Lois Y. Barrett

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 in her research and writing about house churches, missional ecclesiology, and early Anabaptist religious and cultural history.  Before joining the faculty in 2002, she served as a denominational mission executive and as a pastor of an urban congregation.  Serving as an AMBS administrator and instructor in Kansas and Indiana 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

• “Testimony in Anabaptist Mennonite Theology and Practice” in Vision: A Journal for Church and Theology (Fall 2009)
• “Jesus and God,” in Jesus Matters: Good News for the 21st Century (Herald, 2009)
• “Defining Missional Church,” in Evangelical, Ecumenical, and Anabaptist Missiologies in Conversation (Orbis, 2006)
• 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)
• Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Eerdmans, 1998), co-author
• Praying the Beatitudes of Jesus (Conference of Mennonites in Canada, 1998)
• And No One Shall Make Them Afraid (Faith & Life, 1998), editor
• “Ursula Jost and Barbara Rebstock of Strasbourg” in Profiles of Anabaptist Women: Sixteenth-Century Reforming Pioneers (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1996)
• Doing What Is Right; What the Bible Says About Covenant and Justice (Herald, 1989)
• Letters to American Christians (Herald, 1989), co-author
• Building the House Church (Herald, 1986)
• The Vision and the Reality (Faith & Life, 1983)

Speakers Bureau Presentations

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