1. As a part of daily living - mission needs to be an incorporated aspect of how we live, not an add-on. It’s not something which can be contained in a few-week assignment or assignments (which I’ve done in the past), a three-year overseas assignment (which I’m doing now), or in defined “projects” that a church names, puts in its budget, and assigns workers to (which I’ve also participated in). All of those are good initiatives with positive thought and effort behind them, often for the right reasons. But how I desire to engage with the “church’s mission and evangelism” is to be living it and breathing it as part of who I am in this world, and how I live my life in response to God and fellow humans. A bit vague, I appreciate, but hopefully understandable.

2. I think our approach to mission today is too programmatic, centralised, and institutionalised. Yes, I am for sure a product of my generation which has quite anti-institutional attitudes. However, I do see centralised and top-down responses to grassroots movements and initiatives and I see them hampering the Spirit’s movement in the world and our capacity to respond. In our postmodern (or hypermodern) world, I would like to see mission reflecting more of the relational and fluid nature of human contact - for “mission support systems” (current mission agencies, etc) to be less prescriptive and less contained within strategic plans and budgets but to be instead support for what the human missional agents “run into” in daily life.

But these are just a young idealist’s views … I’m clearly out of touch with reality and don’t understand the benefit of these tried-and-true methods and systems for doing mission. [This last comment was sarcastic, but also realising the need to couple dreams with reality for viability.]