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This is a heavy heavy piece of work that assumes you are the Holy Spirit in order to understand it. Basically it felt like Hunsbeger working his own opinions of election into Newbigin's thoughts in order to legitimise election as foundational in mission.

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For people seriously asking how to live within the gospel's encounter with their own culture, the study hopes to help them find missionary ways of being and thinking and acting, missionary eyes for seeing their own and other cultures in light of the mission of the Spirit of God, and missionary instincts of compassion, humility, patience, and love for the journey. Pp8

The choice for individual meaning over against meaning for history as a whole can of course be seen in the tendency within Christian experience to focus hope on the "state of being beyond death" believing that "the aim of the Christian life is to be found in another world which [one] enters by the act of dying" . But the Bible's image of the end is not that of a "disembodied survival for the individual" (79cjh:205). God's purpose is not "a collection of individual spirits abstracted one by one from their involvement in the world of matter and in the human community." Therefore, "the Christian hope is no selfish quest of private salvation" (53ch:109-1 11). Such a view would negate the view of history as ,,a real drama with a coherent meaning" and reduce it to "a non-stop revue, an endless series of solo items," a show which as a whole "has no plot and no conclusion~' (59scmt:183).

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It was never within Bishop Newbigin's normal pattern of expression to speak in terms of the "boundaries" of the church. In fact, he was always eager to undo the tendency of of the church toward a corporate egotism which sees mission solely in terms of its own "preservation and extension' as coterminous with God's work in the world. He is careful to remind the church that "God's saving work is always spilling over far beyond the bounds of the Church (72sad: 7 1). The church's mission is such that by its calling to exist for the rest of humankind it must always be the "beyond bounds" people, offering its gospel to those outside. Therefore, "there will be no fixed boundaries because God's saying purpose in Jesus Christ is not limited by our membership rolls. 156