In line with highlighting our Leadership in the New Parish Certificate, we were able to sit with Michael Frost at the Inhabit Conference. Here’s a bit of what he had to say.

At the Inhabit Conference, our dear friend and renowned missiologist Michael Frost joined our “Leadership In the New Parish” symposium. One of the critical conversations we explored together (both during the symposium and in this interview) addressed the stifling dilemma faith communities experience around the subject of mission. On the one hand, are those who boldly venture out with preset salvific answers for “fixing” people. On the other hand, many groups who have seen the damage of colonizing mission become immobilized and unable to help at all. There must be another way.

The Leadership in the New Parish Certificate will explore this subject looking for Spirit-led possibilities for missional engagement. Ministry leaders considering participating in this scholar/practitioner think tank should anticipate discovering and experimenting with innovative paths forward between the polarities of inaction and colonization.

“We try to meet these intertwined challenges of thought and action, with the intertwined images of theory as listening and care. Listening and care transgress dualisms of subject/object and negative/positive. They are a kind of full emptiness, an open grasping – in which subjective and objective, negative and positive co-constitute each other.”

— Recovering the Commons by Herbert Reid & Betsy Taylor