2 Papers: 1) Reframing Young People’s Journeys in Mission and 2) Planning Pilgrimmage
Switch to Paper #2 = Planning Pilgrimmage
Paper #1
Conference Presentation Paper [Short Version] — Koh-Butler & Villar
1. Reframing Young People’s Journeys in Mission
Young adults are not simply preparing for future mission. They already participate in God’s mission, and their journeys offer important insight into how mission formation must change. Drawing on reflections from the 2023–2025 cohorts of the Council for World Mission’s (CWM) Training in Mission (TIM) programme, we suggest formation must be relational, reflexive, decolonising, and attentive to place. TIM forms people not only in what they know, but in how they belong, listen, and respond with others to the urgencies of the present.
We begin with context and method, then highlight three claims. First, mission formation is shifting away from transmission models and toward partnership, accompaniment, and polycentric learning. Second, young adults in TIM describe mission in ways that weave together head, heart, and hands through solidarity, creation care, and mutuality. Third, integrated formation makes room for participants’ personal and cultural stories. These are not distractions from mission but part of the material through which mission is lived and interpreted.
1. Context and Method
CWM’s TIM programme has formed young missioners for more than four decades. TIMs come from diverse settings into shared community life, academic learning, mission exposure, and theological reflection. In 2023–2025, TIMs represented twenty-six cultural contexts and learned in seven countries. Their reflections provide a rich picture of how mission is understood, tested, and embodied by young adults living across difference while remaining accountable to particular local communities.
Material comes from newsletters, written reflections, facilitated debriefs, and spoken narratives gathered during and after fieldwork. Rather than treating these as data points for measurement, we approached them as voices to be listened to. They allowed participants, facilitators, and supporters to hear one another, while giving young adults language for naming learning. We read and re-read the material, tracing recurring themes around partnership, decolonisation, creation care, communal life, pastoral accompaniment, and what we describe as a now-orientation.
This is not a statistically representative study, nor does it aim to generalise beyond TIM cohorts. It is a qualitative, theologically attentive reflection on patterns that emerged across contexts. We write as co-learners who accompanied TIMs in teaching, mentoring, and facilitation. Our position required care, humility, and reflexivity, yet it also offered proximity to how TIMs made sense of mission. What became clear was that formation was happening not only in classrooms or formal placements, but around meals, on journeys, in conflict, in worship, and in moments of crisis.
2. Mission Formation in a Changing World
We came to appreciate that mission formation has shifted significantly. Older models sometimes saw mission as transmission: theological knowledge, resources, or religious certainty moving from one place to another. Contemporary contexts call for something else. TIMs entering mission today encounter worlds shaped by colonial histories, ecological fragility, migration, inequality, and rapidly shifting local-global relationships. Formation cannot be reduced to content or technical preparation. It must help people learn how to relate, how to read power and context, and how to remain teachable where they are both guests and participants.
In TIM this shift appears in several ways. Mission is less a one-directional activity than a partnership. TIMs learn they are not simply bringing something to others; they also receive, are challenged, and are changed. This pushes formation beyond individual competency toward mutual accompaniment and supports a decolonising stance. As TIMs live and learn in polyglot community, they are invited to notice how inherited assumptions about theology, leadership, race, language, gender, or social class influence them. Formation becomes adaptive rather than fixed. It asks not only, “What do I believe?” but also, “How have I learned to see, and what needs to be unlearned?”
Here the language of glocal formation becomes helpful. TIMs spoke of becoming part of a global family while growing more deeply attentive to local settings. Glocality did not dissolve local accountability; it sharpened it. To belong to a global Christian community was, for them, not to become generic, but to see more clearly how one’s own place, people, and struggles are tied to wider patterns of injustice and hope. Glocal formation names a space in which local commitment and global solidarity weave together. It is relational, dialogical, and often uncomfortable, requiring participants to keep negotiating difference without retreating into defensiveness or control.
TIM formation is more than preparatory. TIMs’ reflections suggest the opposite. They were not waiting to become missioners. They already acted, discerned, improvised, grieved, organised, and responded. They wanted to be recognised and accompanied in the work they were already doing. A now-orientation therefore matters deeply. Young adults are present agents in the church and world, not future leaders in waiting.
3. What Young Adults Say About Learning
We used a simple lens for interpretation: head, heart, and hands. By head we mean theological and conceptual learning; by heart, spiritual, relational, and affective formation; by hands, the practices and embodied actions through which mission becomes visible. This lens was useful because participants rarely separated these dimensions. They did not sort mission into theoretical ideas, activism, or inward spirituality. Repeatedly, they spoke of thinking, feeling, and acting, as woven together.
With head, TIMs shifted in how they understood mission. Many moved from seeing mission primarily as evangelistic transmission or charitable works toward describing relational accompaniment, listening, and solidarity. This was not merely a change in vocabulary. It reflected encounters in which they discovered that meaningful mission begins with attention rather than answers, with presence rather than control. Participants wrote about learning to listen before speaking, to observe before prescribing, and to recognise how often people at the margins are rendered invisible by systems that speak about them without learning from them.
With heart, communal life was the most formative element. Living together across cultures pushed TIMs to question habits previously unnoticed. They named both strain and gift: the patience required, the discomfort of misunderstanding, the challenge of negotiating routines, and the deep friendships and partnerships that emerged. Formation was not smooth. It involved generative disruption. TIMs learnt mission is not sustained by personal conviction alone, but by being with others in ways that build trust, honesty, and shared responsibility.
