you from this session?
How does your Church define and engage in mission? Is mission encouraged or emphasized?
Does your church (denomination and congregation) have a missions committee?
If so, how do they function?
How much emphasis does your church place on local missions?
Is there more emphasis on global missions?
What will you take away from this session?
8 Spirituality and Mission
https://vimeo.com/1171652120/39be819b77?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci
What surprised, excited, and/or challenged you from this session?
How does self-love factor into the commandment to love our neighbours as ourselves?
What elements of Tizon’s definition of a spirituality of mission stood out to you?
What will you take away from this session? What will you take away from this course?
Zoom discussion – 22-24 May
Session 6 - Summary and Re-Orientation
Key Themes in Mission
· Tell
· Teach
· Tend
· Transform
· Treasure
Review of the “Unmasking Empire” paper (in the light of the last few weeks)
· Post-colonial and post-Christendom
· Reconciliation
· Culture and Diversity
· Friendship, Partnership and Teamwork
· Global and Local
Spiritual Practices for TIM 2026
· Prayer – Personal
· Prayer – corporate
· Worship (in community)
· Devotions (personal)
· Reading Scripture
· Bible Study (in community)
· Service
· Study
· Acts of Charity
· Acts of Justice
· ?
· ?
· ?
Introduction to Strengths-based approaches to Leadership
· Myers-Briggs
· DISC
· Enneagram
· Clifton Strengths (Gallup)
For your interest and further study…
9 Epilogue (Missiology in the 21st Century)
https://vimeo.com/1171652136/44fc1532f5?fl=ml&fe=ec
Context and Mission – Webinar
Notes
Lecture 3 - Culture and Mission
There are as many definitions for culture as there are anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, and theologians.
Definition: Culture is a dynamic but integrated set of shared ideas, values, and beliefs.
We can sum all that up. In the word worldview.
Worldview is expressed fundamentally by the language, customs, art, and social institutions and which guide a specific people's convictions regarding the nature of truth, reality, and meaning, as well as corporate and individual behavior.
Culture is a dynamic but integrated set, meaning that culture is not static.
It's always changing, sometimes subtly and peacefully, and sometimes abruptly and violently.
But culture is what remains an integrated whole even as it changes.
So when an aspect of culture changes, it changes the whole thing.
Culture is created when human beings come together and begin to flesh out a community based on a shared worldview.
Culture is a social construct, though it's not an intentional, conscious, totally human made construction. Rather, culture is what results when human beings come together around a shared worldview organized around shared ideas, values and beliefs a particular culture forms.
Culture is expressed by language, customs, art, and social institutions, meaning that our very language, which, by the way, distinguishes us from the rest of the animal world, our customs, our art, our social institutions like family structures, political structures, et cetera, reflect a culture's worldview.
Culture guides a specific people's convictions regarding the nature of truth, reality, and meaning.
Meaning that culture determines our beliefs about God, humanity, and the world.
Everything we see and interpret as ultimate reality, whether that's about God or science or nature, et cetera, is determined the lens of our culture.
Meaning that culture also determines what we deem ethical and unethical behaviour on both the social and personal levels.
Anthropologist Charles Kraft writes
“We are taught to trust our culture as an adequate set of guidelines in terms of which to live our lives.”
Most people consider their customs and the assumptions that underlie them to be correct, sacred, and often even absolute. So by default, we assume our culture to define what is normative and even absolute for truth and ethics. When we become more aware of our cultural assumptions, we not only check our tendencies toward ethnocentrism and paternalism, we also open ourselves up to accept other cultural expressions of the faith.
This is the beginning of the crucial process of contextualization.
Contrary to the notion that contextualization simply seeks to dress up the gospel in culturally appropriate clothing for the purpose of converting people, it speaks of a much more complex and noble task.
It means negotiating the delicate tension between revelation and context, seeking to discern the transcultural truth, the unchanging gospel interculturally, and learning together in the process how to translate and practice that truth according to a specific culture. It refers to the effort to remain true to both a globally shared biblical faith and the particular lifeways of a people.
What does contextualization look like? Or how do we do it?
A List of practices
- · Develop relationships.
- · Learn local language, written and unwritten communication, idioms, customs, dress, etcetera.
- · Develop relationships.
- · Attend community functions, celebrations, and so on.
- · Develop relationships.
- · Learn the local history of the people.
- · Develop relationships.
- · Read the local newspaper.
- · Develop relationships.
Contextualization happens best in and through relationships that we foster among the people of the host culture. Here are some deeper practices for contextualization.
1. be involved in the life of the host church.
We'll be tempted to become a member of an international church or to gather with fellow missionaries instead of plugging into a local indigenous church. And of course, there is a place for worshiping in familiar ways and for being with people of the same culture. But it can't be instead of learning to be church according to the lifeways of the host people.
2. be open to unique cultural forms of being and doing church.
