“Rising to life and breaking out from Babylon” requires the mediation of life-flourishing education to discern our public witness, engaging with the signs of the times. Life-flourishing education is both formal and informal collective inquiries of faith to rediscover the meaning and imperatives of faith to facilitate the community’s public witness.
Christian doctrines form the theological threads that weave communities of faith together and serve as lenses to see, understand, and engage in the world. However, doctrines inherited from the past have also perpetuated domination, exclusion, and subjugation.
Christian doctrines form the theological threads that weave communities of faith together and serve as lenses to see, understand, and engage in the world.
This requires the nerve to decolonize our doctrines and negotiate our non-negotiable sources of faith for the sake of life. Life-flourishing education includes community living, social analysis, learning from the orality and knowledges of the Indigenous communities, and participation in the campaigns and struggles to dismantle Babylon. Life-flourishing education, hence, privileges the epistemologies of the subaltern communities and employs alternative pedagogies of freedom.
1. Life-flourishing Education: Revisioning Educational Ministries
One of the legacies of the missionary movement is the educational institutions that they established in the colonies, particularly for the excluded and marginalized communities.
2. Decolonizing Theological Education
Theological education is central to the life of the church to enable the church to become contemporaneous in its public witness. However, our theological education curriculum, pedagogies, and institutions need to be decolonized to become centers of lifeflourishing education.
3. Theologians without Borders
Theologians without Borders is a community of socially engaged theologians committed to accompanying the theological institutions and churches in the Global South to facilitate life-flourishing education.
4. Training in Life-flourishing Preaching and Worship
Ministry of the Word and Sacrament is central to the vocation of the Church. However, it is important to decolonize the altar and pulpit and transform them as spaces that inspire the church to “rising to life and breaking out from Babylon.”
5. AAP/SAAP/MCI
The existing Academic Accompaniment Programme (AAP), Special Academic Accompaniment Programme (SAAP), and Member Church Initiatives (MCI) will be reviewed thoroughly and re-designed based on the new theological statement.
6. TIM/ Face to Face/ANF
The existing Training in Mission Programme (TIM), Face to Face Programme, and A New Face Programme (ANF) will be reviewed thoroughly and re-designed based on the new theological statement.
