Over coffee in a Barcelona neighbourhood, an acquaintance expressed the remark, “I can’t invite my friends to church, they will never return, and that might end our conversations about God.” What an astounding observation. Many believe the church is where talk of God occurs. Yet, people are taking part in these God discussions both in and outside a church environment. However, there seems some disconnect between the exchange taking place about God in the church, and the exchange occurring outside the church. What is occurring are distinct approaches of engagement.
One pastor described the challenges of ministering in a local church in the Barcelona area, by describing the cultural barrier between the church and the community. Interest in God is not the obstacle but how the discussion occurs. Language and rituals employed in the congregation form a wall or barrier. Those outside the church are likewise erecting a wall. So, two walls stand between the groups of people, both constructed by the
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He develops this hermeneutic, not by focusing on comments related to mission in the Bible, but by looking at the action and purpose of God as narrated in the biblical story. God’s purpose, as Bauckham sees it, results in the kingdom of God or “the achievement of God’s purposes for good in the whole of God’s creation.” Bauckham desires one to read the Bible, “in a way that takes seriously its missionary direction.” Therefore, we can call this hermeneutical framework missional. Missional describes something that “is related to or characterized by mission,” and Bauckham is stating that, at its core, God’s purpose or mission characterizes the whole of scripture and what we know of God. Herein lies the first critical piece of Bauckham’s hermeneutic—the mission is