Our Mission
We equip Christian leaders to understand the intersection of their collective stories with God’s story so they can more fully love their neighbors.
Our Vision
Healing and joining together our unique stories into God's Story
Our Strategy and Approach
The Need:
The Gospel ought to be Good News to everyone, but especially with the recent news, the church is divided and confused about the Good News. Who is the good news for and what defines it? Currently, theology is biased towards a male-dominated, western lens. You’ll scarcely find categories like shame, honor, and patronage among systematic theologies, yet these underdeveloped Biblical categories are more relevant today than ever before. Kingdom Rice utilizes these underutilized biblical majority world categories in everything we do. In this way, every community can directly find their story in God's Story.
Healing and joining together of our unique stories in God's Story
Marginalized communities are not in the mainstream, but are the ones Jesus continually lifts up in the Gospels. Healed marginalized communities have found their story in God's Story in their own unique way.
Stories that are being healed are stories that are able to find solidarity. On that first Pentecost, the Spirit enabled an unprecedented joining together, a kind of inclusion we need now more than ever before. Against the exclusion that has robbed minorities of voice, sound, bound, land, and place, the inclusive work of the Spirit restores these. Consider these words from theologian Willie Jennings:
“The Spirit creates joining. The followers of Jesus are now being connected in a way that joins them to people in the most intimate space—of voice, memory, sound, body, land, and place. … to speak a language is to speak a people” – Willie James Jennings, Acts, A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017), 28.
Our Mission drives our three-tiered strategy
Demonstration
To begin equipping leaders, we have to unstick imaginations from trapped ways, and demonstrate concrete pictures of the Kingdom that they can engage with. Jesus never taught without first a demonstration of the Kingdom. So thus we will only teach in the context of what we can demonstrate. Click here for a fuller explanation of demonstration.
Assessment
We carefully and sensitively excavate our stories and cultures as a way to identify past masters and instincts and lenses by which we live life. Click here for a fuller explanation of assessment.
Integration
Only after the Spirit identifies old masters, lenses, habits, we can replace them with new lenses, new ways. We lead participants to concretely pray and plan how their three most important lenses will be affected, how they see God, themselves, and others, especially others that are culturally different from them. We break this down as practically as possible, applying these new lenses to where we work, play, and live. Click here for a fuller explanation of integration.