Mission after Christendom

Emergent Themes in Contemporary Mission

Ogbu U. Kalu, Peter Vethanayagamony, Edmund Kee-Fook Chia, Ogbu U. Kalu, Peter Vethanayagamony, Edmund Kee-Fook Chia

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780664234652
• eBook ISBN: 9781611640649
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

In 1910 Protestant missionaries from around the world gathered to explore the role of Christian missions in the twentieth century. In this collection, leading missiologists use the one hundred year anniversary of the Edinburgh conference as an occasion to reflect on the practice of Christian mission in today's context: a context marked by globalization, migration, ecological crisis, and religiously motivated violence. The contributors explore the meaning of Christian mission, the contemporary context for mission work, and new forms in which the church has engaged-and should engage-in its missionary task. From these essays, a vision of twenty-first-century mission begins to emerge-one that is aware of issues of race, gender, border spaces, migration, and ecology. This renewed vision gives strength to the future of shared Christian ministry across nations and traditions.

1

From Edinburgh to Edinburgh

Toward a Missiology for a World Church

STEPHEN BEVANS

INTRODUCTION

I would like to draw the outlines of a theology of mission—or a missiology—that is both relevant and challenging for the Christian church in today’s world, as we head into the twenty-first century and consciously experience ourselves for the first time in history as a world church. How I’d like to do this is to take the 1910 Edinburgh World Missionary Conference as an icon of missiological understanding at a time that proved to be the high point of the Age of Progress and the Age of Colonialism. In contrast to this icon, I want to indicate how different today’s church and world is, and how very different our understanding of the church’s missionary task must be.

This essay was originally delivered as the 2008 Scherer Lecture at Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago on February 19, 2008. This endowed lecture was funded by the Scherer family in honor of their parents, Eleanor and Arnold Scherer. The author is honored to be part of a legacy of missiological reflection that includes Kosuke Koyama, his colleague Tony Gittins, Andrew Walls, and the late Paul Hiebert. He also wishes to record his gratefulness to Dr. Brian Stanley of the Henry Martyn Institute in Cambridge, England, perhaps the foremost scholar today of the 1910 Edinburgh Conference, for making available to him several unpublished lectures that he delivered in 2006 at Princeton Theological Seminary. Brian Stanley later published these lectures as The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910 (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2009). The author is particularly indebted to Dr. Stanley’s work in this book as well. He is particularly honored and grateful, however, to be the 2008 Scherer Lecturer, since it gives him an opportunity to pay homage in some way to Professor Jim Scherer, who has been his colleague, collaborator, and most important, his friend for almost the whole twenty-two years he has been on the faculty of Catholic Theological Union. To Jim and his wife, Frances, this essay is humbly dedicated.

I do this not to deny the importance or historical significance of the great Christian assembly that Edinburgh was, but only to highlight the missiology that we must develop today in a world of quite new sensibilities and circumstances. I am rather sure that not much of what I say will be startling or new, but I hope it will bring together a number of things that we, as faculty members of the Chicago Center for Global Ministries, have been reflecting on, discussing, and maybe even arguing over for the last several years.

FROM EDINBURGH TO EDINBURGH:
MISSIOLOGY’S NEW OPPORTUNITY

The Boston Missionary Herald may have exaggerated when it spoke of the 1910 World Missionary Conference as “the most important ecclesiastical assembly since Nicaea,”¹ and the conference’s charismatic chair, John R. Mott, perhaps indulged in a bit of rhetorical flourish when he wrote that “never has there been such a gathering in the history of the Kingdom of God on earth.”² Nevertheless, even though there had been large missionary conferences going back as far as 1854,³ James Scherer tells us that the 1910 meeting in Edinburgh “was unprecedented in terms of scope, preparation, and consequences.”⁴ Even though the 1910 Edinburgh Conference was no Nicaea, or Trent or Diet of Augsburg, I do think we can rightly claim that it was one of the most important gatherings of Christians in history—certainly in modern history.

From June 14 to 23, 1910, for 10 days, 1,215 delegates—overwhelmingly white and male but working as missionaries in virtually all parts of the world—listened to some 300 hundred speeches of 7 minutes each during the day and 24 speeches in the evening that lasted up to 40 minutes.⁵ The wide-ranging topics were based on 9 voluminous reports that had been meticulously prepared before the conference began. They included volumes of several hundred pages each on carrying the gospel to the non-Christian world, the local church in situations of mission, education, non-Christian religions, missionary training, church-state relations, and Christian unity. Every delegate had received a set of these volumes.⁶

Many of the major figures of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Christianity were present as delegates: Temple Gairdner, John R. Mott, A. G. Hogg, Pandita Ramabai, V. S. Azariah, Charles Gore, and Charles Henry Brent. The president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, was registered as a delegate, although “to his own deep regret,”⁷ says Temple Gairdner, he was unable to be present. The famous politician and future Scopes Trial lawyer, William Jennings Bryan, was present as a delegate and addressed the conference as well. Due to illness, the great pioneer of mission studies, Gustav Warnek, was not able to attend the conference (he died later that year) but wrote a message that was read in the assembly. Significant as well was the fact that many young men who served as stewards and ushers at the conference would become major church leaders in years to come. Among these were the future theologian John Baillie, the biblical scholars Otto Dibelius and T. W. Manson, and the future archbishop of Canterbury and ecumenical leader William Temple.⁸

