Transcript
We're living in a period in which the whole question of what is mission, what do we mean by mission, has become an urgently debated question in the life of the churches. And that is something new. For most of the last 200 years, and in fact for most of Christian history, I guess, missions and mission have been the concern of specialists. There were special mission boards, special people called missionaries, special actions called missions. And they were normally
understood as being related to something remote, something on the other side of the world, something which is about other people. Missions have not, at least to my knowledge, in Protestant theological seminaries, missions have not been an integral part of the theological curriculum. There is only one university in Britain which has a professor of missions, and that is a very recent appointment. Where mission is taught in theological colleges and university faculties, it's usually taught as a kind
of appendix to what is called practical theology. I don't know whether it's true in the United States, but certainly in Britain, the normal picture that the word mission brings up is either somebody going overseas to Africa or Asia or somewhere, or it is something down in the poor part of the town. The church is the body which is the real, well-to-do, established body in the comfortable part of the town. The mission is the thing
down in the slums, the second-rate apparatus. The Episcopal Church in the United States, it is still the case that a diocese which is not yet properly organized is called a missionary diocese. When it becomes a real pukka diocese, then it's no longer missionary. In other words, mission is a sort of second-class form of church, so to speak. I'm caricaturing, but you know what I mean. In other words, for the greater part of Christian history,
as we've known it, missions have been something on the periphery, and the idea that the church itself is a mission has been lacking. As far as I know, the first major theologian who has made mission an integral part of his theology is Carl Butt. If you look at the great missionary theologies, if you look at the great theological systems of the past, the missionary element is not an essential part of it. Today this is not the
case. You take a representative modern Protestant theologian like Jurgen Moltmann, and you will see that in all his books the thing leads up to the concept of the mission of the church. But today we're in a new situation in which, for various reasons, people recognise that mission belongs to the very substance of the church, and therefore we are now in a situation where there is passionate debate within the church itself about what we mean by mission.
Let me just illustrate that with a few representative positions. This is not anything very systematic, but I just want to remind you of the kind of debate that's going on in our time. I don't know how far these names that I mentioned will be known to you, but we'll talk about them more later. You take first of all the name of Donald MacGavran. Do people know here that name? Donald MacGavran? Church growth man. Church growth man.
Have you heard that name? He hasn't penetrated to Romania yet. You're still protected from some of the influences of the capitalist world. MacGavran is an American member of the Disciples of Christ who spent a long period as a missionary in India and became convinced that the traditional missionary methods were all wrong and that they were not accomplishing the object for which missions are sent. Basically, his criticism was that missions have got mixed up about their priorities.
When we look at the great commission of Matthew 28:18, we read that Jesus says, go into all the world, disciple the nations, teaching them, baptizing them, and teaching them all that I have commanded you. Now says MacGavran, you've got three things there. You disciple the nations, you make them disciples, you baptize them, and then you teach them what I have commanded. Discipling and perfecting are different operations. The job of a missionary is discipling. Perfecting can
come later. Modern missions, says MacGavran, have got all mixed up in their priorities. They spend their time running schools and hospitals and programs for industrial mission and for rural uplift and for social service and for political conscientization and all these things, all of which belongs to the perfecting, the teaching. They are neglecting the essential thing which missions are about, which is discipling, which is making converts, baptizing people. And one of the reasons why they have done
