A Public Missiology

How Local Churches Witness to a Complex World

Gregg Okesson

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780801098079
• eBook ISBN: 9781493422388
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Christianity Today 2021 Book Award Winner (Missions/Global Church)

Outreach 2021 Resource of the Year (Cross-Cultural and Missional)

2020 ASM (American Society of Missiology) Book of the Year Award

One of Ten Outstanding Books in Mission Studies, Intercultural Theology, and World Christianity for 2020

How can Christians witness to the complexity of our world? Gregg Okesson shows that local congregations are the primary means of public witness in and for the world. As Christians move back and forth between their churches and their neighborhoods, workplaces, and other public spaces, they weave a thick gospel witness. This introduction to public missiology explains how local congregations can thicken their witness in the public realms where they live, work, and play. Real-life examples from around the world help readers envision approaches to public witness and social change.

Part 1: Public Witness

1
Why Congregational Witness?

The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either.

—C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity1

Why witness to the public realm? And why do so through local congregations? Those are two of the questions I will be asking in this opening chapter. My intention is to draw the reader into a complex dilemma involving the public realm and make the case for why we need to witness to it—within and through local congregations.

As I shared in the introduction, “public” has become all the rage these days. And so it should be. In the public realm, we work, shop, eat, and play. It’s where we laugh, cry, and relate. We participate in the public realm with our bodies and experience it with our affections. However, the public realm is not just empirical, something we can point to and say, “That’s the public realm!”—such as with a coffee shop down the street—but it operates at another level of existence. Charles Taylor refers to a “social imaginary,” which he defines as “the ways in which [ordinary people] imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations which are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectation.”2 Hence, although we experience the public realm as a proximate place (such as where people physically gather), it is also notional (how people imagine public life).

Bringing together physical and imaginative dimensions is critical for what I am arguing in this chapter. We have developed good resources for confronting the more empirical aspects of public life, such as development for addressing physical dimensions of poverty or advocacy for confronting political issues. But we do not really know what to do with the imaginative (invisible) dimensions of public life, and we possess almost nothing for making sense of thick publics, especially those formed through interpenetration and overlap.

And yet the public realm exerts great influence on humans. It’s the stuff of nation-states, Wall Street, Hollywood, and the United Nations, while no less the site of parks, coffee shops, malls, and restaurants. The public realm spans far and near. And if a proximate public, such as a city park, shapes human existence, then social imaginaries, such as notions of progress or freedom, do so with greater power. We interact with the public realm every time we turn on the television or scroll through the internet. It’s the stuff of daily existence and where we are human together with others.

I will explain in chapter 2 what the public realm is and how it operates. But at this point let me underscore its complexity or thickness. We like to think of the public realm in simple ways, such as the coffee shop down the street or prominent domains such as politics. We then correlate particular domains of public life with key locations, such as politics with Washington, DC, economics with Wall Street, and media with Hollywood. At one level, these correlations are accurate. A coffee shop resides in the public realm, and Washington, DC, is certainly associated with politics. However, publics do not stand still.3 The public realm is composed of many elements that interpenetrate one another in a wild dance. Wall Street is heavily influenced by decisions occurring in Washington, DC, as well as conflicts taking place across the globe in the Arabian Peninsula. Meanwhile, Hollywood has great economic power and shapes people’s social imaginaries. Hence, the public realm may seem like a simple thing, but it owes its existence to different kinds of movement. People experience the public realm thickly.

We enjoy some of this thickness, such as visiting downtown London on a warm summer day and hearing the sounds of laughter, walking through shops, and riding the Underground. Other elements of thickness feel different. When sin worms its way into the public realm, it does not sit comfortably in any one domain. For example, a transnational company seeks to increase its profit share by outsourcing manufacturing costs to a business located in East Africa. That business is able to win the contract because the owner is the son of a leading politician, and the business gains its own profits by hiring day laborers at a salary of one dollar a day and by securing rights to access the city’s water supply. Day laborers cannot afford to commute and therefore set up a squatter camp next to the factory. They end up cutting down all the trees in the vicinity to cook their meals. Meanwhile, the nearby city experiences a dire water shortage due to decreased supply, raising the cost of living for all its residents. In this example, economics interrelates with politics and affects the environment, which subsequently influences economics across the entire city. The sin of greed brings forth more greed, resulting in increased poverty and environmental decay across the entire region. Hence, if publics arise through movement, sin spreads through movement, resulting in what John Wesley calls “complicated wickedness.”

In this chapter I will explain why we need a public missiology. To do so, I will problematize. I want to show why we struggle to engage the public realm theologically and missiologically, especially as sin enters into the thickness of the public realm.

But first, let’s begin with a story.

A Story of Publics

Growing up, I never spent time thinking about the public realm. I probably viewed it as a natural (albeit sinful) part of “the world.” The public realm certainly was not anything my local congregation saw any value in considering, except to repeatedly warn people of its potential hazards.

And yet I was daily immersed in the public realm. I attended public schools, rode my bike around the neighborhood, shopped in malls, watched television, played sports in local parks, ate in restaurants, voted in elections (when I was old enough), and studied psychology and theology at a Christian liberal arts college. After graduating from college, I devoted more than a decade to working with American youth culture but still did not give much thought to the public realm. I dabbled in the study of culture (such as reading Rolling Stone magazine and watching MTV to better understand current trends in youth culture) but devoted most of my time to doing evangelism and discipleship with individuals, without connecting these activities with the public contexts in which the youth lived. I did not consider the public realm or think about how to witness to it with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I first gave any consideration to the public realm when my family moved to a rural village in Tanzania. This may sound surprising to some. Yet the public realm is as much the stuff of rural African life as it is of urban American culture. In fact, that’s where I first became aware of the public realm and especially the density of publics.

Before moving there, I nurtured romantic visions of life in Africa. I envisioned sitting with neighbors around a fire and telling stories as elongated shadows danced across the African landscape; or I saw myself farming a small plot of land into abundance, while acacia and baobab trees rose majestically across the sprawling plains. Looking back, these visions were not just romantic; they were simple. I can’t put a finger on the reasons for desiring simplicity. Perhaps I felt disillusioned with Western forms of complexity, or maybe I wanted to return to my family heritage (as a third-generation African missionary). I’m really not sure. I only know that any visions of simplicity were quickly vanquished by real life in the village.

The village of Selare abuts the Maasai Steppe in north-central Tanzania.4 The people living there are Warangi: Bantu by ethnolinguistic decent and socioreligiously Muslim. Our village had approximately fifteen hundred people. The landscape was arid and hard. People worked tirelessly from sunup to sundown and, because of the scarcity of food, had little nourishment to feed their meager frames. The women started every day by making a fire and sweeping the dirt outside their homes; the men set off to the fields, driving hoes relentlessly into the hard, red earth. Young boys led cows and goats in an endless search for anything green, while girls assisted with household chores, such as collecting water and wood or cooking food.

I knew life would be hard. It was rather the complexity of public life that surprised me. We lived eight hours from the nearest city of Arusha. There was no electricity or phone service anywhere within a three hours’ drive. We had no internet or banks and only one small shop in the center of the village, where we purchased basic items such as matches, kerosene, and maize. All the things we normally associate with public life in the West were conspicuously absent. But public life in the little village of Selare was anything but simple.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: Public Witness
• Part 2: Congregations and Public Witness
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index
• Cover