Transcript
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: I must again ask your forgiveness for the fact that my inexperience as a lecturer has meant that I have not been able to fit the material tidily into the four periods allotted and that today, in view of the fact that we only have about 30 or 35 minutes, I will have to cut very, very drastically and therefore lose, in a sense, the structure of what I wanted to say. I hope you will pardon the rather shorthand
style in which I will have to speak this morning. Yesterday we were taking the second of the three main divisions into which I tried to divide what we have said about the theology of mission. The first, you remember, was God's saving and revealing acts. The second was the world. And about the world, I tried to say four things. First, that God loves the world. Second, that out of that love of God for the world springs the world mission.
And third, that that mission leads to the ultimate issues of mercy and judgment and that I believe we are to interpret the actual course of world history as we see it in those terms. And then I was about to close yesterday with my fourth point under the general heading of the world, which was this: that as our studies have reminded us that the understanding of history as the working out of the mercy
and judgment of God leads to the world mission of the church. So we should understand the church's essential character as being not of the world but in the world. "All authority has been given unto Me. Therefore, go into all the world." And in the prayer of our Lord that we heard today, "They are not of the world even as I am not of the world. As Thou
sendest Me into the world, so I have sent them into the world." The church is called out of the world in order to be sent into the world. The whole nature of the Christian mission, and indeed the whole character of Christian holiness, is in this prayer of our Lord. There is an inexhaustible depth in that paradox. And perhaps as human beings we can only penetrate it by seeing one side and then the other side and then again this side. We know
in experience that there is a kind of holiness which is mere separateness which may evoke admiration but which does not bring redemption. It is salt, but it is salt in the packet and not in the meat. Our Lord was not, in that sense, a religious man. He was criticized precisely on that ground, for the contrast between Him and John the Baptist. True holiness in the Christian sense
is hidden in the world. But yet also we know on the other hand that there is a kind of Christian who is very much at home in the world but who cannot spend even one hour in solitary prayer to the Father. That is salt that has lost its savor. The whole tang, the whole saltiness of Christian holiness lies precisely in this contrast, called out of the world in order to be in the world.
But that now leads me to my third main heading under this general subject of the theology of mission, namely the church. And here I will have to be even more staccato, if you will forgive me. St. Paul says in the text that we are considering that it is through the church that the manifold wisdom of God is to be revealed to all the powers that be. The church is the means by which Christ's Lordship is to be visibly expressed in the world according to
St. Paul in the epistle to the Ephesians. It is the sphere in which, by the operation of the Spirit, the new humanity in Christ grows to its full stature. In the Bible, in the New Testament, the church is itself the mission. Although we see individuals set apart like Saul and Barnabas from time to time for special tasks, it is the church that sets them apart, and it is the church to which they return. The great numerical
increases as we detect them in the acts of the apostles are anonymous. It is the anonymous people scattered abroad after the persecution that arose over Stephen, who spread the Gospel far beyond the bounds of Judea. The church is the mission. It exists to be the witness of God's redemption, the field in which the powers of the Holy Spirit are at work to bring all things under obedience to Christ. The church is, in New Testament perspective,
the embassy of the kingdom of Christ in every place. The story of how that missionary dimension of the church's existence was largely lost. How it came about that great bodies could be called churches which had no sense of missionary obligation is too long to tell here. At the end of that thousand-year period about which I spoke in the first lecture, you had a conception of
Christendom firmly rooted in the Western world. The idea of a total culture in which it is taken for granted that everyone is a Christian and it is the business of churches to try to make better Christians out of them. And we know that the Reformers, in all their revolutionary thinking, never broke out of that Christendom ideology. They took Christendom for granted, and they proceeded to formulate their doctrines of the church and to bring them into practical application
in terms of rival definitions of the church within Christendom over against one another. And when, in the good providence of God, the missionary movement did arise, it arose as the enthusiasm of deeply consecrated individuals and groups. It did not formulate its thinking and its practice in terms of the church. Without realizing the theological issues that were involved in doing so, they constituted themselves
into separate organizations called missions or missionary societies. And even though later on many of these were brought within the organizational structure of the churches, they had retained their essential character and retain it to this day. And it was therefore natural and characteristic that they did not begin by planting churches. They began, as they were bound to begin out of that Christendom environment, by seeking converts, individual converts, who were grouped