With hands, TIMs repeatedly linked learning to fieldwork. They encountered mission through community visits, advocacy events, meal service, mediation training, farm exposure, and pastoral presence in contexts of vulnerability. Some spoke of learning that justice takes shape through conversation, accompaniment, and long attention rather than through quick solutions. These experiences challenged both activist urgency and saviour instincts. They invited a slower, more relational response: one that remains present to complexity and takes seriously the wisdom of those most affected.
Creation care emerged as a clear example of this integrated learning. TIMs did not treat ecological concern as an optional topic. They described it as core to the Gospel and mission. Visits, such as Goshen Farm in the Philippines, helped TIMs connect biblical imagination with questions of food, land, subsistence, and environmental justice. Some drew on their own contexts, especially island and cyclone-prone communities, where climate crisis is not a future scenario but an immediate aspect of life. Creation care was always more than environmental awareness. It was bound up with Kin-dom concerns of community resilience, social justice, memory, grief, and practical response.
This became visible in the response to Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica. TIMs who had been reflecting on teamwork, service, and shared mission found themselves responding to devastation impacting both host communities and members of their own cohort. In that setting, mission required the integration of head, heart, and hands at once: theological understanding, spiritual grounding, practical action, and the capacity to care for one another under stress. Their formation is not only theoretical; it is tested in their current realities.
4. Why Reflexivity and Pastoral Care Matter
We have learnt that mission formation must make room for what missioners carry within them. Young adults do not enter mission as blank slates. They bring cultural assumptions, wounds, aspirations, memories, and theological inheritances. These shape how they perceive communities, how they respond emotionally, and what kinds of language feel possible or impossible to them. If formation ignores this inner landscape, it risks sending people who are technically equipped but not yet integrated.
Our longer paper explores this through two case studies, Luna and Stell, and proposes a three-part pedagogical model: Identification, Interrogation, and Integration. Luna’s story concerns cultural symmetry. Encountering fisherfolk in the Philippines, she experiences a strong emotional bridge with their life-world because of her own maritime background. Yet this very resonance risks over-identification. Stell’s story concerns theological dissonance. Discussion of “God the Father” surfaces unresolved pain around paternal absence, making familiar doctrinal language difficult to inhabit. Though different, both stories reveal how personal history filters mission encounter.
The first task, Identification, is simply to notice what has been carried into the room. This may happen through tears, resistance, confusion, strong attraction, or discomfort. The second task, Interrogation, draws on critical reflexivity. Rather than asking TIMs to suppress responses, it invites them to examine how biography, culture, and power shape what they are perceiving. The third task, Integration, is pastoral. It does not leave the person exposed or ashamed, but helps them see how vulnerability, when accompanied wisely, can become a resource for more truthful and compassionate mission.
This model matters because it moves formation beyond a skills paradigm. It suggests that mission pedagogy must also be sanctuary: a brave, discerning space in which young adults can name what they carry and discover that God is already present there. In our work, we interpret this with help from theology of struggle and Philippine feminist theology, both of which insist that divine presence is encountered not only in abstract doctrine but also in the resilience, pain, and agency of the marginalised. The result is not self-preoccupation, but a deeper readiness for solidarity, because missioners who better understand their own formation are often better able to accompany others with humility.
5. Implications for Conference Conversation
For conference conversation, we offer four implications. First, mission formation for young adults must be treated as present-tense, not only preparatory. Churches and mission organisations need forms of accompaniment that recognise young adults as active contributors. Second, formation must remain deeply relational. Shared life, conflict, hospitality, and mutual learning are not secondary; they are part of living curriculum. Third, creation care should not be treated as an added module on sustainability, but as integral to mission, justice, and discipleship in communities already living with ecological pressure. Fourth, pastoral care and reflexivity are not optional supports for a few fragile individuals. They are essential practices for forming missioners who engage others without denying the histories they carry.
These implications invite a broader question: what environments enhance formation? If our programmes prize efficiency, performance, and measurable products alone, they may fail to notice the deep work through which people become trustworthy companions in mission. If we can imagine formation as glocal, relational, reflexive, and pastorally grounded, then we may better nurture communities capable of responding to a fragmented world with courage, tenderness, and imagination.
6. Conclusion
Young adults help us see mission formation more clearly. TIM reflections point away from one-way transmission and toward partnership, accompaniment, and mutual transformation. They show that formation is strongest when head, heart, and hands are held together in concrete realities. They remind us that pastoral-reflexive work is central to mission because what missioners carry within them shapes how they meet others.
TIMs suggest that the journey of young adult missioners is not a straight line from preparation to deployment. It is more spiral-like: outward into global community, inward through reflexive encounter, and back again to local places with renewed imagination and deeper solidarity. They are not the church of tomorrow, but the church of today, already walking, discerning, and teaching us how mission must be lived.
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Longer Paper for Mission Studies
Reframing Young People’s Journeys in Mission
Reflections with Young Adults Who Have Walked Together in Transforming Contemporary Approaches to Mission
Authors
Amelia Koh-Butler (Council for World Mission) amelia.koh-butler@cwmission.org
and Carmel Villar (Union Theological Seminary) Cvillar.uts@gmail.com
Abstract
The Training in Mission (TIM) programme of the Council for World Mission (CWM) has formed missional leaders for more than four decades. As global understandings of mission shift, TIM offers a renewed focus on reflexive partnership, decolonizing content, and attention to people and place. TIMs experience g-locality, forming a global family that informs local mission activism, creation care, and faithful response to context. Drawing on reflections from participants in the 2023–2025 cohorts, we analyse learning through the lenses of head, heart, and hands and present two case studies of reflexive transformation. Participants represent twenty-six cultural contexts and learn across seven countries. TIMs embody multinational identities while remaining accountable to particular contexts, expressing missional imagination, relational support, and a need for ecclesial recognition. They are leaders for today.
