Looks like JKA Smith has completed his next book, and from this bit of description from the author’s blog, it sounds like I’ll be anxiously awaiting its publishing and release:
The animating impetus of the book is rethinking the shape and practices of Christian education, particularly in Christian colleges and universities in North America (I recognize that these are strange beasts to those in Europe and elsewhere). In particular, I’m pressing the limits, even distortions, that attend “worldwide”-talk which tends to now dominate Christian higher education. Such worldviewism, I suggest, continues to reduce Christianity to an intellectual system that can be grasped apart from the church and is then “taught” as information to be merely transferred from one head to another. In contrast, I argue that Christian discipleship is a matter of formation, not mere information–and that “Christian” education should be fundamentally a matter of shaping our love, our desire, to be oriented to the shape of the kingdom of God. And such formation happens not primarily via the heady, cognitive “lectures” (whether in our Protestant sermon factories or our Christian college classrooms) but through embodied practices that seep into our imagination and get hold of our gut, our heart, our kardia.
Fors Clavigera: “Desiring the Kingdom” is Finished!
Sounds a lot like what Church of the Saviour does with its formation/discipleship. This is my experience with the approach of this community, and JKA seems to envision a similar ecclesia.