Missional Wisdom Foundation

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Journey

Journey
by
Robert Bishop

Photo credit: Ryan Klinck

We at the Missional Wisdom Foundation have struggled with our elevator pitch almost since the beginning.

How does one describe all of Missional Wisdom’s various projects?

Our work touches a lot of people in a lot of ways and in a lot of places, and it can be hard to connect all of the pieces without a whole lot of explanation. We tried various metaphors to describe our mission in general terms, but never quite hit on a summative image.

Recently, we settled on a single, simple sentence:

The Missional Wisdom Foundation experiments with and teaches about alternative forms of Christian community.

This summary functions as a guiding light for our various ventures. Experiments, by nature, are temporary; failure is expected and an acceptable way forward; and we know that the next thing won’t look exactly the same as this one.

One important implication of this new articulation is that teaching has been pushed to the forefront. Over the years, we have endeavored to teach about the lessons we learn from our experimentation using many different methods. From our long-term training programs to our publications, it has been our goal to make our educational content robust and flexible, able to fit each student’s context.

It is with the same spirit that led us to launch The Epworth Project, The Julian Way, and Launch & Lead that we are proud to announce Journey, our newest educational initiative. Journey uses the same robust platform that we use in Launch & Lead, but the classes stand by themselves and can be taken at an individualized pace. This modular approach allows students to access content that doesn’t necessarily fit into Launch & Lead, although there will be some overlap.

The topics covered in Journey will be as varied as the work we do in the Foundation. We are currently developing courses on contemplative photography (see last week’s Wisdom for the Way for a primer), conversational homily, group dynamics, the importance of story in community development, and disability theology. We hope to have three or four of these open for registration in April, and more will be in the pipeline.

Some of the courses we offer will be self-paced and others will be scheduled and facilitated. All of them will be designed with the contextualization that has become Missional Wisdom’s hallmark.

Journey is another expression of Missional Wisdom’s experimental work. Join with us to discover what we can learn along the way.

Come journey with us.

If you are interested in hearing more about Journey, please click the following link so that we can contact you when new Journey courses are added to the catalog: http://eepurl.com/cx_Isr
 

Invitation to Missional Mindfulness:

  • Experiments open us up to failure. How can failure inform your life?

  • How is God calling you to experiment?