Keywords
· Youth · Formation · Reflexivity · Creation · Glocal · Worldview · Learning · Mission Pedagogy · Pastoral Care · Theology of Struggle · Feminist Theology · Missionary Formation ·
Introduction and Background
Gathering under the theme “Walking Together in Mission: Facing Global Challenges for a Sustainable World,” we approach mission as a shared journey shaped by companionship, listening, and mutual learning. The Emmaus story (Luke 24:13–35) reminds us that Christ is encountered on the road—in conversation and community—as people walk through uncertainty toward hope. Companionship is not an optional extra; it steadies us on unfamiliar ground and helps us keep walking together.
This paper grows from journeying with young adults in the Training in Mission (TIM) programme of the Council for World Mission (CWM) (2023–2025). For four decades, CWM has accompanied TIMs through communal living, contextual engagement, and theological reflection. Current conversations about decolonization, partnership, creation care, and worldview raise fresh questions about how young people are formed for mission—and how they, in turn, reshape missional practice.
Reflections are drawn from participant inputs across twenty-six cultural contexts whose learning unfolded in seven countries. They describe forming a global community that deepens local commitments. They name this glocality: belonging to a global family that sharpens engagement with particular places, struggles, and activism.
A striking theme is concern for creation and place. Participants frame mission as responding to God’s call to care for the earth and tend the places they inhabit. This aligns with the Assembly’s sustainability focus and with interconnected pressures—ecological crisis, inequality, displacement, and intergenerational tension—which for these young adults are not abstract issues but lived realities requiring collaborative responses.
We read these voices through a lens of head, heart, and hands—attending to theological reflection, spiritual formation, relationships, and embodied practice. What emerges is not a picture of leaders merely “in preparation,” but of young adults already exercising agency and imagination while also naming a need for accompaniment, relational support, and ecclesial recognition. These are leaders for today.
The paper unfolds in four parts. We introduce TIM and how we listened, then situate it within wider shifts in mission formation, share participant insights, and offer two case studies of reflexive transformation (“unpacking” personal baggage). We close by drawing out missiological implications for formation and partnership, hoping these voices illuminate fresh possibilities for mission today.
Methods: Listening to Young Adults in Mission
Before turning to what TIMs said, it helps to say a little about how we listened—and why that matters. Newsletters enabled supporters, facilitators, and TIMs to listen to one another, with content, form, and project management shared across the group. The TIM Newsletter communicated discoveries about mission to supporters “back home” and created markers for reflective practice. As participants narrated experiences and connected them with theory, they often became better able to recognise their own growth.
Presence is about returning visibility to people who are normally overlooked… Not the answers, but attention. Not the resources, but relationship.
Themba Ngwira, “Ligtong Reflections,” 2025 TIM Newsletter, Issue 3, p.13.
As authors, we worked with reflections from participants in the 2023–2025 cohorts, using written and spoken narratives gathered during and after learning placements. Our aim was not comprehensive measurement but careful listening for patterns in how young adults describe formation, mission, and leadership. Participants represented twenty‑six cultural contexts and learned across seven countries.
This [contextual visit] taught us that mission must begin with listening and learning before speaking.
Priscillah Bwalya & Themba Ngwira, “Understanding Mission in a Modern Global Context through Cultural Visits,” 2025 TIM Newsletter, Issue 8, p. 3.
Cultural and mission-site visits in Manila and Dasmarinas (Philippines), Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Singapore, and Jamaica offered contrasting contexts that sharpened comparison—both across sites and with their home countries.
We organised the material with a simple integrative lens—head, heart, and hands:
- Head: theological ideas, worldview shifts, and key concepts participants used
- Heart: identity, spirituality, relationships, and communal belonging
- Hands: practices, experiments, and actions in local places
This lens fit the way TIM itself emphasises people, community, and praxis, and it aligned well with our interest in g‑local belonging and creation‑attentive mission.
We read and re-read the reflections, coding for recurring themes such as decolonising approaches, partnership, care for place and creation, and the tension between leadership now and leadership later. As we compared notes, we looked for convergence and difference, tracing links between global community life and local responsibility, and between ecological concern and shifts in prayer, study, and action.
We write as co‑learners alongside participants, having accompanied TIM cohorts in teaching, mentoring, or facilitation. Aware of the power dynamics this can introduce, we prioritised participant language and treat our analysis as reflexive accompaniment rather than external evaluation.
Reflections were used with permission. We anonymised identifying details when quoting unpublished work and avoided stories that could expose vulnerable communities. Our guiding principle: protect relationships and communities while allowing genuine insights to be heard.
This is not a statistically representative study but a theologically attentive qualitative reflection on particular cohorts in a particular period. The geographic spread is broad, though not exhaustive; the voices are many, though not all. Some of the richest insights emerged after structured activities—over meals, on walks, and in debriefs—so they are textured rather than easily counted. Even so, the breadth of cultures involved and the consistency of key themes suggest these patterns matter for wider missiological conversation. With that posture in mind, we turn to wider shifts in mission formation that clarify these insights.
1. Missional Formation in a Changing World
1.1 Shifts in Global Mission Thinking
Themba and Eddy are unlikely brothers. One is a tall, serious English-speaking South African, just beginning to discover his calling as a theologian. The other is a much shorter, French-speaking Malagasy pastor, secure in his faith and exuding warm joy. Their churches, life experiences, and backgrounds are all very different. Yet they worked together exceptionally well, intentionally learning to appreciate God in each other.