around the missionary. And as the work developed, it was developed in terms of agents paid by the mission rather than a ministry belonging to the church, raised up in the church by the Holy Spirit. The converts regarded themselves primarily as attached to a certain foreign mission. Bill Paton used to tell the story of how he was traveling in a train in India and got talking to a young Indian student. And in the course of the conversation, he said to him,
"Are you an Indian Christian?" He said, "No, sir; I am a Canadian Baptist." And that remains characteristic of the younger churches in many parts of the world even to this day. Of course, The problem was recognized, the problem was tackled in very many places. Even a way back as 100 years ago, that great missionary statesman, Henry Venn of the Church Missionary Society, laid down the policy of that society as being euthanasia. It must die, and the
church must exist. And yet the constantly recurring dichotomy remained. In every case where the mission tried to become a church, you had this situation set up in mission field after mission field where you had two organizations side by side. One very well financed, very well organized, very influential, called a mission; and the other very poor, very struggling,
very weak, called a church. And it took time before people could stand back and look at that situation and say, "What in the name of all that is Catholic and apostolic is this? What is this dichotomy of church and mission?" And then there followed that process, complicated but certainly accelerated by the emotional strains involved in the struggle
of the younger peoples to liberate themselves out of the colonial background and to recover genuine national selfhood. I say complicated but certainly accelerated. We may penitently wonder whether this problem would ever have been solved if it had not been for the drive of the formerly subject peoples towards nationhood and selfhood. It would take too long to go out of my way
to speak of the great illumination brought to this whole issue by a missionary in China who wrote, 40 years ago, a series of revolutionary books in which he contrasted the missionary methods of St. Paul with those of our own day, Roland Allen, and suggested that in this fundamental respect, namely that it was failing to put the living church in the center of its thinking, the modern missionary movement had departed with disastrous results
from the New Testament pattern. And so, for the last two or three decades, thinking about missions has been dominated by the idea of the church. The word "church-centric" has appeared over and over again in both theological and practical documents. But of course, it is no use pushing the thought of the church into the center of missionary thinking if it merely means the
re-enthronement of a static conception of the church. This meeting of church and mission, which has taken place through the experience of the younger churches, calls not merely for the kind of revolution in missionary thinking which has taken place and is taking place, but it also calls for an equally profound revolution in church thinking which has not yet taken place. And that is, in a sense, the crux of our situation today.
Is it not an astonishing fact that in our normal theological curriculum, at least in most of the theological colleges that I know, mission has no central place in the structure of dogmatic theology? Is it not extraordinary that until we had the great work of Kenneth Scott Latourette, we had no major church history which was missionary church history, which surveyed the history of the church in terms of the
expansion of the church and not simply in terms of the internal disputes and theological developments of the church's life? Is it not extraordinary that in normal practice, if you call a well-to-do suburban congregation a mission, they would regard it as an insult because a mission is an affair down in the poor part of the town where you go and visit out of the kindness of your heart? Is it not astonishing, in other words, that it is still the case, in spite of two and a half
centuries of ecumenical mission, that the fundamental structure and thinking of the church remains fundamentally non-missionary. And let me say in parenthesis that the biggest issue that is going to be discussed at these meetings in a few days' time at New Haven is precisely along this line. The proposal for the integration of the World Council of Churches with the International Missionary Council raises essentially this issue: Are the churches connected with
the World Council of Churches ready for as radical a rethinking of their fundamental nature as has been required in the last two or three decades on the part of missions to discover that the church is absolutely at the center of the mission? There can be no doubt about it when we read the New Testament. The apostolate of the church is the means by which the mercy and judgment of God revealed in the cross ought to be made known to
all men and thereby history brought to its final consummation. But let me add this: It is also true and important that the church in the New Testament is more even than this. The church is not merely an agency to serve something else or an instrument to bring something else into being. It is also itself the place where salvation, the ultimate eschatological salvation, is enjoyed in a foretaste
where the Holy Spirit is actually present, where life in the body of Christ is enjoyed. It is as important to recognize that the church's enjoyment of these things in [via?] is real and solid as it is to insist that they can only be enjoyed in their fullness in patria. The New Testament, which requires us to think of the church in missionary terms forbids us to think of it in merely functional terms as a
means towards an ulterior goal. Those who know that true churchmanship is a veritable participation in the life of God himself, that mutual indwelling of the believing fellowship in the Father and the Son, which is described in the 17th of St. John, cannot think that the church is a mere means to serve some other end. No end can be higher than this that we should abide in Christ and He in us.
