David Wesley, Nazarene Theological Seminary
In an article posted on January 22, 2007 in Christianity Today, Christopher J.H. Wright has a fascinating article which he titles “An upside-Down World”. His primary argument is that Christianity has always been polycentric, and gives examples of that from the New Testament. A great quote in the article, although it is not cited is from Andrew Walls:
“The emergence of genuine world Christianity and the ending of Western assumptions of heartland hegemony simply marks a return to normal Christianity, which looks much more like the New Testament than Christianity ever did.”
Wright says that “the language of home and mission field is still used by many churches and agencies, but it fundamentally misrepresents reality”. This is not a new concept and in my opinion is in line with the whole tone of scripture which emphasizes mission as God’s nature and God’s activity in which the Church is called to be “co-workers with God.”
While the article represents the heart of missional thinking, there are some pragmatic issues which are difficult for our post modern ears. In a time when being “purpose driven” is the norm, Wright states, “we want to be driven by a purpose tailored for our individual lives, when we should be seeing the purpose of all life, including our own, wrapped up in the great mission of God for the whole creation.” Issues of contextualization and “user friendliness” are also difficult to synchronize with Wrights statement, “we wrestle to ‘make the gospel relevant to the world.’ But God is about the mission of transforming the world to fit the shape of the gospel.”
Without doubt, mission never has never had a territorial center, and it was never meant to be a gospel from the “west to the rest”. Colonialism and nation pride, sadly to say, many times overshadow the mission of God. I am reminded of the American eagle of the muppets who is quoted to say, “a salute to all nations of the world…but mostly America”. We want to be inclusive, but we end up with “mostly America”. When we sing “we’ve a story to tell to the nations”, we often think that it is “mostly America” who has a story to tell to the nations. We put together mission statements which state that our mission is to make disciples of all or in all nations, and yet we often mean that it is “mostly Americans” who are to make disciples of all other nations.
To quote Wright (again), “the real mission boundary is not between ‘Christian countries’ and the ‘mission field,’ but between faith and unbelief, and that is a boundary that runs through every land and, indeed, through every local street.”
I welcome your comments about Wrights article as well as my thoughts. Wright's article can be located at http://www.christianvisionproject.com/2007/01/an_upsidedown_world.html
8 comments:
The issues that Wright mentions in this article have been very real to me for some time now. In fact, a few close friends of mine have tried to talk me out of being a missionary for these very same reasons. When I look at the call that I believe God has placed on my life, I still can't help but think that I am supposed to be involved in cross-cultural ministry overseas. Although I admit that I have sometimes participated in the kind of language Wright mentions which paints the Western church as the true or origional church, I am also constantly trying to work out what it would mean to support the Christ-centered church with no geographical center. It is hard to be an effective cross-cultural minister when we so easily buy into the oppresive nature of our culture.
The answer for me lies in Wright's statement that "We ask 'Where does God fit into the story of my life?'when the real question is, 'Where does my little life fit into the great story of God's mission?'" This kind of thought highly resembles Stanley Hauerwas' notion that we are called to find our lives within the great narrative of the people of God, namely from the gospel stories. For me, this line of thinking has inspired me to put away my cultural idolatry and to see Christianity for what it truly is; it calls me to be a cross-cultural minister in the manner of the early Christians.
First, it should be noted that my wife and I (missionaries from the US to Mexico and Central America) train and develop Nazarene missionaries from the 7 countries in MAC to go overseas. That's right; our job is to see that Salvadorean missionaries are in all the world doing mission, to see that Costa Ricans are in Africa and Indonesia and maybe even the United States. Do you want to know what a typical regional coordinators' meeting looks like in Guatemala City? Missionaries from Argentina, the US, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, Nicaragua, and other countries all come together to "do" the Great Commission. That kind of melting pot makes conversations like this blog's topic both relevant and obsolete. relevant because it is exactly what we should be talking about! But obsolete because we are so delayed in bringing these subjects up! The world has been groaning under our American patriotism and unintentional colonialism for quite some time now. Aren't we talking about this a little late? As Samuel Escobar (a Peruvian missiologist) says, this is missions from everywhere to everywhere. It is already happening whether many of us Americans are recognizing it or not. And it MUST happen to transform the world. We cannot do it alone as one country or as one denomination even.
