Resource Highlight for October 2024

In the new book, Community of Missionary Disciples: The Continuing Creation of the Church, Stephen B. Bevans, SVD, “unpacks the profound Catholic conviction that the church is missionary by its very nature as he considers what it means for the church to be on mission, in community, and together in discipleship.” (Orbis) This text is a rich source of reflection, study and dialogue as we the seek to place mission at the center of our communal Christian identity. Not only does Bevans synthesize missiological history, Scripture and magisterial documents up to and including Francis’ papacy, but fundamentally reframes ecclesiology itself through a missionary lens. “The church,” he writes, “is constantly being created by the summons of Jesus and the power of the Spirit to embody, demonstrate, and proclaim the ‘revolutionary intimacy’ that is the reign of God.” 
 
For those engaged in “the mission field,” as it’s so often called, Bevans’ work can also help guide our own understanding and discernment into the current moment. It not only challenges traditional ecclesiological frameworks (“Ecclesiology,” he writes, “has simply not been missiological enough”), but contends that missiology conversely “has traditionally emphasized the historical developments of the church or how missionaries should proceed in their boundary-crossing work and not on the missionary nature of the church itself.” That work—the “gracious, healing, liberating, life-giving, forgiving, transforming action of God”—places fresh invitations on each of us as we strive to “embody, demonstrate, and proclaim” God’s Reign.