Each had entered TIM assuming mission was more than personal evangelism and open to broader thinking. Yet much of their prior formation (perhaps unintentionally) conveyed mission as the transmission of good news to those in need, with the missionary as an individual actor. Both could name people who had encouraged their journey with God, but it was harder to name faculty or friends as mission teams. They had not yet fully discovered that goodness was to be found in the margins.
Three pillars of the TIM programme had evolved over several decades:
1. Mission continues to shift in focus, from transmission to partnership[1]
The Council for World Mission (CWM) had adopted ‘Mission Partnerships’ when it intentionally transformed from the London Missionary Society (LMS), and it is now known as a partnership of churches in mission. Therefore, much of the formation for TIM is how to work in partnerships and share resources, power and decision-making. The capacity to work in partnership is largely dependent on self-awareness and developing a reflexive practice. This is explored further in the authors’ partner paper, Planning Pilgrimage: a motif for Young Adults Walking Together.
2. Mission continues to be ‘de-colonized’ and ‘de-centred’[2]
The movement to a global partnership was challenging for CWM, as the LMS had strong ties to British colonialism. By bringing participants from different countries to live together, studying/exploring context in different environments, and continually having to renegotiate boundaries and redefine benchmarks, the TIMs would take on an adaptive posture.
Rather than relying on fixed rules and hierarchies, TIMs would centre themselves on the person of Christ and the relationality of the Trinity.
3. Youth and Young Adult formation for mission requires a now orientation rather than an assumption the work is purely preparatory or that it can repeat the past.
As the vulnerability of partnership opens up reciprocity, TIMs become both bearers and receivers, a humble posture that opens up both the now and later. TIMs, therefore, learn to be in constant conversation with their context: What is being observed? What is being experienced? What is brought? What is left? What is changing? How is this impacting change? How will we need to adapt?
More recently, post-colonial influences have prompted this additional emphasis on adaptive leadership among TIMs, as:
4. Mission-from-the-margins requires people-centred approaches more than programme-driven approaches.
TIM is an educational programme within CWM’s Programmes. Given programmatic structures, thematic goals, partnership reporting, and the ecclesial nominations process, being people-centred can feel like a big ask, yet candidate inputs and interviews shape programme content and methodology. Each TIM brings unique skills, characteristics, and life experiences; these ingredients are valued.
A visit to Sabina Park, historic home of Jamaican cricket, sparked conversations about teamwork, goals, and shared achievement. Themba and Eddy reflected on the behind-the-scenes teams without whom the visible players could not succeed.
It reminded us that every role, no matter how small,
contributes to the success of a larger mission …
Source: Themba Ngwira & RANDRIAMAZAORO Dimbisolo Eddy,
“Trip to Sabina Park,” TIM Newsletter Issue 9, p. 4.
This understanding of everyday contributions as part of a larger mission soon became more than an idea. Only days later, they experienced Hurricane Melissa (November 2025) and joined the missional response of their hosting church, the United Church of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, both to the devastated community and to one another, as one member of the group had lost his family home in the storm. In that moment, the TIMs were asked to bring together what they knew, what they felt, and what they were willing to do with their own hands in the work of cleanup and care.
1.2 Formation Beyond Skills: Head, Heart, and Hands
Christian educators often speak of forming the head (intellect), heart (affect), and hands (action). Dennis Hollinger (2011) argued that balancing these components is essential to what makes us fully human.
Mission and ministry curriculum development in reformed tertiary settings often focuses on theological content and conceptual understanding. By contrast, vocational missionaries from communal orders will often prioritise shared spiritual practices of the heart (e.g. Catholic and Orthodox missionary communities who are known for prayer, devotion, shared reflection). The rise of lay and occasional (often voluntary) mission engagement has led to the incorporation of skills acquisition through competency-based vocational education and training.
The TIM Programme was designed to balance these three components. Theological and conceptual understanding is addressed through the formal Diploma of Mission Studies, comprising five intensive modules (Psychological, Socio-Analytical, Biblical, Theological, and Missiological). Each module draws on all the other lenses, and regular fieldwork ensures reflection on their integration in practice.
TIMs live together in Christian community, with shared spiritual and relational responsibilities, growing together as a new expression of God’s reconciled family of disciples. They engage in a range of practical field activities that challenge them in five areas of mission: articulating the Gospel in a variety of social contexts, sharing learnings about how faith works in varied settings, exercising pastoral care and concern in different communities, advocating for disadvantaged and marginalised people and places using different contextualized strategies, and engaging in creation care[3].
1.3 GLocal Formation Space
The shifts traced in this section—from transmission to partnership, from unilateral expertise to mutual accompaniment, and from institutional transfer to adaptive formation—suggest that forming mission practitioners today requires more than curriculum expansion. The head–heart–hands framework helps correct overly cognitive models of training by holding theological understanding, spiritual depth, and embodied practice together. Yet if treated as self-contained, it can still reproduce older patterns: forming well-rounded individuals equipped to go, rather than communities formed to belong and become alongside others. Each TIM arrived as a strong leader in their home context; the challenge is to accompany them into a globally aware family in which no one is entirely alone, even far from home.
