In a rapidly changing world, where little is as it seems and the landscape changes like sand dunes pushed across the desert by hot, African winds, there remains a desire for a better day; a yearning for a brighter tomorrow. In the midst of global chaos, cultural upheaval, and a general loss of vision and hope by the masses, a group of humble men – pastors and leaders – arise from the ashes of cultural conformity to stride across the stage of history and take their place among the phalanx of the wise men changing the world – one blog post at a time. Like the great minds of old, these leaders have come together to dispense wisdom to a starving populace yearning for direction and guidance in the midst of an age of uncertainty and doubt regarding the future . . .

Okay, we don’t know who those people are (what’s a phalanx, anyway?), but if you find them, could you please let us know?  We’d like to listen to their podcasts or something – they are probably awesome. As for us, we’re just a group of people who are trying to figure out what God is doing in the world and how we can join Him in His mission of redemption and reconciliation.  We don’t take ourselves too seriously and we don’t have all the answers, even though we do have a lot of questions and ideas that we don’t mind sharing. So, we thought that we would start a new joint blogging venture that could serve as a workshop for our thoughts, so to speak. Lots of ideas will be constructed, sanded down, and nailed together. A lot of pieces will end up on the workshop floor to be thrown away when they are no longer needed. But, our hope is that something will emerge from these ideas that will help us chart a course forward for the church as it engages in the mission of God to redeem the world.

We are all practitioners – local church pastors and leaders – who are attempting to live out these ideas every day. We are not new to the blogosphere and we have had individual blogs for several years now. This is not even the first time that we’ve collaborated together and you might have run across some of our writings in the past, although our focus will be a bit different from what it once was when last we wrote together. You can expect us to write from a Southern Baptist context, especially in the initial days of this enterprise.  Given our context, we will begin with a series of posts designed to interact with a current important topic in SBC life, the Great Commission Resurgence (GCR) Task Force.  This seven-part series, entitled “If We Were The Great Commission Task Force…”, will provide a means for us to share some ideas that we’ve had about the task force, providing positive fodder for discussion.  The purpose will not be to provide a critique of decisions made by the group (as evidenced by our writing in advance of decisions they will make), but what we would do if we were the group itself.  From there, we plan to branch out and engage other voices and ideas. We hope to have guest contributors from different settings to provide their perspective on what God is doing in their venue. Our goal is to exemplify what we believe Southern Baptists could be doing to engage non-Baptists as well as our lost world.  We also hope to have some fun along the way.  (Well, that part is pretty much guaranteed.)  You can expect something new two or three times a week.

The Church in the 21st Century faces many challenges. How do we live missionally as the landscape of our world resets again and again? MissioScapes is an attempt to engage that question and put forward some answers and ideas that we hope will be helpful to each of us as we endeavor to follow Jesus in the work that He is doing.