Lois Y. Barrett

Lois

Director, AMBS-Great Plains
Associate Professor of Theology and Anabaptist Studies

  • B.A., University of Oklahoma, 1969
  • M.Div., Mennonite Biblical Seminary, 1983
  • Ph.D., Graduate School, The Union Institute, 1992

Email: lbarrett@ambs.edu
Phone: 316 283–7098

Curriculum Vitae

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The nature of the church has been a long-standing interest for Lois Barrett. It was the encompassing frame for her work as executive secretary of the Commission on Home Ministries for the General Conference Mennonite Church for almost ten years, her service as a pastor of an urban congregation, her research and writing about house churches and about missional ecclesiology, and her doctoral dissertation on early Anabaptist religious and cultural history. After 12 years as a board member of the Great Plains Seminary Education Program, she became director when that program became an extension site of AMBS in 2002. Serving as administrator and instructor in the program calls out the best of Lois's gifts of teaching, administration, and empowering people to serve the church.

"Theological education is for the purpose of serving the church. And serving the church involves understanding the nature of the church and the mission in which God sends the church. The church is the people of God, an alternative community with another set of allegiances and another set of practices from the dominant culture. As such, the church is to be light to the world, a city on a hill, a sign of the future God intends for the whole world."

Scholarship

  • Treasure in Clay Jars: Patterns in Missional Faithfulness (Eerdmans, 2004), co-author
  • Mission-Centered Congregations (Herald, 2002), editor
  • "Rethinking Anabaptist Apocalypticism" in Apocalypticism and Millennialism: Shaping a Believers Church Eschatology for the Twenty-First Century (Pandora, 2000)
  • "Marks of the Faithful Church-Marks of the Successful Church: A Response to Natural Church Development from a Missiological and Ecclesiological Perspective," Anabaptist Evangelism Council (February 1999)
  • Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Eerdmans, 1998), co-author
  • Building the House Church (Herald, 1986)

Speakers Bureau Presentations

  • Leadership for a missional church
  • Missional church
  • Anabaptist history and theology
  • Congregational discernment of its vocation