The following is an older post from an older blog that came out of my trip last January to the Sundance Film Festival. I’m posting this series in anticipation of a new gathering our community is hosting later this summer around the medium of film (details coming soon).

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Being missional can seem so complicated at times. Don’t evangelize – embody. Don’t attract – incarnate. Don’t preach – narrate. Don’t segregate – integrate, and while you’re at it, feel free to congregate, as long as you don’t spectate. Whatever you do, don’t isolate yourself from culture, but while you’re busy engaging be sure not to capitulate. Don’t pursue your Christology at the expense of your Pneumatology or your theology won’t be Trinitarian enough for your ecclesiology. In which case, everything is just plain buggered.

Fortunately, we have friends to help us keep it all straight: Newbigin and Shenk, Roxbourgh and Gibbs, Allen and Wright (not that Wright, the other Wright), Bosch and Moltmann and Yoder and Volf and VanEngen. Missiology can’t seem to restrict itself to just one discipline, so, fortunately for us, nearly every theologian has something to say about it.

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Two exciting things have happened recently 1) we’ve launched this site as a way to explore a new church community in North County, and 2) our group is planning a unique gathering later this summer related to film (details coming soon). In honor of both I’ve decided to revisit a small series of posts from my old blog that came out of my trip last January to the Sundance Film Festival.

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The most powerful presentation of the gospel I’ve ever seen was through the eyes of an African slave, as depicted by an American Jew.

In Steven Spielberg’s movie Amistad (based on true story) the enslaved African named Cinque wrestles with the rage and helplessness feuding inside, and the shock of a foreign culture outside. Christianity is an enigmatic resident of this world, and doesn’t make much sense to Cinque, until he reaches a point of exhausted frustration and begins leafing through a huge, pictorial bible in the local church.

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