But they know also that this abiding in via is still only a foretaste and therefore constrained by Jesus' love. They long ardently for the completion in all men of that which has been begun in themselves. Having entered this caution against the danger of thinking of the church in merely functional terms, let me return to my central point, which is this: that these two concepts, church and
mission, are inextricably bound one to another. That any attempt to think of one in isolation from the other must necessarily mutilate our thinking about both. On the one hand, the church exists in the apostolate. "As the Father hath sent me, so send I you. Receive the Holy Ghost." The church exists in the act of being sent. The sending, the mission, the apostolate creates the church.
On the other hand, the mission, the apostolate has no being apart from the church. It would do violence to the whole biblical record in which the calling and election of a people is the central strand if we were to try to conceive of the missionary task apart from the church that visible, tangible, and let us also add sinful body of men and women called by God, by His Word,
knit together in a sacramental fellowship, vivified by the Spirit, living, witnessing, worshiping, and serving from Christ's coming until His coming again. That visible fellowship is the organ of mission. And now let me come to my final section, which I have called, very pedestrianly, practical implications. I do not apologize for that
pedestrian title because I believe that no preaching is valid unless it leads to some kind of action, bearing in mind the whole picture that I have tried to paint. On the one hand, the contemporary political and cultural situation which I have suggested is to be interpreted in terms of the faith that more and more people are being drawn into that one global history whose center is the
cross and whose end is the final mercy of judgment and judgment of God. And on the other hand, the attempt to interpret the theology of mission in relation both to God's saving deeds and to the world and the church with the center of our attention in a real movement of the Holy Spirit in world history, creating a visible fellowship which is in the world but not of the world. Having that picture in mind,
let me try very tentatively, and with the consciousness that these thoughts must be subjected to rigorous criticism by those who bear the responsibilities for the ongoing mission of the church, I submit the following for your consideration. Five points. One, I have personally come to feel that the hour in which we now are calls for a really ecumenical organization of the world mission. By this I mean
that the integrated World Council of Churches and International Missionary Council, if that is given to us, must, as soon as possible, develop the means by which the present direct parental relationships between mission boards and younger churches are replaced by a network of brotherly relations among equals in which each, as far as possible, gives according to its power and
receives according to its need. It seems to me that the experience in a limited sphere of interchurch aid through the World Council of Churches encourages one to believe that it can be done and done in such a way that brotherhood is not replaced by bureaucracy. In such a way that each, even the weakest, can feel and accept a responsibility to make its own unique and irreplaceable contribution to the
common past. I realize the formidable difficulties and the strong sentiments that will have to be encountered in such a program. I know how hard it is for parent churches, just as for ordinary human parents, to see their offspring pass finally and irreversibly out of the leading strings. But I do not believe that believe that it will be possible for the younger churches really, deeply, spiritually to get
right out of their present colonial situation. To put behind them their present debilitating dependence upon their parent churches and to discover their own true selfhood before God except by some such drastic change. I believe that we now know enough about the techniques of large-scale organization to make possible such a change without destroying
genuine freedom and spontaneity. As I look at China, I see a church which, at frightful cost, has been given the gift of selfhood before God. As I look at India, I see a church in a nation which has emphatically emerged from colonialism, a church which I cannot say has spiritually yet put colonialism behind it.
