New Zealand Presbyterian predicaments in missional leadership education

Johnston, M. (2018) New Zealand Presbyterian predicaments in missional leadership education. Australian Journal of Mission Studies, 12(1), pp. 11-21.

Abstract

When the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand denomination and its Churches undergo a turn to mission as their primary orientation, questions are asked of the ordained ministers’ capacity to negotiate and lead this. This implicates theological education and whether the task of forming missional leaders has reckoned with the deeply set imaginations and systemic assumptions of a settler Church denomination and Reformed history. Ordained ministry leaders find themselves in contexts reflective of Church-centric imagination and practices to fix internal issues, increase mission activity, and grow Church numbers. These are performative pressures based in the current climate of a declining mainline denomination, highly secularised society and particular social constructions of ordained leadership. Sitting within this are instrumental and modernist imaginations that fail to attend adequately to God's agency, a disposition that infuses and limits minister's capacity to lead congregations in the Missio Dei. Theological education is therefore invited to question the extent to which it is shaped to address this.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Johnston, Rev Mark
• Authors: Johnston, M.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > Theology and Religious Studies
• Journal Name: Australian Journal of Mission Studies
• Publisher: Australian Association for Mission Studies
• ISSN: 1834-4682