The contemporary context calls for formation that is relational and attentive to place. Glocalization offers a constructive frame. Robertson argues that the global and local are not opposites but mutually shaping realities (Robertson, 1992, 1995), a dynamic reflected in the polycentric landscape of world Christianity. Roberts adds that the glocal is also a calling: the church is invited to hold local commitment and global solidarity together in new ways (Roberts, 2007). Formation that takes this seriously cannot remain centred in one place, tradition, or direction of learning; it must become glocal—nurturing practitioners rooted enough to belong and open enough to be changed by those they walk alongside.
This points toward a GLocal Formation Space. The TIM community is global in its human ingredients, yet it is always placed in particular local environments. The task is to engage local mission while negotiating multiple worldviews, and to do so with enough honesty and patience for difference to become a teacher rather than a threat. As Sharon and Trevaughn note, living together creates an intentionally complex holding space that provokes deep questioning and cultural challenge.
Communal living will make you question why you do things the way you do. It will teach you patience and tolerance and, at the same time, facilitate meaningful friendships and partnerships.
Sharon Thiong’o & Trevaughn Hylton, “Life so far / Us at UTS,” 2025 TIM Newsletter, Issue 3, p.5.
Sharon and Trevaughn’s comment names formation as relational disruption, placing communal pedagogy ahead of simple content delivery. Even in co-writing a newsletter article, these two young adults—from Kenya and Jamaica—crossed the Africa–Caribbean divide to walk together in mission. That same disruption appears throughout what TIMs say about their learning, and it is to those voices that we now turn.
2. TIMs articulate their learning
Fieldwork exposed TIMs to varied forms of mission: solidarity and advocacy events, visits with marginalized communities, meal service, and health support. They also undertook Peer Mediation training, learning facilitated conversation and negotiated compromise. For young people with a strong sense of right and wrong, living with “what people are willing to live with” was often new and uncomfortable. The invitation was to stay with people in discomfort rather than trying to “win” salvation.
Justice better takes shape in contexts through conversation rather than by a battle of words.
Source: 2024 TIM, “A Heart of Gratitude,” TIM Mission Chronicles, Issue 7 (2024), p.5.
Reggae is more than a rhythm because it carries messages of peace, freedom, and social justice...
(Samuel Fililagi Toleafoa & Dim Zam Cing, “Jamaica,” 2025 TIM Newsletter, Issue 9, p.9).
Faith can adapt to modern times while remaining centred on God.
(Randriamazaoro D.Eddy & Samuel Fililagi Toleafoa & Dim Zam Cing, “Theology in Context,” 2025 TIM Newsletter, Issue 8, p.11).
Missions should be done with those in the margins and not for them…
Source: 2024 TIM, “The Missiological Modules,” TIM Mission Chronicles, Issue 5 (2024), p.3. (underlines made for this paper)
Presence is about returning visibility to people who are normally overlooked. Not the answers, but attention. Not resources, but relationship.
(Themba Ngwira, “Ligtong Reflections,” 2025 TIM Newsletter, Issue 3, p.13).
Taken together, these reflections express a decolonising approach to mission: accompaniment rather than intervention, presence rather than provision, and participation in God’s mission rather than acting as external agents. Though they come from different participants and activities, they gather around relationship—and they also open naturally into the TIMs’ growing concern for the environment.
Samuel, a young Samoan leader, comes from a Pacific context where climate crisis is experienced as rising seas and food insecurity. Visiting Goshen Farm in the Philippines, he observed how placing ministry leaders and theological students in subsistence farming reframes biblical stories about land, food, wealth, and privilege.
Mission is not only about people—it is also about the land. Caring for creation is part of the Gospel.
(Samuel Fililagi Toleafoa, “Goshen Farm Reflection,” 2025 TIM Newsletter, Issue 3, p.8).
Samuel valued wondering aloud in Godly Play sessions about creation and farming (Berryman, 1991), which helped him develop his written reflections. The use of Godly Play is discussed further in our partner paper, “Planning Pilgrimage: A Motif for Young Adults Walking Together in Mission Formation” (Villar & Koh-Butler). What matters here is that this kind of “wondering” creates room for participants to speak without being reinterpreted or teacher‑splained; when explanations come too quickly, they can interrupt learning still taking shape. Time to sit with discomfort gave reflection room to deepen.
Returning home, Samuel will face mission questions about oceans, shipping, and deep‑sea mining. As he begins formal studies, he enters college with a global worldview shaped by seafaring and life in multiple contexts.
African participants were moved by a visit to Nelson Mandela Park in Jamaica. They saw how a local figure’s words and deeds traversed continents. Mandela’s concern for environmental justice shaped their articulation of creation care as more than human survival—toward life‑flourishing and shalom.
Mandela’s vision reminds us that environmental justice is social justice.
(Source: 2025 TIM, “Nelson Mandela Park piece,” 2024 TIM Newsletter, Issue 8, p.4).
Some TIMs spoke from rural or farming experience; others named limited green access in urban settings. All identified community members disadvantaged by climate change or environmental neglect and described renewed energy to attend to place and respond more intentionally to crisis. While this was clear in the 2023 and 2024 cohorts, the 2025 group enacted it through their response to Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica.
For some TIMs from cyclone‑prone countries (Jamaica, Madagascar, Samoa, and Papua New Guinea), extreme storms were familiar; for others, a tropical hurricane was new. The intern lost his family home, and another participant belonged to a directly impacted community, making the crisis personal for all. As they sheltered, they also prepared to assist their hosting church’s response. Moving from anxiety to organised service required mutual encouragement and the integration of spiritual, emotional, and practical resources: they prayed, responded to need, and made space for one another’s vulnerability.