Contrary to what we may think, the Bible doesn't prescribe the form that the church is supposed to take. That would be our culture talking when we insist, for example, that worship should be on Sunday morning and that we should follow some liturgy, and that we should be dressed a certain way, and that we should sing hymns and so on. Gentile Christian churches formed quite differently than Jewish Christian churches - the Bible teaches that Christian communities take on many forms.
A church in the suburbs of middle America should look an act differently than a church in urban Nairobi, which should look an act differently from a church in rural Thailand, which should look an act differently from a church on the coast of Costa Rica.
As Filipino pastor Ed Lapi says, every tribe and nation must be allowed to evolve a brand of Christianity whose spirit is biblical but whose body is indigenous.
3. Be keen and learn the folk religion of the culture.
Folk religion is what I call Street theology, a way that ordinary people, in contrast to the religious establishment, relate to God. Folk religion employs familiar terms and images of the established religion. For example, folk Catholicism in the Philippines extensively uses images of Virgin Mary, Infant Jesus, and the crucifix.
But the religious outlook and way of life are different enough from the formal and proper form of the establishment that the official church would not accept them as legitimate.
There is Christianity and there is folk or the people's Christianity. The folk Christianity of the people often reflect elements of the culture that the establishment has eliminated. So to learn the folk ways of the ordinary religious is essential for deep and thorough contextualization.
4. receive from the people.
Contextualization is not a one way process. Both missionary and host are or should be in a give and take relationship. As such missionaries cannot demonstrate an “I have everything I need” mentality which can be translated as “you have nothing to give me that I need, whereas I have everything to give you that you need.” An important part of the contextualization process is to learn not only to give, but also to receive from the people.
5. practice solidarity with the people
Rejoice with them, suffer with them, advocate for them, stand with them, serve them, and be served by them. For better or for worse, nothing speaks louder in terms of contextualization than becoming one with the people. Solidarity, being with the people through both their joys and struggles on a long term basis.
This leads us to the last element we need to discuss in this session on culture in the Gospel, namely the embrace of the incarnational approach to mission inspired by the Christmas event of God choosing to dwell among us in Jesus Christ.
Many have not simply celebrated this truth, they have also employed it to describe their desire to Incarnate among the people God has called them to love and serve with.
In contrast to ministering from a distance or occasionally parachuting down into the village of the other, incarnational presence means pitching your tent with the people, sharing in both their joys and struggles. It means long term commitment.
Incarnational Ministry
Theologically, Christ alone can claim the incarnation. On the other hand, if it inspires us to imitate Jesus in our approach to mission, then by all means let's use the Word.
Objections have been raised through the years to the incarnational approach to mission. It's unrealistic, they say, It's dishonest, it burns out missionaries, and besides, the poor don't even want us to move into their neighbourhood anyway. These objections have proved valid in so far as they have challenged tendencies to romanticize cross cultural ministry as well as have provided cautions to avoid unnecessary hardships. But – they should not discourage people from cultivating a very real, humble, learning sensitive presence among the poor.
Critical analysis of the incarnational approach have sparked discussions that have led to various creative ways to understand and practice incarnational mission. Though incarnational presence continues to be qualified and modified, it's kernel truth remains the same, namely that the embodying of the Gospel requires a full commitment to, with, and among the lives of the people and their culture.
In the next session, we will explore another truth about contextualization, namely how all forms of church and formulations of theology are contextual. It's not like there's a cultural standard for what a church looks like by which all other churches must be measured, or a standard theology by which all other theologies must be measured. No culture has a corner on these things. Now this is true, and it is then we have to come to terms with the fact that mission is polycentric and diverse.
Lecture 4 - Polycentric and Diverse Mission
If colonial mission assumed A dominant center that extended to the ends of the earth, post colonial mission views many centers from which mission is extended. Mission today is polycentric.
Our picture of mission can no longer just be white faces from the West going to non white faces in the majority world. It is also culturally diverse. Mission is multiculturally from everywhere to everywhere.
The editors of the important volume Mission After Christendom, right Though previously mission was unidirectional, moving from the Western Hemisphere to what were called mission territories, today mission seems to be from everywhere to everywhere. This phrase, From everywhere to everywhere, refers to a way of viewing mission as an enterprise of the global church scattered throughout the earth, not only enriching itself and its diversity, but also demonstrating the gospel of reconciliation.
Scholars such as Andrew Walls and Philip Jenkins have documented their remarkable shift of the church's center of gravity from primarily in the West with a predominantly white face, to the global S with a predominantly brown or black face.
According to Jenkins, a typical Christian today would be quote, a woman living in a village in Nigeria or in a Brazilian favela.
Indeed, a world Christianity, a precursor to the all tribes and nations and languages scenario of Revelation 7 has emerged and this is cause for great celebration.
I say emerged not to say that World Christianity is something new on the scene, but rather that the post colonial, post Christendom age has enabled us to see a new the truly diverse global nature of the Christian faith.