this is because they have developed the typical approach of what is called the mission station. If you look at this interesting word, mission station, which is a word that anybody involved in foreign missions at least has constantly heard, you see, because mission means going and station means standing still. So a mission station is just about as complete a contradiction in terms as you could get. And MacGavran has a point here. What he says is that missions
have, yes, they go, but then having gone, they form a station. They establish a place, they build a bungalow, they build a mission compound, they put up a church, they put up a school, they put up a hospital and so forth. And there it is, a kind of colony of the missionary's society. And then they expect people to come and to attach themselves to this mission station. Well, says MacGavran, this is a lot of nonsense. It
contradicts mission at the very beginning. And in fact, when you see the way that the church has really grown in history, it is not through the mission station, but it is through what he calls the people's movement. The way that the church really grows anywhere in the world, anywhere in history, is because masses of people, relations, friends, cousins, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, they hear about it from each other and they begin to move, they begin to
come and the church begins to grow. And the business of the missionary is to nurture this people's movement wherever it happens, along the lines of the family relationships. And if you do this, then as to use MacGavran's favorite adjective, there are fantastic possibilities of growth. The word fantastic occurs about two times on every page of MacGavran's writings. And after his withdrawal from India, he established a thing called the Institute of Church Growth at Fuller Theological Seminary,
Pasadena, in California. And he has carried out surveys all over the world, something like 20 or 25 volumes have appeared in the last 10 years, which demonstrate this thesis that there are fantastic possibilities for church growth all over the world, provided we adopt the right priorities, provided we put discipling first and provided we abandon the mission station approach and develop the people's movement approach. Well, we'll look more deeply at MacGavran later, but his movement, the church
growth movement, is one of the prominent movements in missionary thinking at the present time. Then secondly, there is, at the opposite end of the spectrum, there is the concept of mission as humanization, mission as humanization. This was the great phrase used at the Fourth Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Uppsala in 1968, where the emphasis was upon the work of mission as providing genuine humanity. Jesus is the new man, and the work of missions
is to make real humanization possible in every situation. And therefore, in the Uppsala report, instead of the traditional language of mission fields, instead of the language of MacGavran, who will tell you that there is a tribe in the Maroon there, which is absolutely ready to be evangelized if only the right kind of people go in, instead of looking at mission fields defined as places where there are non-Christians who are ready to be converted, the Uppsala
report looks at what it calls points for mission, points for mission, situations for mission. In other words, situations where man's humanity is threatened, and where there is a possibility for the Church to act on behalf of the humanity of man. And therefore, in this sense, mission is directed not just to the non-Christian world, it's directed to the Church. It's directed to any situation where man's humanity is at stake. And if you had before you the
cyclist style sheets, which I meant you to have, I could show you the section in the Uppsala report where these points for mission are listed. We might perhaps be able to look at them this afternoon if you're able to get a note tomorrow. Situations of exploitation, situations of stress, situations of loneliness and so forth. So that the whole emphasis there is on mission as God's action in the world for enabling man to be truly human. One
of the very best positive and constructive statements of this that I know is by the Indian theologian M.M. Thomas called Salvation and Humanization, which is a very fine development of that thesis. But the publication of the Uppsala report precipitated a violent reaction in Germany. A group of theologians led by Peter Baerhaus of Tübingen produced a great document called the Fundamental Crisis, the Frankfurt Declaration on the Fundamental Crisis of Missions, which totally repudiates this Uppsala picture.
