The Gailyn Van Rheenen Endowed Session: Missiology and the Search for Tangible Good
Location
Stauffer Chapel
Start Date
3-6-2026 3:15 PM
End Date
3-6-2026 4:45 PM
Description
What counts as “tangible good”—and how is it discerned? This lecture engages the conference theme, “Christian scholarship as tangible good,” by attending to the ways God’s work takes visible form amid complex and contested realities. Across disciplines, there is a welcome and growing emphasis on the lived impact of scholarship in real communities—a broader praxiological turn toward practice, embodiment, and consequence. Missiology has long shared this concern, insisting that theology be both embodied and contextual (even as it has, at times, felt the pull toward reductive forms of pragmatism). Drawing on interviews with leading missiologists recorded on the Missiology Podcast—treated here as a “living archive” of the field—this lecture highlights a distinctive contribution of missiology: a theological grounding in the Missio Dei that reframes the search for the tangible good as a process of discerning and participating in God’s prior initiatives. At its best, the field of missiology explores postures of attentiveness and relational forms of life that enable communities to recognize and respond to the tangible good of God's work in the world.
Martin Rodriguez, Azusa Pacific University
Convener: Greg McKinzie, Abilene Christian University
Respondent: Allen Yeh, International Theological Seminary
Oral Session 105E
The Gailyn Van Rheenen Endowed Session: Missiology and the Search for Tangible Good
Stauffer Chapel
What counts as “tangible good”—and how is it discerned? This lecture engages the conference theme, “Christian scholarship as tangible good,” by attending to the ways God’s work takes visible form amid complex and contested realities. Across disciplines, there is a welcome and growing emphasis on the lived impact of scholarship in real communities—a broader praxiological turn toward practice, embodiment, and consequence. Missiology has long shared this concern, insisting that theology be both embodied and contextual (even as it has, at times, felt the pull toward reductive forms of pragmatism). Drawing on interviews with leading missiologists recorded on the Missiology Podcast—treated here as a “living archive” of the field—this lecture highlights a distinctive contribution of missiology: a theological grounding in the Missio Dei that reframes the search for the tangible good as a process of discerning and participating in God’s prior initiatives. At its best, the field of missiology explores postures of attentiveness and relational forms of life that enable communities to recognize and respond to the tangible good of God's work in the world.
Martin Rodriguez, Azusa Pacific University
Convener: Greg McKinzie, Abilene Christian University
Respondent: Allen Yeh, International Theological Seminary
Oral Session 105E