Introducing David Fitch, a Missio Alliance Leading Voice

After almost ten years of blogging over at www.missioalliance.org, I am excited to be joining the Writing Team at Missio Alliance and honored to be included among a diverse and compelling group of “Leading Voices” including writers like Carolyn Custis James, Dennis Edwards, Efrem Smith, Kyuboem Lee and MaryKate Morse who are being asked to help guide and shape conversation around some of the most pressing questions and issues facing the North American Church in God’s mission.

I’ll be doing the same thing here I have always been doing: writing posts on theology, church, culture, and mission. People who know my writing also know I write a lot about church-planting issues. I move often between the conversations on my Facebook and Twitter feeds to fill out some of my points here with a post. Feel free to follow me on FB or Twitter. If you friend me on FB, I’m getting crowded on that page, so I’m only friending people who have a stake in theology and the church. If that’s not evident in your profile, then please message me a note telling me in sentence of your interest. I’ll friend you until I have no more room. Over the years, some of my online writing has shaped chapters in books. I love writing in all four of these platforms (Facebook, Twitter, blogging, books). I try to write approximately 2 to 6 times a month.

Of course, my writing starts in the contexts of where I spend the bulk of my everyday life. I am a church planting pastor (I think I’m involved now in my 6^th church plant), church planter coach for the Christian and Missionary Alliance. I am also a professor of theology, culture and ethics at Northern Seminary. I travel (about once a month) to speak at conferences and gatherings to encourage pastors, leaders, and Christians on the church, cultural engagement, and mission. And I’m living daily as a husband, dad, Squirts hockey coach in my town of Westmont IL, a southwest suburb of Chicago. I read, think and write out of all of this, usually from 6-9 a.m. in the mornings.

Besides the opportunity I have to be part of amazing team of leading theological-practitioners who write as a ministry to others, one of the great things about coming over here to Missio Alliance is to have people who work on this site and keep it working. This saves me time and money. These good people have moved all my content (ten years worth!) over to this site. There’s a search function on the site. Whoooopee! Do you know how many times I’ve gotten an e-mail saying you need a search function on your site and I haven’t known how to do that?! I have an author page now which fulfills many of the functions of my prior site. I have an RSS feed peculiar to my blog. So check it out folks?

For all of you who are new to me or new to Missio Alliance, I think you will find the work done here theologically driven, evangelical in theological commitments (Missio is committed to Lausanne’s Cape Town Commitment) but distinctively driven by mission. I get my holiness and mission emphasis from being a member of that kind of denomination (Christian and Missionary Alliance). I get my Anabaptist theological emphasis from my own intense theological journey. I engage culture with an appreciation for the history of ideology, political theory and continental philosophy. I believe in large parts of US and Canada we’re post-Christendom. I think all of this fits well with this great theological forum called Missio Alliance.

So won’t you join me? Subscribe to the blog? Take a look around at some awesome pastor-writers. Let us work together for Christ and His Kingdom in the places we live!