After years of being invested in missio-dei thinking and practice around this, I really think we are being brought beyond this now quite dated concept. As mentioned it has been twenty plus years since I first started pushing into the missional language and landscape, and in doing so, my practice and thinking has changed. Going to a new place that you nor I have been before is conceptually helpful, but perhaps the standard refrain relating to missio-dei, which is to find out what God is doing in the community and get in on his act, has been holding us back. It presupposes we know God, but the God we know cannot be G-d.

The issue is how to proceed and what resources are there for this. My instinct is that it is about a shift in language to help develop a new understanding and the idea of kenosis. Perhaps the challenge is to feel where people and place are condensing, and use a language that is about coming together to create space to discover G-d. If I was pushed I would say a more helpful wording is that we need co-create G-d with the community, we need the community to help us find the hide and seek God, who at the moment of capture hides, is seen through the trees, and formed as we share with one another the glimpses we see. The space to do this can only be created as people and place come together in relationship, as we empty ourselves of what is gone before and discover the self emptying G-d as christ in incarnated amongst us.