As missiologist Alan Yeh notes, this more recent phenomenon of world Christianity is a recovery, not a discovery. This should go without saying, but the idea of world Christianity should still include Europe and North America. The Western church still has a role to play.
The weight of Christianity may have shifted, but it would be misguided to believe that the Western church has somehow been replaced or left behind by non western forms of Christianity.
This has not happened so much as other centers have also formed.
Whereas the Western church was at some point erroneously regarded as the center, it is now one of many centers of Christianity around the world.
Christians are geographically widespread.
This is, according to the Pew report, so far-flung.
The report says that no single continent or region can indisputably claim to be the center of global Christianity.
To be sure, Christianity has not disappeared in the West, but now that it makes as much sense to talk about Christianity in the global S as it does Western Christianity, it stands to reason that cross cultural mission transcends any unidirectional approach.
In a post colonial post Christendom age mission happens from the West E North and South to the West E North and South from everywhere to everywhere.
Corresponding with the recovery of world Christianity is the idea of the recovery of mission as multi directional. Now that the majority weight of Christianity lies the global S, the South is in prime position to lead the way as Cardoza, Orlandi and Gonzalez qualify. The missionary movement moves in all directions, yet with a major protagonist role coming from the South.
In pre colonial and colonial times, the Christendom Church dominated the missionary scene and therefore claimed responsibility to evangelize the rest of the globe. As such, missions appeared unidirectional from the dominant western center to the ends or the outer margins of the earth.
This phrase From Everywhere to Everywhere refers first of all to a way of viewing mission as an enterprise of the global church scattered throughout the earth, not only enriching and growing itself in and through its diversity, but also demonstrating the whole gospel of reconciliation for our broken, desperate world.
To see such a picture of the intercultural, missional, united global church as reconciler becomes a viable possibility in a post colonial, post Christendom world.
Second, the from everywhere to everywhere phrase refers to flexibility and resiliency in mission, shaped and reshaped by the various cultures involved in any given missionary encounter.
Another way of saying this is that multidirectional mission is messy.
Mission no longer has clearly defined messengers and recipients, or a one way flow of personnel and finances, or a clear leadership structure.
The missionary movement is not a one way St., assert Cardoza, Orlandi, and Gonzalez, but it's rather a network with multiple intersections and crossings so that one cannot point to a particular center or to an established pattern of lineal, cumulative, and progressive movement.
The fuller picture presents a much freer and fragile movement, with success and failure, enthusiasm, frustrations, ambiguities and perplexities.
And 3rd From everywhere to everywhere refers to one more crucial point, namely the de-emphasis of territorial expansion.
Mission today is not so much about expanding Christianity's territorial borders anymore, since the Church is essentially everywhere.
Territorial expansion bears the mark of mission under Christendom.
In a Christendom context, to spread the gospel was virtually the same as the goal of adding to the list of Christian territories throughout the world.
As post Christendom has taken hold, territorial expansion takes a backseat, if it should be allowed in the car at all, in favor of genuine multidirectional mission by God's whole church among all populations from everywhere to everywhere.
This is what Andrew Walls calls the Ephesian moment, a coming together of cultures in Christ that demonstrates what God desires, the healing of the nations and the reconciliation of all things.
Whereas the original situation in Ephesus involved the coming together of two cultural blocks, Jew and Gentile, there are now many cultures that make up today's worldwide church.
Perhaps the most striking single feature of Christianity Today Walls celebrates is the fact that the church now looks more like that great multitude whom none can number, drawn from all tribes and Kindred's people and tongues, than ever before in its history.
North American Christianity can be seen as a microcosm of world Christianity in that the eyes of some are increasingly opening to the truth of the multi ethnic nature of the church.
When most people lament the decline of the church in North America, they refer, knowingly or not, to the white church.
But as Sam Chan RA reminds us, the church in America is not dying.
It's alive and well among the immigrant and ethnic minority communities.
And yet global mission is still largely an endeavor of middle to high class, white, mostly suburban churches.
If we want to live into the from everywhere to everywhere nature of mission today then we will have to review current structures, protocols and expectations which seem to lend themselves to sending primarily well resourced Euro Americans as missionaries and which conversely disadvantage less resource non whites to serve globally.
Mission has become capital intensive.
A far cry from the 1st 70 missionaries whom Jesus sent out in Luke chapter 10 when he instructed them, take no purse, no bag, no sandals.
At the very least, churches and mission organizations need to review fundraising standards in order to diversify global personnel.
Today the Spirit is calling the whole church in all its diverse glory to engage together in God's mission.
And our structures and models need to reflect this.
Mission today is polycentric and diverse. It's from everywhere to everywhere.
I call what God is doing today in, through, and sometimes in spite of the church, the holy mess of mission.
Christ calls us to join him in the mess.
In the next session, we will go even deeper with contextualization and discuss cross cultural friendships through which God's mission advances.
Cross cultural missional friendship speaks powerfully and effectively to a fractured world.
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