Some of the stuff we will be looking at through the session is basic missio dei stuff:-

Mission is not a program of the church but rather an attribute of God. Mission comes first from the heart of God and we are caught up in it rather than initiating it.

Mission is primarily the work of God and we participate with God in what He is doing.

Missio Dei sees our mission as stemming from the Triune God: The Father sends the Son, The Father and the Son send the Spirit, The Father and Son and the Spirit send the church.

As the Father sent me, so I send you. (Jesus)

Therefore one of the things that Bosch highlights is the role of church in the process Bosch would say “Mission denotes the total task God has set before the church.. To love, to serve, to preach, to teach, to heal, to liberate the world�
It is the word total that grabbed me, as often we see the purpose of church is to worship. Whilst I would see mission as worship when people try to look at the task of church they would use worship in a more narrow way. The question of what is the task of the church is an important one in contemporary society?

I then want to get into how your view of God shapes your response and approach to mission, leading into a broad look at contextualisation, not just contextualising the message. But building on missio dei that contextualistion does not start with a theoretical question (how do we contextualise this message) but a commitment to the poor, the outcast. ie stems from Jesus incarnation (how God chose to contextualise)

We will then look at how the message always has wrap, and contextualisation is part of the process for ensuring a free and authentic response can be made, and this can be grounded in Gods desire and value he places on humanity, free will etc
Secondly we have a model God gets involved in the world, Commitment
The incarnation God of Jesus – practical
Jesus’ immersion in the needs of the world and response gave a guide with which to answer the question “what exactly is wrong here?

Nussbaum then summerises five challeneges to missio dei Compartmentalisation – Treating Mission as just one part of the churches activity
Separation – Seeing church and mission as separate concepts
Division – Accepting denominational division as inevitable
Receiving Churches – having mission churches- sending churches
Second class Laity – treating people as second class

And finally I hope to use some stuff from Lausanne Willowbank conference on Culture and mission exporing the theme of humility as a resource from mission and contextualisation which will probably take the shape of a study of phillipians 2.

But teaching in a theological college I cannot resist finishing with this quote from Bosch

“theology rightly understood, has no reason to exist other than critically to accompany the missio dei. So mission should be the theme for all theology