Acts for today's missional church

Abstract

This article investigated the challenges associated with being a missional church in an everchanging world and possible patterns to live missionally in new contexts. The need for Christian missions to be radically contextual in facing up to these changes provided the basis for this study to build on the importance of context and the ways in which the early church in Acts reinvented itself continually in facing up to new challenges, opportunities, peoples, cultures and questions. The way in which the faith community emerged as a church when it became aware of its boundary-breaking mission was explored by using the seven phases in the development of the mission of the church, as identified by Bevans and Schroeder in their groundbreaking theology of missions. By reflecting on these seven phases, this article formulated patterns for a missional church.