DMiss—in progress

EPI's principal educational project—the publication of a series of translated booklets featuring the Academy of Mission teaching modules—is being undertaken in parallel with a Doctor of Missiology degree course, with Fuller School of Intercultural Studies (part of Fuller Theological Seminary), the intent of which is as follows:

 A Doctor of Missiology degree equips leaders to effectively integrate theory into missional praxis within the global reality of the twenty-first century.  With this program, key leaders will continue their ministries in-context while attending a cohort-based seminar and interacting with a visiting Fuller SIS faculty member.

The Literature Review provides a review of missiological literature that is germane to the leadership education project. The following abstract provides an introduction.

This Literature Review forms part of a Research Project that will examine the development of a contextually appropriate missional, leadership education curriculum and model, within the economically poor nation of Burkina Faso, a country where biblical theological and missional texts are rare and contextually appropriate theological texts are practically unavailable.

The curriculum’s content and published format will be determined through a process of missiological review exercised in partnership with Burkinabe church-planting leaders, such as the ‘Assemblée Evangélique de Pentecôte’ (‘Evangelical Assembly of Pentecost’). An existing curriculum, developed by the author for use within Africa, and well received within Burkina Faso, will form an initial reference point.

Significance

Missional, mother-tongue or Francophone (lingua-franca) leadership-training resources, relevant to the missionary church-planting vision of groups such as AEP, are hard to obtain within Burkina Faso. Almost no such texts are produced within the nation itself and relatively few are imported because there is no significant Christian book trade there—Christians accounting for less than 5% of the population.

We believe that the production of a series of contextually appropriate, low-cost, missional, educational texts, easily reproducible by church groups and mission agencies, constitutes a relevant response to this need and a potential precedent to be followed with the publication of further theological and missiological texts, in a practical, compassionate response to the dearth of such resources.

The production of accessible and relevant leadership training texts within an economically impoverished culture also presents a missiological model with the potential to address, in some measure, the wide gulf existing between the centres of gravity, respectively, of missiological educational resources—located stubbornly within the global north—and of the emerging missionary force of the twenty-first century—now located firmly within the global south, where they are “coincidentally” amongst the most economically poor (Escobar 2003:66).

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