And I mean as an illustration of the vehemence of the debate, all the missionary societies in Germany have been bombarded by letters from their supporters to say, if you have not signed the Frankfurt Declaration, please note that this is my last subscription to your mission and the Frankfurt Declaration has been made a kind of instrument to force the missionary boards in Europe to abandon this Uppsala approach. I mean mention that as an illustration of the vigor,
vehemence of the whole debate. Well then you have an extension of what one might call the Uppsala approach in the whole movement of liberation theology, revolutionary theology. Just a matter of interest, could I ask, have you read any of the Latin American liberation theologies? You probably have. Second sources, not primary. Second. What have you read? I've read Carl Yoder's critique of liberation theology and I've read papers from the Latin American press which present papers on the
theme by various Latin Americans. Is this phrase familiar to you, liberation theology? Gutierrez. You've read Gutierrez, the big five volume thing by Juan Luis Segundo, Theology for the Artisans of a New Humanity, I think it's called. But at any rate, what we normally call the Latin American liberation theology is in a sense an extension of this arising out of the particular situation perhaps of Latin America, but with close affinities to the black theology of James Cone
and so forth in this country. That is to say, a movement of thought which attacks vigorously the traditional European missiology on the ground that it is a confusion of Greek idealism with the Gospel, that what the Bible presents us with is God's mission as liberating action. The prime paradigm for mission is the Exodus story, which is a political story. It is the story of the liberation of a people who are enslaved and the God of the
Bible is the God who manifests himself in the Exodus story. He is a God of the oppressed and he is the God who calls upon his people to liberate the oppressed. And therefore, the whole traditional, as they would say, idealistic misinterpretation of Christianity, which talks about general ideals of liberty and freedom and unity and so forth and then says, how shall we apply them to this particular situation, is totally misconceived. On the contrary, God is only
known in action for liberation. There is no question of a reconciliation between Moses and Pharaoh in the Book of Exodus. There is no possibility of developing a form of church union which will include Moses and Pharaoh. There are two possibilities, either you are on the side of Moses or you are on the side of Pharaoh and there is no third possibility. And if you are not on the side of Moses, then you are not on the
side of God. And there is a straight issue of commitment to the struggle for liberation. It's fair to say that the Latin American theologians, I think, would agree that they derive their analysis of the situation largely from Karl Marx. They accept the Marxist tools for analyzing their situation, but they are not Marxists in the sense that they accept Marxism as a total interpretation of the human situation. There they would differ from Marxism, but they do accept
Marxism as a correct analysis of the of the present economic order and they call for a total commitment to the struggle for the liberation of the exploited. And that is mission. It's not that it's part of mission or an illustration of mission. It is mission. Mission is action for the liberation of the oppressed. That is mission as the God of the Bible manifests himself to us in the Bible. Now, again, we'll come more fully to discuss
liberation theology later, but I mean, I give that as an illustration of another prominent position. Or again, to move to a totally different spectrum of the compass. And I would be very interested to know what Andras would have to say about this living as he does in a predominantly orthodox milieu. But we have, I think, to take quite seriously the orthodox conception of mission as a participation in the life of the Trinity, which is expressed in
the liturgical presence of Christian congregations in the midst of the world where the life of the triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is present in the reality of the worshipping congregation. Christ is sent by the Father in the Spirit, Christ and the Church are sent into the world as the bearer of a divine life which draws all men to itself. And one can illustrate this in the experience, I would say, of the Russian Orthodox Church
in the U.S.S.R. at the present time, where in spite of the prohibition of every kind of missionary activity, in the sense of preaching or publication or propaganda of any kind, we see the spectacle of men and women being drawn into the life of the believing and worshipping congregation. And the orthodox missiology emphasizes this idea, the Church's mission is fulfilled in the actual presence of the living worshipping congregation into which men are drawn by the power of
the Spirit. And then lastly, there is the conception of mission as dialogue. Again, this is something that we will come to later on for a much fuller discussion, but the importance of dialogue, which has become one of the significant words in our modern culture in the Western world generally, partly I think a reaction against the aggressive evangelism of the colonial period, a recognition of the need for a greater amount of humility among Christ's ambassadors, a recognition
that we are living together in a plural world, that there can be no sort of crusading spirit today if we are to be realistic about the human situation, that dialogue is the form in which we are to relate ourselves to those of other faiths. I think that there are some who would say that dialogue is a part of mission. That would be the position of the Lausanne covenant, that in dialogue you learn from others in order