The mood was electric. As the editor of the Christian Century, Charles Clayton Morrison, wrote in the July 7, 1910, issue of the magazine: “Everyone feels the presence in the conference of a power not ourselves, deeper than our own devices, which is making for a triumphant advance of Christianity abroad. And not less are the delegates thrilled by the sense that the conference foreshadows a new era for the church at home.”⁹ It was a time, says Andrew Walls, “of dreams and visions.” All were convinced that, indeed, the world could be evangelized in this generation, as Mott had famously proclaimed.¹⁰ And while Brian Stanley warns of oversimplification, Walls notes that “not for nothing are the origins of the modern ecumenical movement conventionally dated from this meeting.”¹¹ Out of the strengths and weaknesses of the 1910 Conference arose the International Missionary Council and the two groups of Faith and Order and Life and Work; out of the latter two groups emerged the World Council of Churches, inaugurated in Amsterdam in 1948, which by 1961 included the IMC.¹²

Edinburgh 1910 is an event worth remembering, and this is what a number of events planned for 2010 and into 2011 aim to do. James Scherer points out that the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization, the Boston Theological Institute, and the Pentecostal Partners in Mission all have plans to mark the centenary; there will be “a common celebration jointly sponsored by many groups,” to take place in Edinburgh on June 12–15, 2010. In addition, the WCC’s Conference on World Mission and Evangelism has proposed a commemoration late in 2011.¹³ And on a much smaller scale, CCGM’s annual World Mission Institute for 2008 took the Edinburgh World Mission Conference 1910 for its theme, as this volume attests.

So 1910 produced an amazing event, one clearly worth commemorating. A century’s distance, however, can not only point out a lot of the rather naive and even arrogant presuppositions of the time, presuppositions that have given the missionary movement such a bad name in our time. It can also show us, by contrast, how we might think about and engage in mission today. There are a number of important contrasts between Edinburgh and “Edinburgh,” if you will, and these can help us glimpse a missiology more suited to today’s world church.

FROM EUROCENTRIC TO WORLD CHURCH:
MISSIOLOGY’S NEW CONTEXT

Of the 1,215 delegates to the conference, the overwhelming majority were men from Britain and the United States. Although accounts of numbers vary, Brian Stanley writes that 509 of the delegates were British, and 491 were North American. In addition, there were 169 delegates who originated from the European continent, and 27 came from white South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.¹⁴ There were only 19 representatives from what the conference (mistakenly!) called the “younger churches,” and all of them were from Asia—4 from India, 4 Japanese, 3 from China, and 1 each from Korea, Burma, and Turkey. There was only 1 “indigenous black African Christian” in attendance: Mark C. Hayford from Ghana. Hayford’s name, however, does not appear in the lists of the official delegates, with the result that scholars had concluded that there was no indigenous African in attendance.¹⁵ The 5 (possibly 7) male and 1 female African American delegates were often mistaken by participants and the press as Africans.¹⁶ But, with the only exception of Hayford, “the voice of African Christianity was not heard at Edinburgh.”¹⁷ There was no representation from the Pacific Islands or from the Caribbean.¹⁸

Latin American representation was ambiguous. One of the conditions for Anglican participation in the conference was that it should exclude places where Catholics, Orthodox, or even other Protestants were the targets of missionary activity. “Such endeavors could be included only when, as in parts of Latin America, they were directed toward statistically identifiable groups of aborigines or recent immigrants—islands of heathenism with the boundaries of Christendom.”¹⁹ Nevertheless there were no Orthodox or Roman Catholic representatives present, although American delegate Silas McBee read a lengthy letter of greeting from Bishop Geremia Bonomelli, bishop of Cremona, Italy, addressing the issue of Christian unity. What is intriguing for history is that Bonomelli had befriended a young priest by the name of Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, who convoked the Second Vatican Council almost a half century later, a council whose chief aim was the promotion of Christian unity. Who knows the influence that this pioneer of Catholic ecumenism had on his friend, the future pope?²⁰ Noting the absence of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox delegates, Temple Gairdner reflects prophetically: “Who, on this ridge of memories and of hopes, can say what the future may bring forth?”²¹ Charles Henry Brent, the Episcopal bishop of the Philippines, wrote that Bonomelli’s letter was “the little cloud not larger than a man’s hand to-day, destined tomorrow to cover the Roman heavens.”²² What was clear from the small numbers of representatives from what we call today the two-thirds world is that the organizers of the conference conceived or imagined the world as relatively sharply divided into two parts. There was a “Christian” world, the duty of which was to be a sending church, and there was a “non-Christian” world, which was to be evangelized, or at best be a “receiving church.” As Andrew Walls puts it with his usual eloquence:

