Bio

Born in 1976, I am married to Katiucia and father of Emily, Gabriel and Laura.  Since 1993 I have served with Youth With a Mission, an interdenominational organization training Christian leaders to bring the Kingdom of Christ into all nations and spheres of society.  From 1999 to 2017 my wife and I were church planters with the Calvary Chapel movement, the past 16 years in Brazil.  In  2017 we transitioned to serving YWAM’s University of the Nations‘ College of Humanities and diverse reconciliation movements promoting church unity such as Towards Jerusalem Council II.  We currently live in Lisbon, Portugal.  

I have a MA in Global Leadership from Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA and a BA in Humanities from the University of the Nations, Kona, HI*.  Currently I am doing a PhD in Intercultural Studies at Biola University.  My wife has a BA in Pedagogy from OPET University, Curitiba, Brazil.  We offer a variety of developmental consulting and teaching rooted in our experience as missionaries but applicable to non-confessional contexts as well.  Please refer to the “services” page to see how we may be of service to you.  Please see Katiucia’s blog Dawson5 for more information on her consulting resources.    

Davidjdawson.com

Davidjdawson.com is home to articles focused on Christian missions, church unity, interfaith dialogue, theology of religions, cross-cultural family, and multi vocational ministry.  Over the past two decades in ministry my wife have navigated traditional and non-traditional models of doing and financially supporting Christian missions.  We’ve also felt the strain as Christian institutions have grappled with the call to disciple nations from the margens of society.  The Western Church no longer enjoys the same place of privilege in the post-Christendom era.  But we celebrate this as a new opportunity to get back to the early church culture of changing culture from the margins of society.  

I believe that there are seismic shifts in how ministry will be done in the global pluralistic urban world.  Through this blog I humbly wish to contribute to the discussion on how serving God today transcends traditional Western Christian paradigms.

On the Services (add link) page I have detailed the teaching and consulting content I offer individuals and groups.  Take a look and think about booking me for a free consultation.  

Postsupersessionist Missions

The Society for Post-Supersessionist Theology describes PS as “a family of theological perspectives that affirms God’s irrevocable covenant with the Jewish people as a central and coherent part of ecclesial teaching” (Society for Post-Supersessionist Theology | Jewish-Christian Relations, n.d.). PS advocacy is described as seeking “to overcome understandings of the New Covenant that entail the abrogation or obsolescence of God’s covenant with the Jewish people, of the Torah as a demarcator of Jewish communal identity, or of the Jewish people themselves” (Society for Post-Supersessionist Theology | Jewish-Christian Relations, n.d.). 

I focus specifically on PSM in the Portuguese-speaking world, with emphasis on Jewish-Christian and intra-Christian reconciliation. In relation to the intra-Christian reconciliation, I hold that addressing the first division among the followers of Jesus – Jew and Gentile “Parting of the Ways” – is key to healing subsequent divisions that have fragmented the church. The apostle Paul promotes a vision of the church as “one new man” consisting of Gentile and Jewish disciples of Christ who honor their respective callings (Eph. 2:11-22). But the emerging Gentile-majority church ignored Paul’s warnings against rejection and arrogance towards the Jewish people, both those who believed in Christ as well as those who did not (Rom. 11:11-24). 

The church was called to embodying a prophetic witness of intercultural reconciliation. Instead, Gentile and Jewish identity was replaced by a homogenous identity as “people of God” where all the promises given to Israel were redefined and appropriated. This redefinition spiritualized the promises to Israel in a way that cast the biblical vision as divorced from particular human identity. A generic vision of redemption emerged that focused on escape from earthly human culture into an etherial paradise of universal homogeneity. Heaven was promoted as a place where the individual would be freed from particular cultural identity based on confession of Christ as the rite of passage. While I agree with the liberating nature of the salvation by faith, I disagree with the rejection of human cultural particularity. This contradicts the vision of the New Heaven and Earth as a place where God is worshipped by a multitude whose cultural diversity is intact (Rev. 5:9). 

I believe PSM can be useful in reforming and bringing innovation to contemporary paradigms and practices of mission. In particular, mission as interfaith dialogue where Christians identify themselves as pilgrims and witnesses rather than “the people of God” in the motif of substituting the biblical paradigm uniquely attributed to the Jews. While the concept of people of God attributed to the church is valid, it’s relationship to Western imperialism and colonialism means it should be substituted with language that counters this distortion. I suggest a collective identity of the global community of followers of Jesus that uses diverse terms such as pilgrim, witness, disciple, church, etc. that are careful regarding the concept of divine election. I believe divine election is a biblical doctrine that should not be rejected. However, I content that divine election is intended in Scripture to warrant ideas and practices of superiority and exclusion. 

The restoration of the witness of the universal church as community of diverse cultural expressions of Christian life. Diverse ethnic groups are encouraged to follow Christ’s teachings in a way which is not culturally pristine but redeemed. In other words, PSM promotes the change of culture through the manifestation of the biblical vision of Christ’s kingdom. However, as Lamin Sanneh states, “the original language of Christianity is translation” (Sanneh, 1989). Therefore, the collective witness of the global church is essentially one of unity in diversity. In a pluralistic world where cultural diversity is an ideology to be sought after, an essential part of the church’s attractiveness should be its variety.