Alfred Stephen
Mission
Mission India has been progressing forward depending on the contextual needs of the society. Perspectives in Mission has taken new dimensions by responding to the context. Homiletics as a discipline of study which forms the methodological frame work for preaching need to devise ways of incorporating these missional perspectives into theories to facilitate preachers to construct sermons. In the following sections types of mission and its progressions and theory of Homiletics of Empowerment are given for further and deeper reflections.
Types of Mission and its progression
Evangelism
Educating
Equipping
Empowering
Engaging
Experiencing
Affirming
Homiletics of Empowerment focusses on engaging with the text to identify the empowering elements in the texts.
Empowering Homiletic theory operates on regaining the power, rights, status etc.
It also operates on repositioning of powers through a process of decentralizing power concentration
Empowering is needed mainly because of the loss of power to be
Lost being an individual
Lost being productive
Lost the very identity and trying to recover it
Lost the dignity
Lost all the possibilities of a proper living
Lost Social, Psychological, economic independence
Hermeneutics of Empowering operates on a major principles i.e. Repositioning of Power
Repositioning or Power operates at two levels
- Decentralizing of power concentration among one group of people. This power is accumulated by unlawful means, depriving the other, by misuse of influences.
- Regaining the power which was lost because of authoritative misuse of power by one group of powerful people. This regaining leads to the next level, that is
At the Decentralizing level, hermeneutics of empowering operates subversively, questioning the unlawful structures and toppling of powers.
Subversive theory seeks to reorganize the power structures
Seeks to identify unlawful ways power is accumulated and misused
Seeks to decentralize the power concentration
Seeks to distribute power to those it originally belong
Seeks to take option for the powerless
Seeks to expose the truth and confront the untruth
Seeks to provide a subversive understanding of the text
At the Regaining level hermeneutic of empowering operates on the progressive theory
Progressive theory focusses on empowerment as object of reading any text
The interpreted text is the outcome of the praxis reflection process
Point of departure in progressive theory of interpretation is the powerlessness in the text and the context
It reads into the destabilized realities to restabilize
It works towards reengineering the powerless community
It works towards reengineering of the distorted psyche, disfigured identity, dislocated rootedness, dispossessed ownership and stigmatized dignity through a process of dismantling of the text and the context.
It focusses on
Assuring Hope
Refiguring identity
Affirming dignity
Actualizing Reality
Progressive Theory seeks
To revitalizing confidence
To reenergize vitality
To identify the power points possibilities