The best analysts and thinkers of 1910 could take for granted that there was a reasonably homogenous fully evangelized world, and a world beyond it that was unevangelized or only partly evangelized. From the fully evangelied world of Europe and North America the Home Church must send forth its choicest to carry the Gospel to the non-Christian world, where the Native Church, a tender young plant, stands as earnest of the future.²³

If there is anything that has changed in mission today, it is this situation of a neatly divided world, of a section of the world that could call itself Christendom, of a basically Eurocentric church. Walls himself, along with Lamin Sanneh and, more popularly, Philip Jenkins, have all pointed to the seismic shift in Christianity in our day from North to South, from Europe, North America, and Australasia to Latin America, Africa, and significant parts of Asia.²⁴ At the turn of the twentieth century, the largest Catholic country in the world was France; now it is Brazil, followed by Mexico, the Philippines, and the United States (due in part to our influx of Latino/a migrants). And while now Christianity is actually shrinking in what Edinburgh 1910 regarded as the Christian world over against that of the heathen, it is in the latter where Christianity is now flourishing. Missionary activity is not only going on “in six continents,”²⁵ as a famous World Council of Churches meeting expressed it in 1963; it is becoming increasingly a two-thirds world movement to the West and the North, and every congregation has as its task that of becoming a “missional church.”²⁶ Representatives of the missionary movement today, therefore, as we move from Edinburgh to Edinburgh, will have to come from the entire world, not just from one part of it, for the whole context of missionary work has changed dramatically and radically. And any missiology for a world church has to be a missiology of a world church.

The meetings mentioned above that will commemorate Edinburgh 1910 will be quite different in content and character from it. While Western theologians, missiologists, and missionaries will certainly be present, the vast majority of delegates will be from the thriving churches of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Among these will be scholars who have contributed to recent works of missiology written out of a two-thirds world perspective: men and women like Jehu Hanciles, Philomena Njeri Mwaura, Chukwudi A. Njoku, Lalsangkima Pachuau, Jacob Kavunkal, Evangeline Anderson-Rajkumar, and Julie C. Ma.²⁷

FROM MODERNITY TO POSTMODERNITY:
MISSIOLOGY’S NEW ATTITUDE

Edinburgh 1910 was held at the height of the missionary movement that had begun, by Protestants, at the beginning of the nineteenth century—the “Great Century,” as Kenneth Scott Latourette called it²⁸—and for Catholics, several years later. It was a heady time, one of optimism and belief in inevitable progress. John R. Mott saw a real confluence of the power of the gospel and the power of modern science, and it was this that convinced him of the possibility of the conversion of the world by the end of what others had called “the Christian Century.” The church, Mott and many others believed, “stood at a kairos moment,”²⁹ and the doors that were open might not stay open indefinitely. Now was the time to seize the opportunity, in bold action for the sake of the gospel.

Who could have guessed in 1910, however, how soon those doors would indeed be closed. Just four years later, as the “guns of August”³⁰ lined up against each other, the hopes of the nineteenth century would come crashing down, and there would begin the long, painful, yet inevitable process of decolonialization and—despite the untold amount of good that missionary work had done—the unmasking of the evil that Christian mission had condoned or brought about itself. Today we still have the wonders of science, which fueled the visions of the nineteenth-century West. Scientific progress has brought amazing things like jet travel and computers and instant communication to almost anywhere in the world. But scientific rationalism and arrogant belief in progress, we know, have also resulted in the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the poisoning of our planet, and the very ambiguous phenomenon of globalization.

Edinburgh 1910 was held at the height of Western modernity, but it was an age that was soon to collapse in on itself. A century later we find ourselves still in the aftermath of that collapse and can only speak of ourselves in terms of postmodernity. A century ago the answers to life’s questions seemed clear and inevitable; today there are more questions than answers. A century ago there was no doubt of the superiority of Christianity over the other world religions: the modern “master narrative” was in full force. This was evidenced at Chicago’s 1893 World Parliament of Religions and at Edinburgh itself, where the demise of the other world religions was confidently predicted if Christians would take the initiative boldly and quickly. Yet today, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and traditional religions throughout the world have experienced a renaissance, and theology recognizes in the famous words of Max Warren that “God has not left himself without a witness in any nation at any time. … God was here before our arrival.”³¹ The “gr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. From Edinburgh to Edinburgh: Toward a Missiology for a World Church
• 2. Mission from the Ground Up: Emergent Themes in Contemporary Mission
• 3. Globalization and Mission in the Twenty-first Century
• 4. Many Tongues, Many Practices: Pentecost and Theology of Mission at 2010
• 5. Mission from the Rest to the West: The Changing Landscape of World Christianity and Christian Mission
• 6. Expanding the Boundaries, Turning Borders into Spaces: Mission in the Context of Contemporary Migration
• 7. Short-Term Missions as a New Paradigm
• 8. “Do Not Fear: Go”: The Commission of Theological Feminism in the Mission of the Church
• 9. Defining “Racisms”: Understanding Our Globalized, Terrorized, Ecologically Threatened World
• 10. A Beloved Earth Community: Christian Mission in an Ecological Age
• 11. Mission as Dialogue: An Asian Roman Catholic Perspective
• Notes