to communicate the gospel. Or secondly, there is the position of dialogue as a parallel but distinct activity. This is illustrated in the structure of the World Council of Churches, where the unit on dialogue with men of other faiths has been lifted out of the missionary department of the World Council and has become a separate department. But finally, there are those for whom dialogue is a total replacement of mission. A man like Wilfred Cantwell-Smith in his
recent writing regards dialogue as a total replacement of mission. We do not anticipate other people becoming Christians. We anticipate a growing into each other's traditions so that we all become the inheritors of each other's traditions. Perhaps with that, one may say that missions, as traditionally understood, have come to their end. I merely illustrated these as a kind of tour de l'horizon, as the French say, just a little illustration of the kind of different views about
mission that are current in the world today. There is the church growth school with its emphasis on baptism, conversion, church growth. The business of missions is to multiply Christians. And then on the other hand, you have the humanization concept of Uppsala leading on into the liberation concept of contemporary Latin America. You have the Orthodox concept of mission as the life of the triune God present in the worshiping congregation and drawing men to itself. And finally, you
have mission as dialogue. Well, these are just illustrations of the sort of variety of views of mission that we have today, which are in very vigorous debate with each other. And as we go through this three weeks course, we will be looking at those in a bit more detail at their strengths and weaknesses. And any anything in a way of clarification on that before I just move onto the we can discuss, of course, after coffee, the
just then go on to say a little about the historical background of this debate. And that can also be be material for our discussion this afternoon. Why are we now suddenly in a situation where missions become a whole subject for debate and controversy? And when you start trying to talk about historical background, the question is always how far back do you go? You can always go a little bit farther back than the last person and get
a different perspective. But at least we can agree that, well, we may not even agree with this. We may say that Christian missions begins with Abraham. But at least let us say that we will begin with the extraordinary story of a crucified Lord, of a man crucified who is declared to be the Lord of all. The supreme Lord encountered as a criminal. I don't know whether you have ever seen reproductions of one of the graffiti discovered
on the walls of the Palatine in Rome. It pictures a donkey crucified and a man bowing down in front of it. And the script underneath is Anaxamanas worships his God. Well, one can see crystallized in that the the utter absurdity of the Christian message as it must have appeared to the cultivated pagan of the world in which it first appeared. Anaxamanas worships his God. And then from the same period you have a man like Paul speaking
of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. Here you have this message which from one point of view is absolutely absurd, scandalous, blasphemous, ridiculous. And from another point of view is the ultimate revelation of God's love. Church history stopped in Syria more or less and nothing to the east of that existed. A typical example of our western parochial way of looking at church history. The great center as we know for the
dissemination of Christianity in the first two centuries was Antioch where you had both Greek and Syriac speaking peoples and the Greek version of the gospel spread westwards and we have the story of that in Acts and in the subsequent history the western church. The Syriac version spread very early eastwards along the great trade routes which have linked Europe to China and India since long before recorded history. The first state to adopt Christianity as its state religion
was Edessa in the north of what is now Iraq. That was by the end of the second century long before Constantine. By the year 225 there were more than 20 Christian bishops in the area that we now call Iraq. Nisibis had already become a great center of Christian teaching. By the fifth century there were bishops in Meshed and Herat and Merv. All those countries along the what we now call Afghanistan and the slopes between the Hindu
Kush and the Oxus River. I wish we had the map. The church in the east of course always suffered from the time that Constantine was converted to Christianity because just as Christians in eastern Europe are suspected of being agents of the west so Christians in the Persian Empire were suspected of being agents of the Roman Empire and this was increased when Constantine wrote his famous letter to the emperor Sapo the second asking for the protection of
Christians which immediately put all the Christians in the eastern empire under the suspicion of being agents of the western power. In 410 the Persian Empire officially recognized Christianity and gave it the position of an accepted minority religion and laid the foundations for the Millet system which Islam was subsequently to accept. According to the ancient legends the gospel reached India in the time of Saint Thomas himself, one of Christ's apostles, and although of course that story cannot
