Scattered And Gathered

How can the local church empower people to live faithfully and fruitfully for Christ in their Monday-to-Saturday lives? How can what happens on Sundays and in midweek groups equip and sustain God’s people for the opportunities and challenges that present themselves in the places where they are each day? What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus? What sort of churches grow these sort of disciples? What sort of leaders serve these sort of churches? These are challenges that LICC (London Institute of Contemporary Christianity) have been successfully helping churches address with training events, resources and tools. Scattered and Gathered is the follow-up book to Imagine Church (2012). This new book will enable church leaders to grow churches that help people know what it means to serve the purposes of God on their front-lines. It's a book that is based on the latest of LICC's thinking and methods of supporting churches with their practice of ministry. Each chapter will help church leaders to move past good intentions into knowing how the practices of their church will lead to the development of confident front-line-focused disciples. Providing a resource that leaders can use with wider church leadership teams, small group leaders and pastoral workers. It will ensure that local churches are able to keep the contexts of their church communities central to their mission planning and practice. Scattered and Gathered offers a clear vision of what it means to be the people of God, guides in reflecting on the shape and culture of church life, and then explores what that means for the leadership styles and expectations of those who have that responsibility. This is a book that will further develop the conversation about churches being communities that shape us for our scattered living.

The twenty-first century is marked by mass migration. Massive population movements of the last century have radically challenged our study and practice of mission. Where the church once rallied to go out into “the regions beyond,” Christian mission is currently required to respond and adapt to “missions around.” As a result, leaders in this field have been developing diaspora missiology to provide a missiological framework for understanding and participating in God’s redemptive mission among peoples living outside their places of origin. In this volume, experts in diaspora missiology from across the globe analyze the development of missions to migrants and add to our understanding of the contemporary church’s opportunities and responsibilities for mission amongst diaspora groups.

AND brings you fresh encouragement to your ministry. By teaching you how to move beyond the attractional-missional divide and utilize insights from both perspectives, you'll learn how to bring together the very best of the attractional and missional models for church ministry. AND is part of the Exponential Series.

The movement of people spatially at an unprecedented scale is a special social phenomenon of the 21st century. Among these people on the move are those who take up residence away from their place of origin-the "diaspora"-who are the focus of this study. This book is an interdisciplinary study on the 21st century demographic reality that led to the development of "diaspora missiology" as a new missiological paradigm, and the need to practice "diaspora missions" as a new mission strategy.

This volume takes its title from the first-century Christian catechism called the Didache: “Even as this broken bread was scattered over the hills . . . gathered together and became one, so let Your Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth.” For Christians today, these words remain relevant in an era of massive human movements (voluntary and coerced), hybrid identities, and wide-ranging cultural interactions. How do modern Christians live as both a “scattered” and “gathered” people? How do they live out the tension between ecclesial universality (catholicity) and particularity (distinctive ways of being church in a given culture and context)? Do Christians today constitute a “diaspora,” a people dispersed across borders and cultures that nonetheless maintains a sense of commonality and mission? Scattered and Gathered: Catholics in Diaspora explores these questions through the work of fourteen scholars in different fields and from different corners of the world. Whether through reflections on Zimbabweans in Britain, Levantines in North America, or the remote island people of Chiloé now living in other parts of Chile, they guide readers along the winding road of insights and challenges facing many of today’s Christians.