And as I look at Africa from a distance and as one who knows it not at all at first hand, I ask myself with fear and trembling whether the church will be awake in time to all that is implied in the rising tide of African nationalism. Secondly, I have come to feel -- and I'm putting these in this very tentatively way because that is how I feel about it -- I have come to feel,
in line with what I have here been saying about the world in missionary thinking, that we must take far more seriously our share in what may be called the non-religious, non-ecclesiastical aspects of the history of the times in which we live. I suggested in the first lecture that the terms of the great problems with which the young nations are wrestling -- population, technical development, fundamental rights, the welfare state, and so on -- are
ultimately set by the Gospel. I therefore suggest that the time calls for a much more devoted effort than has yet been made by Christian people to give themselves in partnership with non-Christian colleagues in government and other services to the task of helping the younger nations to wrestle with these problems and, in so doing, to uncover and interpret to them the real issues which are
involved. Here is a vast field of work which is not, in the technical sense, religious but which is central to the total world mission of the church if I have rightly understood it. Moreover, it is a kind of service which will be ardently desired for many years to come by the governments and peoples of the younger churches. I know that there is an insistent demand for the very finest type of men and women for service in the United Nations technical
aid programs, UNESCO, the Colombo Pact and so forth. And many of those in responsible positions in that work make no secret of the fact that they want committed Christians because none others can do what needs to be done. Of course, such Christians must know what they are doing. It would be very easy for this kind of thing to be in the world and of it, to be salt without savor. What is needed is Christians
who understand their faith and who can interpret the secular history of our in the light of it. But that just brings us back to the central concern of all these lectures, which is that the church as a whole and not just what is called foreign missions should be thinking of their faith steadily in terms of God's purpose for the world as a whole. There are immense possibilities opening up just at this time
in the World Council's program of study on the Christian responsibility for areas of rapid social change. And I believe that if those studies are followed up by the church as a whole, they could lead to the kind of action that I have here in mind. More on the local level, is it not necessary to take more seriously the significance of non-religious activity in the total purpose of God for the world? I mean on the level of national
and governmental action. I have already hinted at this in my first lecture. How vastly important it is for the whole fulfilling or hindering of God's purpose for the world that, for instance, our policies, the policies of our governments on armaments, on race, on tariffs should be constantly under Christian scrutiny? Have our ordinary church members yet seen
these issues in the context of their missionary thinking? It will not be much good if British missionaries preach peace if the British government's policy on nuclear weapons makes war more certain?. It will not be much use if the United States government and people give vast economic aid to weaker nations if at the same time, by its tariff policy, it is strangling the economic life of those weaker nations. It will not be much good if
any of us preach the coming of a kingdom of universal brotherhood if we are blind to the problems of racial discrimination in our midst. These are easy things to say, I know, but they are true. And the point is that we should be learning to see these non-ecclesiastical matters in the same frame of reference as we see what are called foreign missions and to recognize that the fulfilling of God's purpose for the world involves the whole of life
and not just what we call the religious part of it. We are concerned because God is concerned with the world. And thirdly, closely related but with reference more especially to the local church and its witness, I am convinced that the fulfillment of the church's mission in the world requires a far more widespread rediscovery of the meaning of lay action in the world. The Christian
is called out in order to be sent in. We have constantly forgotten the second half. We have thought that we had done our duty when we had got men and women into the church, got them to participate in worship and to take part in all our multitudinous activities. We have forgotten over and over again that the church exists not for the sake of existing but for the sake of getting God's will done in the world. That many times we should perhaps
have said to our members, "No, don't come to the choir practice. Go to your trade union and help to make it strong and straight and clean. Don't come to that church supper; go to your chamber of commerce or your employer's federation or your bar association and help those fellows to see something beyond the ends of their own nose, beyond their own profit and loss accounts. Too often we have thought that the church existed on Sunday and is in a state of suspended animation from Monday to
