While I have been so incredibly impressed with this past year's class as demonstrated in my previous post, there are still four significant "markers" to which I must return next year before plunging more deeply into Joining God's Mission. My theory is that these "markers" are all related to the pervasive influence of Christendom which has so completely dominated the landscape that the vast majority of kids (and adults) do not even realize the blindness we have embraced.
The first marker continues to be God's Story which has suffered unparalleled damage from mis-reading the Bible as a dis-integrated collection of children's stories, each with it's own moral at the end seemingly wrapping each story up with a "happy ending" without realizing that, in so doing, we have distorted God's Story beyond all recognition. Reading the Bible with the right contextual lens tells a Story that is neither child-friendly nor spiritually harmless.
The other three markers are directly related to the first as kids (and adults) are strugging with God's Mission in the world, the nature and purpose of His "kingdom", and not surprisingly, the "missions-to-missional" paradigm shift which is continuing to rock our worlds. I am not sure how I will help kids deconstruct the above but we must re-address these issues before we go much further down the road.
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