some background convictions

For over eight years I’ve been blogging about once a week here at www.missioalliance.org (The blog took its name from the tag line on my first book in 2006). The posts have been my weekly reflections from life and work as a pastor, missional community “coach” and professor of theology and culture at Northern Seminary. The posts are always meant to be practical. Many times however the posts engage a more explicitly theological issue I believe is important to understand for leading and being the church in the new post Christendom worlds of N. America. At times, these may be more complex. I’ll have a warning on the top of the post warning readers of this kind of post. If you’re not interested, please just skip on this one. 

I often seek to clarify what I call Neo-Anabaptist thought can teach pastors/leaders  as we navigate the treacherous terrain of the strangely hostile (to Christianity) secularism of the West. Still, this is not a purely academic theological blog. It is on the ground reflections on church, ministry, leadership, mission, contextual engagement and the challenges of leading church into mission in post Christendom/secularized contexts. 

I generally post once a week (sometimes twice). The post usually are an extended treatment of an issue of theology/ church/culture and mission from either my pastoral work, teaching work, or my interactions on Facebook or Twitter (which often create interesting dialogue).   SO WHY NOT SUBSCRIBE? Click on the RSS feed and be notified of the postings at Reclaimingthemission as they come? Thanks for joining me inthis blog conversation. And I look forward to continuing the dialogue with you and the many readers of Reclaimingthemission.com .



My BIO

David Fitch

… is B. R. Lindner Chair of Evangelical Theology at Northern Seminary Chicago, IL. He’s married to Rae Ann and they have one child, a son  Max.  He is also  the founding pastor of Life on the Vine Christian Community– a missional church in the Northwest Suburbs of Chicago of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. In 2014 he moved with his family to Westmont IL to join in with a church planted from Life on the Vine, Peace of Christ Church, Westmont. He helps pastor there as well  as coaches church planting via many assorted venues.   He writes on the issues the local church must face in Mission including cultural engagement, leadership and theology.  His theology (and theological development) combines Neo-Anabaptist streams of thought, with his commitments to evangelicalism (especially as it existed before the modernist-fundamenatlist controversies) with political theory that can help us understand how ideology and culture work to absorb Christian witness. He has lectured and presented on these topics at many seminaries, graduate schools, denominational gatherings and conferences. Dr. Fitch is the author of numerous articles in periodicals including Christianity TodayThe Other JournalMissiology as well as various academic journals. He is the author of The End of Evangelicalism? Discerning a New Faithfulness for Mission (Cascade Books, 2011),The Great Giveaway: Reclaiming the Mission of the Church from American Business, Para-Church Organizations, Psychotherapy, Consumer Capitalism and Other Modern Maladies(Baker Books, 2005) and mostly recently Prodigal Christianity: 10 Signposts into the Missional Frontier (Jossey-Bass 2013) with co-author Geoff Holsclaw. He has a forthcoming book with IVP coming in 2016 entitled Faithful Presence: How God Shapes the Church for the Sake of the World. He facebooks every morning  here and his twitter handle is @fitchest