Having sketched the TIM experience in participants’ own words, we now turn to personal transformation. Across the 2023–2025 programmes, twenty-two of twenty-six participants named dealing with personal issues in a testing environment. In the wake of COVID-19, at least twelve had been touched by recent family loss; others carried shorter- or longer-term traumas, and time away from home created space to reflect on internal struggles. As facilitators, we accompany TIMs through pastoral presence. The following depersonalised case studies illustrate this work within a diverse community sharing a liminal space.
3. CASE STUDIES: Unpacking the suitcase: An Integrated Approach to Reflexivity, Pastoral Care, and the Theology of Struggle in Mission Formation [CARMEL B VILLAR]
Through two case studies—“Luna,” a maritime missioner experiencing cultural symmetry, and “Stell,” a missioner navigating theological dissonance shaped by paternal absence—this section offers a three-part pedagogical model: Identification, Interrogation, and Integration. Drawing on Eleazar Fernandez’s (1994) “Theology of Struggle” and the Philippine feminist theologies of Sr. Mary John Mananzan and Rev. Dr. Lizette Tapia-Raquel, it shows how a pastoral-reflexive approach can help transform personal wounds and cultural biases into professional and spiritual assets. It invites mission organisers to imagine formation as a brave space where inner integration is part of authentic community encounter and prophetic solidarity.
Missioners often carry psychological and cultural “baggage” that remains hidden until reflection or community encounter brings it to light. Gittins (2002), in Ministry at the Margins: Strategy and Spirituality for Mission, distinguishes cultural baggage and personal history. He uses the “cultural suitcase” to name inherited biases and normative assumptions carried into ministry: “We carry our culture like a suitcase; we are often unaware of its contents until we try to open it in a different climate or find that it contains things that are inappropriate for the new setting” (p. 76).
Alongside cultural baggage is the missioner’s “personal history”: unresolved wounds and needs that shape worldview and ministry. The missioner is never a detached agent of the Gospel, but one “whose own history—including their prejudices, fears, and past experiences—is the very medium through which the encounter with the community is filtered” (Gittins, 2002, p. 81).
“Consider the case of Luna, a missioner from a maritime community in the Pacific Islands. Her encounter with a coastal village in the Philippines became a biographical intersection. With local fisherfolk, she faced a dual crisis: systemic poverty—worsened by climatic instability and capital scarcity—and the collapse of a local ‘capital provider’ brought on by family health needs. Luna responded with affective solidarity, moving beyond detached observation into shared lament. This ‘revelation of baggage’ shows how her fishing-culture history dissolved professional distance; without reflexivity, such over‑identification can slide into paralysis.”
In a different didactic encounter, Stell—a missioner‑in‑training—faced a personal history that unsettled familiar theological language. During a session on positionality, he broke into tears during discussion of “God the Father.”
In the reflexive space that followed, Stell disclosed a “personal history” (Gittins, 2002) marked by paternal absence. Raised by his mother and grandmother, he experienced a secure matriarchal home but carried a “symbolic void” around fatherhood. This produced theological dissonance: he struggled to connect the doctrinal “love of God the Father” with his lack of a paternal reference point.
This unexamined baggage also triggered an ontological crisis about his future efficacy. Stell wondered whether he could offer “paternal” care to a community—or parent well—without any blueprint. Training became the revelation of a hidden wound: fear that his personal history made him spiritually incomplete for mission.
Luna and Stell’s stories differ—one socio-economic, the other psycho-spiritual—but both show why mission pedagogy must be integrated. Luna’s baggage is cultural symmetry: a visceral bridge that, without reflexivity, risks over-identification. Stell’s baggage is biographical dissonance: paternal absence that becomes a barrier to preaching “God the Father.”
Despite their differences, both arrive at the same pedagogical crossroads, where “personal history acts as the medium through which the encounter... is filtered” (Gittins, 2002, p. 81). For Luna, pastoral-reflexive accompaniment helps tears lead to strategic empowerment rather than shared helplessness. For Stell, it reframes the paternal “void” not as deficit, but as a capacity to empathize with the marginalized and fatherless. Bringing these suitcases into the didactic encounter turns vulnerability into a professional and spiritual asset.
This raises the central question: how can mission pedagogy be reimagined as an intersectional practice of reflexivity and pastoral care so that a missioner’s cultural and personal baggage is identified, unpacked, and integrated before shaping community encounter?
In Search of an Integrative Approach to Mission Pedagogy
I. The Missionary "Baggage": Theoretical Scaffolding
This study draws on Gittins’ (2002) missiological psychology: missioners carry a “cultural suitcase” and “personal history” that filter ministry, often dormant until revealed in immersion or a didactic encounter. McGlone and Sperry (2016) likewise argue that formation must address the psychological dimensions of radical commitment, since unexamined narratives can lead to dysfunction.
II. Reflexivity as a Pedagogical Tool
To “unpack” baggage, this paper uses critical reflexivity. More than reflection, reflexivity is a sustained internal dialogue that examines positionality. Finlay (2002) and Berger (2015) describe it as turning the lens back on oneself to see how situatedness shapes interpretation. In mission, Jackson (1997) and Rogers (2016) argue that reflexivity is “the heart of the matter,” making subjective responses a site of learning rather than a barrier to encounter.
III. Theology of Struggle and Feminist Liberation
Integration is further grounded in Theology of Struggle and Philippine feminist theology. Fernandez (1994) develops a “spirituality of struggle,” locating God not in abstract doctrine but in the brokenness and resilience of the marginalized.