be proved it is extremely likely in view of the very large amount of evidence of close contact between South India and the Roman Empire in the first century AD and in view of the two distinct traditions, the western tradition and the eastern tradition, both of which testify to the presence of Christianity in South India from a very very early date. Arabia, many of the Arabian tribes had been converted to Christianity by the end of the second
century. By the time of Athanasius, Ethiopia was already a Christian nation and of course Christianity spread very rapidly along the North African coast and was indeed the strongest center of Christianity after Rome was sacked by the barbarians. Armenia was a Christian nation from the second half of the third century and so one could go on so that when one comes to the year 500 there is a widespread development of Christianity right through Asia although not yet
reaching as far as China. Now into this situation there explodes the phenomenon of Islam. Islam is born and achieves its gigantic expansion in the semi-Christianized communities of Arabia and within a hundred years of the death of the prophet, the Arabian peoples have been welded into a great religiously oriented nation. The whole Persian Empire, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa have come under the power of Islam and in a very short time the armies of Islam penetrate
right through Spain into France, occupy southern Italy and Sicily and sack Rome itself. At the same time you remember in the same period the pagan northern tribes, the Norsemen have come down out of what we now call Scandinavia ravaging the British Isles and the whole of northern Europe destroying the Christian civilization that had been built up in the previous five centuries and to every outward appearance one would say that Christianity was finished. It has become simply
a tiny beleaguered ghetto surrounded on the south and west by the power of Islam and on the north by the power of the pagan Norsemen. The Persian Empire on the one hand which has been taken over now by Islam and the Islamic civilization developing in northern Africa and in Spain is far more advanced in science, in technology, in philosophy, in culture than the little enclave of Christendom and what we now call Western Christendom is really a
sort of large ghetto, a sort of large millet. Do you know this word millet? It's an important word I think for the Persian Empire when they recognized Christianity in 410 established what they called the millet system by which the Christian communities in the Persian Empire were given the status of a sort of state within the state. They had their own laws, they were governed by their own rulers, the bishop had the powers of the magistrate within
the community but they were absolutely they were prevented from evangelizing. They were an enclosed community and when Islam conquered the Persian Empire and took it over they established the same millet system so that the great churches of the east which had hitherto been linked with Byzantium and the smaller churches of the Far East, the Nestorian and Monophysite churches of Persia and India became millets, little as we would say which were preserved but also prevented from expanding
and one could really say that the whole of Western Christendom was a kind of large millet surrounded by the superior culture and military and political power of Islam because let's remember that Muslim Spain was far more advanced in all the arts and sciences and technologies of the time than what we call Western Christendom. So there is the situation. Now how did the counter movement begin? How did Christendom break out of this prison? I suppose one could
say that one of the most important moments was the early part of the 12th century when the centers for the translation of Islamic works into Latin were opened in Salerno and Toledo. These were the two main centers especially Toledo in Spain where the great works of the Arabic scholars which had incorporated the learning of ancient Greece, Greek science, Greek philosophy, Greek medicine which had incorporated this material into Islamic thought and created the great Islamic culture of
the Middle Ages and Western Europe had lost all of this. The great Augustine of Hippo never learned to speak Greek, never learned to read Greek. The Greek tradition had been lost but the Muslims who had learned it in the school of the Nestorians in Cybis had preserved it and so you had the great Muslim philosophers Avicenna who created a synthesis of Plato and Aristotle within the Muslim system and Averroes, Ibn Rushd who created a synthesis of
Aristotle and Islamic thought. All these great developments of philosophy and science and medicine which were unknown to the Western world until the opening of these translation schools and then all this material began to flow into Western Europe and so you had the great renaissance of the 12th century in Europe, the coming of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, the foundation of the universities and the beginnings of the movement that created the renaissance and out of this
ferment there comes the beginnings of a counter-attack against Islam beginning in the Iberian Peninsula in Spain and Portugal. You have first of all the great wars by which the Muslims were expelled from Spain and then the struggle to recover the Holy Land, the Crusades and then the great voyages of discovery designed to get round Islam and reach the vital trade of the Far East which was now controlled entirely by the Muslims and so you have
the great voyages of discovery westward across the Atlantic, southwards around the Cape of Good Hope, northwards to try and find the northeast passage round the north coast of Russia and so forth and this movement of expansion was a movement that was shaped by the thing against which it was reacting. Islam was a total theocratic system, a total political religious military in which there is no distinction between these different elements, no separation of church and state, a
