This project assembled a group of potential small-group facilitators for the purpose of drafting a small-group discussion guide to be used at the Speedway (Indiana) Church of Christ. The guide was intended to aid the discernment of missional practices which sustain the renewal of the wider community. Focusing on the Gospel of John, the intervention attempted to recover a temple Christology, construing the incarnation, ministry, death, and the lifting up of Jesus within the larger story of the temple’s ongoing re-creation of the world. In bestowing his glory upon the church, Jesus sends the church into all the world, as the Father had sent him, as a renewed temple and a mysterious agent of ongoing creation. Thus, the temple’s iconic creational functions, architecturally expressed on Zion and embodied in Jesus Christ, act as spiritual and imaginative sources for the church’s own practices of community renewal. The group sessions produced the discussion guide entitled The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Discussion Guide for Discerning Missional Practices. This thesis assesses this artifact’s reliability and its wider theological significance for missional ecclesiology, suggesting further areas of research