This is complemented by Sr. Mary John Mananzan and Rev. Dr. Lizette Tapia-Raquel. Mananzan (1992) critiques “malestream” clericalism, helping missioners deconstruct rigid theological archetypes. Tapia-Raquel (2024) develops “Babaylan feminist multiplicity,” insisting the Divine is incarnate in women’s resilient, nurturing lives. Together, these lenses help missioners like Luna and Stell re-map personal histories as sacred sites of encounter and solidarity.
Using Gittins’ (2002) framework, this paper argues that without a pastoral didactic—a safe space to unpack suitcases during training—missioners may be sent out skilled yet effectively blinded by unexamined histories. Theology of Struggle and feminist theology provide language for this work while linking it to local and global realities.
The Task at Hand
Using Luna and Stell’s comparative narratives, this paper illustrates a three‑phase model for mission formation that bridges academic instruction and personal transformation: Identification, Interrogation, and Integration.
Phase 1: Identification – The Diagnostic Task (The "Didactic Reveal")
Phase 1 reveals hidden baggage during the mission didactic. Using Gittins’ (2002) framework, we identify two manifestations of the “suitcase”:
Luna (Cultural/Socio‑Economic): a “cultural suitcase” of maritime identity. Her baggage appears as symmetry—shared history with fisherfolk that can overshadow her role as missioner.
Stell (Theological/Relational): a “personal history” of paternal absence. His baggage appears as dissonance—no father figure becomes a barrier to the “God the Father” archetype, triggering crisis about his efficacy.
Phase 2: Interrogation – The Reflexive Task (The "Unpacking" Process)
Phase 2 moves from awareness to interrogation through critical reflexivity (Finlay, 2002; Berger, 2015), giving Luna and Stell tools to look inside their suitcases without shame:
For Luna: Reflexivity helps her ask why she is weeping, shifting from “feeling the same” to “standing with,” and clarifying her positionality as missioner.
For Stell: Reflexivity helps him deconstruct the “Father” archetype and see his struggle as biographical projection rather than spiritual failure.
Phase 3: Integration – The Pastoral Task (The "Transformative Outcome")
Phase 3 integrates pastoral care so burdens become professional and spiritual assets, forming wounded healers in mission:
Luna: Her tears become empathy that can sustain strategic advocacy for marginalized coastal communities.
Stell: His matriarchal formation becomes a resource for offering inclusive pastoral care beyond patriarchal norms.
Luna’s Narrative
Facilitator: (Initiating the reflexive process) "Luna, we all noticed the depth of your emotion during the fellowship. What was happening internally? What made you cry?"
Luna: (Unpacking the contents of her suitcase) "I come from a fishing village just like this one. But in my village, our people are always complaining about almost everything. Here, I see people who seem to have much heavier burdens—bad weather, no catch, no capital—yet I don't hear them complain. Their resilience is what broke my heart."
1. The Identification of the Suitcase: The Revelation of the "Home" Suitcase
Luna’s tears weren't just about the Philippines; they were about the Pacific. Her "cultural suitcase" contains the voices of her own people. In this moment, the Filipino villagers became a "mirror" (Gittins, 2002) that showed her something about her own culture that she had never noticed before: the habit of complaint versus the grace of resilience.
2. Moving from Symmetry to Critical Reflexivity
Initial Thought (Symmetry): "They are just like my people."
Reflexive Realization (The Reveal): "They are different from my people in how they carry suffering."
The Pedagogical Task: The facilitator helps Luna see that her baggage (her frustration with her own village’s complaining) was being projected onto this new community. Her tears were a mix of grief for her home and awe for the stranger.
3. The Pastoral Integration
This is where the "Integrated Approach" shines. Instead of telling Luna her comparison is "unfair" to her home village, the pastoral facilitator helps her see her Personal History as a bridge.
The Asset: Luna now has a "theology of resilience." She can go back to her own village (or stay in mission) and speak not as an outsider, but as one who has seen a different way to carry a cross. Her baggage has been transformed into a visionary asset.
Stell’s Story
Stell: (Revealing the core of his theological crisis) "I grew up without a father. I was raised by my single mom and my grandmother. How can I tell the people of God's love when I haven't experienced a father's love?"
Facilitator: (Initiating the reflexive shift) "How did you experience love?"
Stell: "Through my mother and grandmother."
Facilitator: (The Pastoral Integration) "Then, isn’t it God's love you have experienced?"
I. The Revelation of Baggage (Identification)
During a mission training module on the nature of God, Stell experienced an emotional rupture. Utilizing Gittins’ (2002) framework, he identified a deep "personal history" of paternal absence. His "suitcase" contained a perceived "symbolic void," leading to the belief that his inability to relate to the "God the Father" archetype disqualified him from authentic mission.
II. The Theological Interrogation (Unpacking)
Through the tool of critical reflexivity, the didactic process challenged Stell’s narrative of inadequacy using two local feminist frameworks:
Dismantling the "Malestream": Applying Sr. Mary John Mananzan’s critique of patriarchal clericalism, Stell recognized that his "shame" was a byproduct of a male-centered theology that monopolizes the image of the Divine.
The Matriarchal Incarnation: Drawing on Rev. Dr. Lizette Tapia-Raquel’s theology of incarnation, Stell re-mapped his childhood. He moved from seeing his mother’s love as a "deficit-filler" to seeing it as a "Babaylan-inspired grace"—a primary site where God’s nurturing and resilient love was made flesh.
III. The Transformative Outcome (Integration)
Stell’s "baggage" was transformed into a professional and spiritual asset. He transitioned from a "detached agent" struggling with doctrine to an "integrated missioner" capable of offering an inclusive image of God.
