The Marylebone Association

Debate with Professor Morna Hooker & Professor Frances Young
‘The Church for today'

FREE ENTRY

What Mission? Urban Discipleship

What mission is the church called to engage in, in urban situations today? What can we learn from the bible? What can we learn from the early Christians?

For this series of Hugh Price Hughes lectures, Hinde Street has invited two eminent Methodist theologians who were once associated with the church, and asked them to engage with these questions. The lecture series is the first in a series of events being planned to celebrate 250 years of a Methodist Society in the West End and 200 years of its presence on this site in Marylebone. We hope that they will help us, as a church and more widely within the West London Mission, to reflect on "What Mission?" God is calling us to in today's city centre.

In Morna Hooker's lectures, she will be looking at the biblical understanding of what we call ‘mission'. Studying how first-century Christians attempted to express their faith in contemporary language is a good place to begin asking questions about how we understand it today.

Frances Young will present two lectures which draw on research into the social and political context of early Christian mission in the cities of the Roman world, endeavouring both to be true to the history and alert to potentially suggestive comparisons and contrasts with the present reality of urban living in a globalised world.

We do not believe that "What mission?" is a question for us alone. How the church engages with the increasing number and variety of people living and working in today's cities is a matter of concern for the whole church. Over the years the conversation at the HPH lectures has been hugely enriched by those who join us from London and beyond. This year, your presence will be needed even more, because the last lecture will take the form of a conversation and debate with our lecturers, in which those attending the lectures will play a significant role. God's mission, which is what we are talking about, is a mission that is best discerned when God's people work and talk together. We look forward to welcoming you to share in this conversation!

As an undergraduate, Morna Hooker studied Theology in the University of Bristol, being firmly convinced (at a time when such a view was very unfashionable!) that Theology was not the preserve of the ordained ministry, but a subject of importance to all Christians. She subsequently taught New Testament at King's College London and at the University of Oxford, before becoming Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity at Cambridge in 1976. In Cambridge she also became a founding Fellow of Robinson College, the newest of the Colleges. She retired in 1998, but remains a Fellow at Robinson, and continues to lecture and to write. She was married to the Revd Dr W. David Stacey
(who died in 1993), and for 9 years divided her time between Cambridge and Bristol, where David, an Old Testament scholar, was Principal of Wesley College. She is a Local Preacher in the Cambridge circuit. Her primary research interest has been the way in which the first Christians made use of Old Testament language and ideas, and expressed their beliefs about Jesus in the thought-forms of the day. She has specialized in the theology of St Paul and St Mark.

Frances Young, retired since 2005, taught NewTestament and early Christian studies in the University of Birmingham from 1971, becoming Professor and Head of Department in 1986. Meanwhile she and her husband brought up a family, including a son with profound learning disabilities, whom they still care for at home, now in his forties. In 1984 she was ordained as a Methodist minister, with a vocation to live on the bridge between the Church and academic theology.

She remains attached to a local circuit, leading worship and preaching on a regular basis. The urban environment of the West Midlands, with its multiracial and multi-faith character, has been an important backdrop to her theological thinking, as well as ecumenism and involvement with disability organisations.