single religious political military entity and the counter-attack of Christendom was of the same kind. The Spanish and Portuguese rule in South America, in India and in Indonesia meant military conquest and the baptism of the inhabitants as part of the same operation and when the northern European powers, Denmark, the Netherlands and Britain, joined in the enterprise the same emphasis was there, the same basic ideas were there even though there was more emphasis on trade and less
emphasis on military and political rule but when Vasco da Gama sailed into the harbour of Calicut and opened the great era of European expansion into Asia it was no accident that his ship carried a cross on the main sail and a gun in the bow. It was simply part of the same operation and it is in this way and let us never forget this fact, it is in this way that Asia and Africa have first met
the modern missionary movement and historical memories are very long. I always remember when Helen and I first went to India and I used to go around, we lived in a very famous holy city called Kanchipuram, the ancient capital of the Kullava Empire with a thousand Hindu temples and when I used to bicycle around that very very orthodox little country town as it now is on my bicycle the little boys used to shout after me, Piringi, Piringi,
Piringi and for a very long time I couldn't understand what this word Piringi was until I found that it was the word Frank, it was a corruption of the word Frank. The Franks who were the crusaders have remained the model of it were through which even as far away as South India people remember the European, the man with the white face is a Frank, he's a Piringi, he's one who comes with the crusaders. One is still
part of that movement which was itself a military, political, religious, commercial counter-attack against the overwhelming power of Islam within which Western Christendom had been encapsulated and that incidentally is why the concept of mission has never had any central place in Christian theology because the whole foundations of our Christian theology were laid in that medieval period when Christianity was a millet, when it was a ghetto, when it was an encapsulated area surrounded by a superior power
and when the breakthrough did occur it occurred in this form in the form of a crusading, exploring, adventuring, trading, evangelizing counter-movement to Islam. Now of course the point of all this story is that the Vasco da Gama era has now ended, what in India is always called the Vasco da Gama era, the era that began in 1495 and really ended I suppose with the First World War. Western colonial power is rejected by the rest of
the world and yet the rest of the Western world still retains overwhelming predominance in economic power and in technical expertise so that we have the paradoxical situation in the world today that Asia and Africa have used the peoples of Asia and Africa and to some extent of Latin America have used the tools of Western culture to drive out Western political power. They've not been able to drive out Western economic power but they are using and still
use the tools, the techniques, the political ideas, including Marxism which is a Western political idea, to drive out the political power of the West so that in this sense Western civilization in its technical aspects has become the world civilization even though Western political power is rejected by the rest of the world. And in this situation now we have the church in its mission and I suppose the key points that one would want to make and just
make them very briefly to close and we'll come back to this after coffee. Let me just note some points and develop them after coffee. The first is the radical secularization of Western culture. Christianity has by and large been repudiated in the Western world. The West remains confident about its technology but has lost confidence in its religious roots. And here we come to this whole question of development and how we understand development. Secondly, there is the enormously
significant fact of China, one quarter of the human race, which in the course of a single lifetime has swung from an ancient Eastern faith to a faith which is derived from the Bible because Marxism is a secularized form of the biblical faith. Thirdly, you have India, a fifth of the human race, in which there are churches drawn from the margins of society but the main central core of Indian society remains basically where it was. Fourthly, you
have Africa, the predominantly Christian continent of our present period with the growth of very strong self-confident churches providing most of the political leadership. Fifthly, you have Latin America where a new style of Christianity is being evolved, a new kind of marriage between Christianity and Marxism. Sixthly, you have the Islamic world, almost totally resistant to the Gospel, the least changed of all these areas. And seventhly, you have the world of the U.S.S.R. and its satellite states
where the church still remains a powerful and growing reality in spite of tremendous hostility. So, this is the situation in which we have to conceive of the Christian world mission today. Obviously, it calls upon us to rethink very, very basically what we understand by the Christian world mission and we must do this rethinking on the basis of our fundamental faith and the fundamental criteria of our faith. Well, I think I've probably talked too much. We'll round off a few corners of that after coffee and then we'll have some discussion.