Saturday and, unlike most animals, hibernates in summer. The truth is that the church exists from Monday to Saturday in a million offices and factories and farms where Christ's people are either doing or not doing His will in the world and that out of that existence, it draws itself together once a week to be renewed and refreshed and re-consecrated in the Word and sacraments of the
Gospel. This recovery of the real meaning of lay action in the world will, I am persuaded -- and I say this because most of us here are ministers -- will proceed only step by step with a parallel rediscovery of the essential nature of the ministry of those special tasks which are not the task of the whole church but the tasks for which we, by ordination, have been set apart. I say those two
things will proceed only as they proceed step by step together. Fourthly, the missionary advance of the church among non-Christian peoples must recover more and more of the character of spontaneous advance which we see in the New Testament and which can be seen in our own days where the lessons of the New Testament are consistently applied. The great [Billingham?] conference voiced an appeal
for mobility. It expressed the view that the Christian forces were, so to say, tied down in the task of maintaining their existing commitments, and I believe that that was a valid cry. But, unfortunately, the discussion which followed has centered almost entirely on the question, "What about our institutions, and what shall we do with them?" rather than on the central question, which is the manner of our evangelism. In its boldest form, because time is
so short, let me state it this way: St. Paul, after 10 years of missionary work in one area, writes to say that his work is finished. He has not set up an organization dependent for its funds and its personnel and its direction upon a board in Antioch. He has established the church, and therefore he passes on to other areas. And from that time onwards, he writes to the churches in Asia Minor and Greece. Not as
branch organizations of which he is the head but as fully adult churches equipped with a ministry, furnished by the Holy Spirit, with all the gifts needed to complete the task of evangelism and service in their region. And therefore, with a sublime confidence that the missionary task is done, he passes on to another region. It is left in their hands with an absolute faith in the competence of the Holy Spirit to carry it on.
The modern missionary movement takes not less than a century on the average to reach the point where the church can, in that sense, be left. And indeed, after two and a half centuries, there are not many areas where the young church stands, in that sense, completely on its own feet. The study of the difference, the difference between St. Paul's missionary methods and ours, will
lead us down to fundamental questions concerning the nature of the church and of the Gospel. Questions concerning our faith in the power of the Holy Spirit, really to furnish his people with all they need for the fullness of life in Christ even though it may not be exactly on the model that we would set up nor conducted exactly along the lines that we would think proper. Competence --
confidence in the power of the Holy Spirit to furnish His peoples with all they need for the fullness of their life in Christ and faith concerning our real expectation about the completion of the missionary task in bringing the whole human race into effective contact with the Gospel. I am sure that all who are concerned with the missionary enterprise are called upon to face that question. And I can only say that from my small experience in
India, I can say that I know that when these methods are applied, when St. Paul's fundamental insights are applied to the growth of a new church, then the church does expand from village to village. Not by the organized, paid evangelistic efforts of an expensive machine but simply because the new Christians, as they meet in the bazaar, in the street, at marriages and funerals and weddings and so forth, tell each other the good news.
Fifthly and finally, everything that has been said from start to finish about the mission, about the world, and about the church rests upon one assumption: that the church is one. But the fact is that the church is not. That single simple fact, more than any other, mocks our efforts to convince the
world that we have the clue to its destiny. The church's disunity is a standing, and indeed a mocking, denial of the church's own nature and witness. It is a denial of the truth of the heart of what we preach. It is a public denial of the sufficiency of Christ's atonement. At no point is the contrast between what we say and what we do more
clement than this. We are set as Christ's ambassadors that all men may hear through us the voice of the one Good Shepherd: "Come unto Me, and I will give you rest." The appeal of Him who said, "I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Myself." But the world hears a multitude of discordant and contradictory voices, each
calling men to identify themselves with one or other of a medley of conflicting groups. I have again and again, perhaps too often in these lectures, used the words "real," "visible," "concrete," "a real series of redeeming acts in history," "a real movement," "a real end." Let me close by saying that nothing will match God's call to us in this
hour of the world's history. Nothing save a real, visible fellowship of men and women recognizably made one in Jesus Christ. Recognizably transcending all the human divisions of race and culture and temperament. A fellowship of which men will be constrained to say, "This is home." Here, in the midst of our pilgrimage,
we have learned to understand the meaning of our pilgrimage and to taste the joy of journey's end.