The Shift: He no longer preaches a God who is absent (the Father he never had) but a God who is present in the struggle and strength of the "silenced and marginalized" (the women who raised him).
A Challenge to the Modern Mission Movement: From "Skills" to "Sanctuary"
The narratives of Luna and Stell remind us that mission is never a journey of a “blank slate” into a “passive land.” It is always an encounter between the history of the community and that of the missioner. A threefold challenge follows from this:
The baggage is real: we must stop designing training programmes that prize technical efficiency over human integration. If our pedagogy is not pastoral, it is incomplete. In TIM we move beyond lectures to create didactic sanctuaries—brave spaces where the suitcases of young people like Luna and Stell are acknowledged and intentionally unpacked. Prophetic voices like Mananzan and Tapia-Raquel belong in this work, helping free missioners from “malestream” assumptions before they reach the margins.
When young people look in the mirror and see frustration, tears, and hollowness, it is not a failure of mission—it is a reflexive invitation. Personal history is part of the message. We ask: are you bringing a message of paternal power, or witnessing to the God of struggle who lives in the resilience of fisherfolk and the strength of the matriarch?
Personal stories become assets for the individual and the global family formed for glocal mission. Whether the origin story is a village of struggle or a home with a “symbolic void,” God has already been incarnate there. We do not go into mission to find God; we go because we have already been found. Tears and laughter, struggles and healing, shared in community, deepen a missioner’s capacity for service.
4. Conclusion: Reframing Mission Through Young Adults’ Journeys
This paper has argued for a reframing of mission formation through three interconnected lenses. In Section 1, we traced shifts in formation: away from transmission and toward partnership, away from monocultural expertise and toward decolonized, polycentric learning, and away from preparation-for-later and toward a now-orientation that recognises young adults as already active agents in mission. The head–heart–hands framework remains a helpful corrective to purely cognitive training, but it is most fruitful within a glocal formation space—relational, grounded in place, and shaped by genuine encounter across difference.
Section 2 gave those shifts a human texture. TIM participants’ reflections, gathered across twenty-six cultural contexts and seven countries, show that mission learning is inseparable from accompaniment, solidarity, and attention to place. Creation care, justice, and pastoral presence were not abstract concerns; they were lived realities—sharpened by visits to Goshen Farm, Nelson Mandela Park, and, most urgently, by the community’s response to Hurricane Melissa. These were not students in waiting; they were missioners in practice.
Section 3 turned inward, showing why integrated formation must also attend to what missioners carry with them. Through Luna and Stell’s narratives, we suggested that cultural baggage and personal history are not peripheral to mission formation but part of its fabric. The three-phase model of Identification, Interrogation, and Integration—grounded in Gittins, Fernandez, and Philippine feminist theology—offers a practical pedagogical response. Formation that does not make room for this inner work may send out practitioners who are skilled, but not yet fully integrated.
Together, these three movements—structural, relational, and pastoral—suggest that the journey of the young adult missioner is not a straight line from preparation to deployment. It is better understood as a spiral: outward into global community, inward through reflexive encounter, and back again to particular places with renewed imagination and deeper solidarity.
Mission is not about filling a deficit; it is about recognising abundance. When formation brings pedagogy and pastoral care together, it does more than produce better workers; it helps form more integrated persons.
As one of the TIMs writes,
“The church must rise – not in fear, but in faith and love for the people.”
(Samuel Fililagi Toleafoa, “People’s SONA Reflections,” 2025 TIM Newsletter, Issue 3, p.24).
These young adults are not the church of tomorrow. They are the church of today—and they are already walking, discerning, and teaching us how mission must be lived in this time.
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Berryman, J. W. (1991). Godly play: A way of religious education. HarperCollins.
Bosch, D. J. (1991). Transforming mission. Orbis Books.
Fernandez, E. S. (1994). Toward a theology of struggle. Orbis Books.
Finlay, L. (2002). Negotiating the swamp: The opportunity and challenge of reflexivity in research practice. Qualitative Research, 2(2), 209–230.
Gittins, A. J. (2002). Ministry at the margins: Strategy and spirituality for mission. Orbis Books.
Jackson, R. (1997). Religious education: An interpretive approach. Hodder & Stoughton.
Mananzan, M. J. (1992). Woman and religion. Claretian Publications.
McGlone, G. J., & Sperry, R. J. (Eds.). (2016). The psychology of mission. In The psychology of the Catholic religious life. Routledge.
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[1] While David J Bosch in Transforming Mission (1991) gave a comprehensive account of the shift from colonial transmission towards mutual participation. For helpful background, Samuel Cueva in Mission Partnership in Creative Tension (Langham, 2015) traced the movement from Edinburgh 1910 (where only 17 of the 1400 participants came from the global south) to the International Missionary Council (IMC) in Whitby, Ontario, in 1947, under the heading “an ecumenical understanding of partnership”.
[2] Andrew Walls argued that Christianity’s centre shifted geographically to the south and east – to Africa, Asia and Latin America, in order to express the faith’s character as a perpetually translating, culturally mobile religion (Walls, 1996). Gambia’s Lamin Sannah pushed this further, showing the importance of vernacular Bible translations as worthy vehicles for divine encounter, undermining previous assumptions about Western civilizing culture (Sanneh 1989). Allen Yeh’s polycentric missiology – not “from the West to the rest” but “from everywhere to everywhere” (Yeh, 2016) – became something of a catch-cry for CWM’s work.
[3] These FIVE areas reflect the “five marks of mission”, as articulated by Walls and Ross
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