Incarnational Mission Conference with Michael Frost

120 people registered for the day conference on Incarnational Mission on 9 October 2008, which was jointly hosted by Urban Expression and the Incarnate Network. The venue - the new CMS centre in Oxford - was excellent and the day was very efficiently administered for us there.

Mike Frost, our guest speaker, is the vice-principal of Morling College, Sydney and one of the pioneers of smallboatbigsea, a missional community in Manley, Sydney. He is better known to many as the author of Exiles and co-author (with Alan Hirsch) of The Shaping of Things to Come.

Responses to Mike's presentations, and to the day as a whole, have been enthusiastic and appreciative. Many spoke of it as inspirational and challenging; some said it offered them a framework for understanding what they were doing already or yearning to do. In particular, people valued Mike's session on the 'missional practices' of his own community that are the outworking of their values. At least one group spent the journey home devising similar practices for their own context. Much of the discussion in the afternoon concentrated on Mike's analogy of 'chiefs' and 'medicine men' in tribal cultures as representing different forms of leadership in the church.

Although the presentations in Oxford were not recorded, Mike's similar presentations elsewhere were, and we hope soon to have information about how to access these.