A CELEBRATION OF IMAGINATION
LOOKING FORWARD, LOOKING BACK Jonny Baker, director of mission education at Church Mission Society, reflects on lessons from our first 10 years of Pioneer Mission Leadership Training and identifies challenges for the next few years.
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he pioneers who have trained with CMS are incredible people with passionate faith, who see possibilities and make things happen, often against the odds and with very few resources. It’s been an absolute joy and privilege to work with them.
LESSONS LEARNED 1. Pioneering is a wonderful gift When students arrive, we ask them what pioneering is. Their answers group into these five areas, which are a really good summary that you can mix and match: finding a new way or path seeing and imagining different possibilities starting and building stuff responding to injustice to make a better world growing new forms of church where church isn’t 2. Mission is the treasure On a compass, true north orients or pulls in a particular direction. For pioneers, true
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north is God’s mission. They seek to align their lives with God’s mission, to participate in it and to call others to join in. They reach people who haven’t heard the story of Jesus and particularly gravitate to the edges. The gospel is always culturally robed so sharing it requires a letting go of their own ways, a listening and discerning to discover afresh the gospel in new cultures. That is why CMS has been such a great home for pioneers over the last 10 years! 3. Be you Pioneering goes best when people find confidence to be the person God has made them to be. It’s easy to think that to be a pioneer is to copy some extreme entrepreneurial behaviours. But actually it is simply about being you, the person God has made you to
THE C A LL – W I NTE R 2 0 2 1
Top: Learning in community: chatting at CMS house during a conversations day hosted by the pioneer team before lockdown. Bottom: Jonny Baker, director of mission education at CMS
