Mission today.

Billman, Kathleen D. ; Hendel, Kurt K. ; Swanson, Mark N. 等

What does it mean for the church to be in mission today?

The present issue of Currents is a "miscellaneous" one in which the major articles have not been commissioned or selected according to some planned theme. All the same, the five articles published here work together in intriguing ways to help us get at the question: What does it mean for twenty-first-century North American Christians--many of us Lutherans--to be the church in mission? What kind of "missional landscape" do we find out there? Given this landscape, how shall the church be the church? For those of us called to preach, how shall we go about it?

Nathan Frambach gets the conversation started by asking what being "in mission" might look like for North American Lutheran Christians in societies in which "the church has been de-centered." He challenges us to understand the church in ways that are agile, mobile, participatory--more like the kiosk at the farmer's marker (where people stop, talk, and make friends) than the big-box store (where people are simply expected to walk in).

Today it may be a commonplace to say that the (supposedly) once Christian West has become a mission field, but that has not always been the case. Patrick Johnson reminds us of a great prophet of the Christian mission to modern Western culture, the missionary and ecumenical theologian Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998). Newbigin wrote no monograph specifically on the task of preaching in the encounter between the gospel and what he saw as pagan Western culture; Johnson has helpfully gathered and ordered many of Newbigin's reflections on the homiletical task, drawing from sources that span four decades.

For Newbigin, "the content of preaching is Jesus Christ." But how does that preaching intersect with the hopes, fears, and dreams of those who hearken to it? What precisely is it that Christ accomplishes for us? Such questions lead us directly into soteriological reflection, and in these pages George Murphy directs our attention to what are often called "theories of the atonement." Don't be intimidated by the latinate word "fiducial" in the title of his essay! In fact, Murphy's phrase "fiducial influence" is a remarkable (Lutheran!) twist on the "moral influence" label given to Peter Abelard's understanding of atonement--an understanding that many of us have found attractive as a critique of and alternative to Anselm's "satisfaction" theory. Murphy gives us some helpful new language; remember that you saw it first in Currents!

The church is called to faithful discipleship in settings in which we are keenly aware of difference and of disparities in power. Mary Streufert asks: Is a genuine "hospitality of difference" possible? How are power disparities to be addressed? Streufert's reflections on these questions take us deep into stories from the Gospel of Mark, into a rich vein of current scholarship, and--very hospitably!--into a moving account of an occasion on which she was on the receiving end of lavish, assumption-smashing, power-upsetting hospitality.

In a reflection written twenty years after graduating from seminary, David Housholder challenges himself and his readers to articulate their "life message," that is, to preach, teach, and write from a "'deep place' ... of great authenticity and integrity" where God is present. Several themes of this issue of Currents are sounded again in Housholder's reflection: the need to survey the missiological landscape and find fresh paths into and through it; the encounter with difference and disparities of power; the task of speaking intelligibly about the atonement; the call to preach with integrity.

May God bless your reflections on what it means to be the church in today's world!

Kathleen D. Billman

Kurt K. Hendel

Mark N. Swanson

Editors