Samenvatting

In their missionary endeavors, many Christians today may well experience a gap between articulating traditional beliefs (handed down ‘cognitive truths’) and a desire to live as a Christian in their ordinary, daily life, focusing on embodiment, practical action, or doing. This leads to resistance or insecurity with respect to engaging in apologetic dialogue or conversations about being a missionary church.

Based on explorative systematic research and field work I propose six lessons for enhancing missional resilience, fitting for the times of transition in which churches in the secular West currently find themselves. This proposal is based on four background perspectives on changing epistemic paradigms and the emerging interest in ‘embodied knowing’ (by Bonnie Miller-McLemore, Stephen Toulmin, Alister McGrath and David Bosch), an epistemological perspective on ‘embodied knowing’ based on the Biblical covenant (by Esther Lightcap Meek), a liturgical perspective (by Nicholas Wolterstorff) and two pioneer perspectives (field research).