The next Stott-Bediako Forum will be held outside Medellín, Colombia in July, 2024. In preparation for this forum, we recruited a core group of contributors who spent several months during 2023 working on their presentations for the event. By November, we were able to hold an online consultation, in which our 17 presenters shared their early drafts with one another to workshop and continue honing their ideas.

We are very excited about the diversity of the presentations coming together, which bring together the research and experiences of practitioners, scholars, and artists; men and women; young and senior scholars; and people from 13 different countries: Bolivia, Palestine, USA, Philippines, India, Mexico, Estonia, Kenya, Costa Rica, South Africa, Palestine, Peru, and Romania. We also designed the program to address a wide range of topics related to the theme:

• Gospel Imagination
• Transformation and Mission Revisited
• God’s Future: A Fresh Eschatology in Missiological Perspective
• Culture-making and Mission
• Contemporary Responses to Missiological Challenges
• Society Transformation in the Biblical Story
• Art as Language of Imagination

Our leadership team has also been working diligently on preparing the logistics and communications related to the upcoming forum. We are thrilled to share that the plenary presentations will all be recorded on site in Colombia and produced as resources for INFEMIT’s global community. An online version of the program will be launched in September 2024 to offer the opportunity to learn, interact, and fellowship around the forum theme to those who are unable to attend in person.

We are also in the process of receiving proposals for additional contributions that will either be given in breakout sessions in Colombia or online. Our hope is to bring together a diverse group of contributors and attendees that reflects the richness and diversity of the body of Christ.

Join in prayer with us that the forum will provide a generative space to connect and learn together and explore the kind of imagination that is needed to shape our understanding and practice of mission amidst the issues of our world today.

INFEMIT connects and contributes to regional fellowships, local movements, and organizations across the world by participating in projects and events with the goal of promoting holistic theological reflection, deep fellowship, and faithful practice that is attentive to context.

Throughout 2023, key members of the INFEMIT Community contributed to major events and projects with the aim of nurturing the Church, both locally and globally. Among many other activities, we celebrate the planning and discernment being directed toward the 4th Global Congress of the Lausanne Movement; events such as the Global Pentecostal Summit, the Cátedra Caty y René Padilla, and the American Society of Missiology Annual Meeting; local initiatives such as Casa Cuenca, a project aimed at conservation and environmental education; and several significant publications that were released.

INFEMIT also provides regular opportunities for individuals and organizations to connect and join in the learning and fellowship facilitated by our global community. One way to do this is by signing up to “belong” to INFEMIT, and we are excited to share that 43 new people/ organizations signed up just this year!

Those who signed up to “belong” were also given the opportunity to join INFEMIT Circles, online fellowship groups that aim to provide mutual enrichment and fellowship, connecting mission theologian-practitioners from across the world who are united by the vision of INFEMIT.

These INFEMIT Circles have been running consistently since 2021. They meet once each month online to share about their lives and work, collaborate or dialogue around shared interests and projects, and pray for one another.

At the end of 2023, we held a large group gathering to which we invited all INFEMIT Circle members, so that they could get to know others participating in the initiative. It was an incredibly enriching time of connection, reflection, and feedback. We also celebrate the testimonies shared, which highlighted people who have found a theological “home” within INFEMIT, some who have been able to make significant connections and find support for their work and research, and others for whom the fellowship helped them endure challenging times. We pray that God will continue to strengthen our community in coming year.

Faith and Life is a process of theological formation for integral mission which empowers Christians to live out the good news of God’s reign in all arenas of life: in hospitals, NGO’s, universities, government buildings, and on the street, as well as in churches. Made up of four modules: Work, Family, Church, and Society, Faith and Life is developed for a specific cultural context by those with native understanding of that context.

The originator of Faith and Life, CETI (Community of Interdisciplinary Theological Studies), continues to offer holistic theological formation across Latin America, operating as a program of INFEMIT. CETI celebrated significant growth in 2023, including a new Master’s cohort with 13 students and new partners launching local, popular-level study circles in Brazil, Argentina, and Guatemala.

At a global level, INFEMIT continues to offer Faith and Life as a model to other organizations who wish to learn from and adapt this program for their own contexts. In Romania, where master’s and PhD programs based on Faith and Life are now offered to students from across Eastern Europe (and beyond), the programs have continued in high demand. A member of the INFEMIT’s Networking Team, Al Tizon, visited the university in Romania this year to guest lecture and share his book, Whole and Reconciled, which was recently released in Romanian.

INFEMIT promotes interdisciplinary and cross-regional scholarship and practice and invests in opportunities for younger scholar-practitioners to grow in roles of leadership in their local and global contexts.

An exciting new initiative emerged organically within the INFEMIT community this year, as members were eager to continue discussing research and topics presented at the previous Stott-Bediako Forum. INFEMIT began hosting regular “community conversations” which provide space to learn about and discuss the work of members of our global community.

These conversations have had unexpected outcomes, providing a space that is especially attractive for young scholar-practitioners to connect, learn, and share within a global community. They have also provided a unique avenue for new people to discover and join INFEMIT.

We have also continued to promote the work and opportunities of young scholars through our Stott-Bediako Forum process. As we look ahead to the 2024 Stott-Bediako Forum, already our core group of contributors includes 7 young scholar-practitioners from different regions of the world.