RICHMOND — Missio Alliance, an evangelical coalition formed last year to help Christians navigate the changing religious landscape in America, will flesh out that goal at a three-day conference in April featuring a range of speakers from across the evangelical spectrum.
The April 11-13 “Future of the Gospel: Renewing Evangelical Imagination for Mission” will be an opportunity to “listen, learn and think through the most pressing theological and cultural issues of our day for the sake of faithfully participating in God’s mission,” said Chris Backert, executive of Missio Alliance’s directional team.
Among more than 50 presenters at the Missio Alliance inaugural conference in April are (from left) Dallas Willard, Jo Saxton and Alan Hirsch.
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The conference’s plenary sessions will be held at Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Va., and some workshops and auxiliary events at Downtown Baptist Church in Alexandria.
Missio Alliance was launched late last year by a coalition of pastors and theological educators in response to the increasingly post-Christian cultural context churches encounter in the United States and Canada. Backert said it is “centered on the renewal of an evangelical imagination that is theologically robust, practically fruitful and oriented toward the life and mission of the Church as it seeks to meet the challenges of the changing landscape of our culture.”
The initiative is also, in part, an alternative to the Gospel Coalition, another evangelical renewal movement but one with a strong Reformed, or Calvinist, theological stance.
Among the early organizers of Missio Alliance were Jim Baucom, pastor of Columbia Baptist Church in Falls Church, Va.; Alistair Brown, president of Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in Lombard, Ill.; Travis Collins, pastor of Bon Air Baptist Church in Richmond; Gary Nelson, president of Tyndale University College and Seminary in Toronto; and Roger Olson, professor of theology at Baylor University’s Truett Theological Seminary in Waco, Texas.
Though Missio Alliance is still in the early stages of developing partnerships, among the sponsors of its first conference are the Richmond-based Virginia Baptist Mission Board, the John Leland Center for Theological Studies in Arlington, Va., George Fox Evangelical Seminary in Newberg, Ore., Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., Northern Baptist Theological Seminary near Chicago, Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington and Yellowstone Theological Institute in Bozeman, Mont.
Other sponsors include two missional church networks — Ecclesia and Fresh Expressions; the Spence Network, a leadership development group; V3, a church planting network; and InterVarsity Press, the evangelical publishing house.
Across denominational lines
Baptists have been prominent in Missio Alliance’s formation, but a wide range of denominational traditions are involved, including Wesleyans, Anglicans, Assemblies of God and the Christian and Missionary Alliance. The organization itself is grounded in the Capetown Commitment, a confession of faith developed in 2010 by the international Lausanne Movement.
The trans-denominational character of Missio Alliance is prevalent in American Christianity as well, said Backert.
“What I’m seeing is that in our shifting denominational world there are a lot of people who, though they are not from the same historical trajectory, actually have a lot in common,” he said. “That’s why you see the wide range of sponsors for this event, a range of people who you don’t immediately think of as being in conversation with each other.”
Backert added that when denominational families “look inward, our issues are different, but when we look outward our issues are the same. How we tackle those issues will be different, but we face the same issues.”
“What is coming together here is a group of people who have enough in common even if they haven’t known each other,” he said. “They may find shared answers to questions of mission and the future of North America.”
Presenters and workshops
Among the more than 50 presenters at the inaugural conference are evangelicals Dallas Willard, Scot McKnight, Alan Hirsch, Cherith Fee Nordling and Jo Saxton. Baptists Roger Olson, Winn Collier, JR Woodward, Jim Baucom, Gary Nelson and Howard-John Wesley also are set to speak.
About 40 workshops are grouped around four “tracks” — church, culture, leadership and theology — and will be offered in four sessions.
Auxiliary events include a welcome reception for JR Woodward, recently named to direct the V3 church planting network, and a gathering of women in ministry leaders.
Additional information is available on Missio Alliance’s website. As a sponsor of the event, the Virginia Baptist Mission Board offers a discount on the $165 registration fee for its affiliated churches. The discount code is BGAVDisc$20.
Robert Dilday ([email protected]) is managing editor of the Religious Herald.