I could not agree more with Wright. As the world gets smaller, the "mission field" here in our own country gets bigger. Ever since I have felt God calling me into missions I have asked many questions about where I had to be to fulfill that call. While I still feel God calling me to foreign missions, I have realized that doing missions begins here and now. I do not have to be in any certain place or know any certain language to minister to the lost. The lost are all around us. On my first mission trip to Romania I was amazed and shocked at the things that I saw in this "3rd world" country. But, what amazed me even more was the fact that I saw some of the very same things here in this, what i assumed to be "superior," country when I got back. My grandmother has always told me I do not have to leave my home to be a missionary, and she's right. Wright says that the mission boundary is between faith and unbelief, that boundary could easily be your front door. I think it is time Western Christianity refocus their mission. As Wright says, "This God-centered refocusing of mission turns inside-out our obsession with mission plans, agendas, goals, strategies, and grand schemes."
Wright does not say that we should not do cross-cultural missions. He simply seeks to correct some distortions in our thinking about missions, especially among people in the Western world. First, he shows that missionaries are sent "from everywhere to everywhere," not just from the West to the rest of the world. Next, he reminds us that the missions of the Church are derived from the mission of God. Finally, he points out that the power of the Cross is good for social as well as spiritual transformation. These are some points that we Westerners have neglected in our discussions about missions, even in the language that we use. (For example, has anyone ever heard someone say, "Let's go and take the Gospel of Christ to those people!"? The sentiment is good, but we need to remember that God, through His prevenient grace, is already working "over there.")
I think that we can still use the term "mission field" without impunity, as long as it's used as a relative, not an absolute, term. For a Christian who has grown up in Brazil, England is a mission field. For a Christian who has grown up in England, Brazil is a mission field. The term usually has a cross-cultural meaning to it, although most Christians recognize that a "mission field" is anywhere where lost people live.
The section at the end on social transformation is not just a tack-on or a personal soapbox for the writer; it is an important part of Wright's message to Christians in the West. We need to recognize that the Gospel sounds different to people in parts of the world where hunger, poverty and oppression are a daily reality. The proclamation of the Word must be accompanied by every possible action, by deep caring and identification with our listeners' material needs. As Amy Carmichael said,"One cannot save and then pitchfork souls into heaven. Souls are more or less securely fastened to bodies..." (my paraphrase) Holistic ministry is both practical and biblical, based on God's concern for the poor.
Many of the comments in Wright’s article summarize the battle of views and thoughts that have raged through my mind in the past few years as I have explored and pursued the possibilities of fulfilling the call God placed on my heart for missions. Growing up, I had a very narrow view of missions. The only thing I knew missionaries to be was preachers or doctors. A missionary was definitely someone from North America who went to some poor, uncivilized place, and talked about Jesus to the people who did not know him. I understand that this was largely coming from a very egocentric view and out of a lack of exposure to the world apart from my own monocultural community, but these views were reinforced by what I heard and learned in church about missions. Fortunately, this view that I was raised to understand has changed. As I understand more and more the word of God, I see its missional focus and how far the Bible’s model is from the one I had understood as a young person. I think Wright’s comments in his article challenge many of the understandings similar to my own and encourage the Western Church to change the way we think about missions and to give up our colonial mentality and accept a Biblical view of missions. Mission is not so much about geography as it is about spirituality. There are people in most arenas of our life that are without the good news of the gospel. One comment Wright makes is that most of the world views the West as one of the toughest mission fields in the world. I agree. I have realized that for me it is much easier to “be a missionary” in some far off land than it is for me to cross over into the world of another within my own country or here in the US. In many ways, North American Christians can benefit from the help and perspective of Christians from other parts of the world as we seek to reach those in our own communities or the community next door. There are definitely some thoughts in Wright’s article that we should be seriously considering as we seek to fulfill God’s mission on earth.
Wright makes a few good points, but nothing profound. Until better Christians are made, all "missions" are self distructing. Nominal Catholics, Nominal Protestants, Nominal Eastern Orthodox, Nominal Non-Denominational (baptists) will discredit anything "Christians" will do anyway. It doesn't seem like volumes need to be written or said beyond Christianity will call us to the way of the cross, call us to forsake our mothers and fathers, hate our brothers and sisters. Christianity calls us to deny our love for ourselves that keeps us from martyrdom. Christianity calls us to deny the love for ourselves that protects nationalism and allows it to pervade the language of mission (or whatever you call selling all of your things and living with and amongst people).
While every movment needs to self-fulfill the recent emphasis on "missional" everything doesn't seem to mission better Christians into existance. Philip Jenkin's book like this article corrects very little about our Christianity if we are not made into people more like Christ. The problem isn't that people call home and away different things, but that the measurements for what makes a "Christian" is far off the mark. Call it whatever you would like, just witness God's presence when you do it.
That means feed the poor, visit prisons, don't be a fat gluttonous pastor, don't drive something that destroys God's creation... if you do that, than you will not need to go to the nations, the nations will come to you.
