When the Members Are the Missionaries : An Extraordinary Calling for Ordinary People

Help to turn the church right side up! Put the daily lives of the members back on top. Extend your vision of "mission" to the members bringing love and justice in deed and word to each of their daily arenas -- their homes, their work, their local communities, the wider world, their leisure, and their church. Fifteen ordinary people tell how mission transforms one of their daily arenas with the power of God's love and justice working in and through them. Then see how congregations can organize themselves to help their members to live this way.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

In 1999, A. Wayne Schwab was funded by Trinity Church Grants to research how congregations can help their members to live as missionaries wherever they are. Participants ranged from New Jersey to Alaska. This book reports the fruits of that project. From 1975 to retirement in 1993, he served as the first Evangelism staff person for the Episcopal Church and built a network of helpers and a curriculum of resources for evangelism. These people and resources reached beyond the USA to Brazil, Spain, Myanmar and the like. He led a growing church in northern New Jersey from 1956 to 1975 while helping to shape the leadership development and education of the Episcopal Church; implementing community change patterns of the European lay academies in his area; and working as a certified pastoral counselor. A native of Washington, D.C., Schwab graduated from Virginia Theological Seminary in 1953; sold Fuller Brushes for a year; and was ordained in 1954. At present, he resides in Essex in upstate New York where he is active in community work, politics, and the church and enjoys family life with his wife and the families of their two sons and two daughters.