Prompt: Public Engagement as Mission, Art by Makoto Shinkai

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Just earlier today, my hard work for close to one month finally paid off. I was able to submit a completed research paper on Church Planting and Church Growth.

Initially, when I started this research paper, I was inspired by the message of The Gospel of Freedom based on Luke 4: 14 to 30. My original goal in mind was to understand the relationship between mission and freedom. However, as I digested the references in the bibliography, I immediately published them as separate articles on Hive front-ends using the tags #cent, #someeofficial, and #pob, and other topic-related tags such as #mission, #freedom, and #epistemology.

My Interest in Public Theology

As you can see in my Cent Blog, I started this writing project on last 3rd of July and completed it on the 30th of last month. These articles serve as my notes or my drafts for this paper. However, in finalizing my topic, as I review my articles, I notice that the persistent theme is leading me in a different direction and that is why I decided to replace the title with Public Engagement as Mission.

Though I have been studying theology both formally and informally since I was 19 years old, I could say that the discipline of public theology is still something new for me. As an academic discipline, I have been teaching theology since 1991. The importance of public theology came only to my attention four to five years ago after contemplating the specific field I would consider in my post-graduate studies.

Without checking the literature, my current understanding of how to do public theology can be done in two ways. One is by taking any specific biblical doctrine and from there seeing the implication of such doctrine for public discourse. Another way to do it is by taking any social issues and bringing the questions surrounding those issues to be answered both by the Bible and theology.

I still need to check when the discipline of public theology was initiated and widely recognized at least within the community of theologians.

Shifting from Public Theology to Intercultural Studies

Entering Intercultural Studies in February this year, I brought with me my interest in public theology. I was wondering in what way can public theology be viewed as a mission.

Preparing my research paper for Church Planting and Church Growth, I first collected all the available resources. Initially, I came up with eleven books and later dropped them to just seven.

After reading and blogging all the relevant chapters in all my selected references, I started to revisit all the articles I published on my Web 3.0 blogs and analyzed them about any specific recurring theme that would emerge. Finally, I saw one, which is public engagement as a mission. I am not sure if I have an academic basis for doing this. However, to my mind, this is my way of integrating my interest in public theology and mission.

Topics for Further Research

As an ongoing writing project, there are many gaps in this paper that I think need further research. They include topics like the role of the church in public engagement, lessons from the history of the Korean Church, the models provided by Hong Key Chung in Romania and Andy Hartropp in Great Britain (Wonsuk Ma and Kyo Sung Ahn, editors. Korean Church, God’s Mission, Global Christianity, 2015), critical realism as part of globalization, Reformed perspective about public engagement as mission, and the role of freedom as the message of Christian mission in the public sphere.

Grace and peace!

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