To be honest I sometimes get frustrated with the constant argument that we’ve gotten things all wrong when it comes to missions. There is no question that mistakes have been made and that sometimes misguided strategies have been implemented by the “West” in its passion to bring the Gospel to places that previously had never known the name of Christ. The reality of the fact is that the early Church lit the Gospel flame that, however history may write it, ignited and moved north then westward and those whose hearts were enraptured by Christ set off to preach that same message of hope to the rest of the world. I don’t really know what is implied in the following statement
Without doubt, mission never has never had a territorial center, and it was never meant to be a gospel from the “west to the rest”.
I look at it more as a domino affect. In our time in history, in the window we are in and can look through, it looks predominantly as a ‘West to the Rest” strategy when more than anything that is where Christianity was flourishing and it is from there that the message overflowed to places throughout the entire world and now we are experiencing yet another shift wherein Christianity has reached nearly every corner of the world and is simultaneously reaching back out into that world (“the gospel from everywhere to everyone”) The Gospel was to be preached to everyone but it also had to move out of one place to another and then another and so on. It is not as though Jesus came into the world and all of a sudden people in the far reaches of North America, before it had ever even been discovered by the rest of the world, knew of the story. My point is, the story moves and moved across time and space. The grace of God is prevenient and God is Omnipresent. So in that sense “mission never has had a territorial center.” However, the Gospel had to be told. In the last chapter of Matthew we read the words of Christ calling his disciples to go into all the world. The Gospel has always come in a sense from somewhere to another…it’s part of the story. Was the Gospel a gospel from “Jerusalem to the rest” (that doesn’t quite rhyme as nicely)? In a sense at one time it was. As time has elapsed the message has continued to make disciples of all nations and for a while that message was being carried by a “West” that was enraptured by Christ. Now we are seeing a shift again as the message has found it’s way to the hearts of millions of people throughout the entire world (and now in particular the Global South). I realize adjusting to new methods and new understandings of missions is a complex transition but it is occurring and people are working together corporately to embrace a new era of global evangelism.
To say that:
“We want to be inclusive, but we end up with “mostly America”. When we sing “we’ve a story to tell to the nations”, we often think that it is “mostly America” who has a story to tell to the nations. We put together mission statements which state that our mission is to make disciples of all or in all nations, and yet we often mean that it is “mostly Americans” who are to make disciples of all other nations.”
To me is a gross generalization and really misrepresents the hearts of those who have served as missionaries.
I’m trying to wrap my mind around the purpose and practical implications of this article. Is the point to re-define the role of a missionary, or are we trying to re-visualize the church?
I wouldn’t say this is a new issue in Christian history. There have been problems with hierarchy throughout our story. The example that comes to mind is from Galatians where Paul blasts Peter for trying to save face by not eating with uncircumcised Gentiles in front of other Jews. I’m not sure that the first century struggle with this problem gives us any solace. It would be a beautiful thing if we could look back on church history, breath a sigh of relief and say, “Ahhh, we finally got past that one.”
Here are my two thoughts on the role of missionaries and the re-visualization for the church. First, we get really messed up with our concept of this word “call.” We have accountants, fire fighters, garbage collectors and school teachers who somehow think they don’t have one. The reason is likely that we think pastor or missionary implies some kind of exclusivity to the word. We’ve made this word so loaded and prescriptive that we fail to recognize the variety of roles and expressions that God uses to administer the sacrament of grace.
Second, the church needs to figure out how to be global. The structure of the Church seems to mirror the diversity of the global community. The only downside to that—the US is consistently at the center with most if not all of the power. I can’t speak for other traditions or denominations, but the Church of the Nazarene is still ran, operated and funded (with a few small exceptions) by white North Americans. On the up side, we are fervently trying to change that. Maybe the Baptists or Assemblies of God are two steps ahead of us, I don’t know. Here’s my point, our denomination is solidly organizationally centered in the US. That is where almost all of the money comes from, and like most Americans, we tend to think if we pay for it we own it. Until we fix this, I’m not sure we can be global. I hope that I’m wrong.
Ok, all this is kind of depressing. I’m going to reiterate what my friend, Pastor Manuel, said in his sermon last night at church (please keep in mind it was in Spanish and I’m not exactly fluent). He was talking about attending Sunday morning worship with the English congregation, “I don’t speak English. I don’t understand everything, but I know that one day we will worship with one language. There is only one Spirit… it doesn’t matter if you are educated, intelligent, wealthy or poor, God has called you to testify. God has promised to go with you.”
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