Foundations for Mission

Emma Wild-Wood

• Publisher: Regnum
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781908355126
• eBook ISBN: 9781912343270
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

This volume provides an important resource for those wishing to gain an overview of significant issues in contemporary missiology whilst understanding how they are applied in particular contexts. Contributors from around the globe and from different Christian traditions explore foundations for mission. The chapters examine in what ways experience, the Bible, and theology are foundational for mission and how they together inform the missional thought of different traditions. The book also raises questions about the continued use of foundations as a helpful metaphor mission reflection and impetus.

PART ONE

EXPLORING EXPERIENCE AS A FOUNDATION FOR MISSION

THE RESTLESS RESULT BETWEEN ‘IS’ AND ‘OUGHT’

Janice Price and Anne Richards

Introduction

In this paper, we look at one of the puzzles which came out of the research material for Foundations for Mission, one of the study themes for the Edinburgh 2010 World Mission Conference.¹ That puzzle was a particular confusion about the ideas of ‘mission’ and ‘justice’. In thinking about this confusion and the apparently problematic juxtaposition of these two concepts, we first look at the issues involved as a case study of evidence from the Foundations for Mission research project. We will then go on to look particularly at the role of experience as both generating the complexity surrounding the issues of mission and justice and providing a path through it. This also suggests that we need to interrogate the role of experience more thoroughly. So we look at emerging themes in mission experience, the complex and indeed contentious issues surrounding the use of experience in defining and exploring mission practice. We also suggest ways to develop understandings of experience in mission through reflective practice.

Case Study – Mission and Justice

At the conclusion of our study in Foundations for Mission, we argued that:

We might even go so far as to ask whether the foundations for mission have any meaning outside the lived experience of Christians working in the world alongside others, finding out what God is doing…. This has theological implications, because if we assert that mission is God’s mission, then we would be arguing that God’s mission has no intrinsic human meaning except in so far as it is entrusted to (all?) human beings and thereby becomes apparent and open to theological investigation in mission working itself out within the creation. ²

Effectively this means that in the matter of describing mission activity, people would want to describe contexts which framed what they understood by it. The local interviews conducted as part of the Foundations for Mission research revealed that those interviewed want to tell stories to describe what mission has meant to them, and the process of telling itself informs and contextualises disparate experience into a coherent pattern through which God’s work can be discerned. Yet one of the interesting questions is whether there are competing narratives in the outworking of vocation which interfere with one another and create confusions. This was evident particularly where people wondered whether the study was trying to find out what mission is like or what mission should be like. The tension between ‘is’ and ‘ought’: the struggle with the reality of things as they are in the world and the vision of what God desires for the world, created difficulties for a number of people. In view of this, it can also be argued that this is a problem of competing narratives, and especially the disjuncture between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ which drives the most problematic element which emerged from the research: the difficult relationship between ‘mission’ and ‘justice’.

The confusion about the relationships between the concepts of ‘mission’ and ‘justice’ was perhaps unsurprising given the broad sweep of possible definition for both these terms, yet it was necessary to include them because public language about mission often raises issues of ‘justice’. A number of statements within the survey prompted comment about what exactly ‘justice’ might be and this required the researchers to dig deeper into the concept as used by different parts of the church. What is interesting about such an investigation is that it highlighted the role of experience in making decisions about what both ‘mission’ and ‘justice’ actually are, and how sense is made of any relationship between the two.

For some Christians, ‘justice’ is synonymous with God’s justice. That is: there is an end time scenario in which God, through Christ, will judge the earth and all that is in it prior to a final reckoning of some kind. In this sense, the focus is on the issue of the way the world ‘ought’ to be, and mission activity works to bring the world as ‘is’ into a condition where God can enact its transformation. This perspective fits well with a perspective of mission as proclamation, in which the call to conversion is part of shaping the context for God’s reign to begin. This justice, then, is the end of proclamation and call to repentance, when human mission activity, driven by an ‘eschatological consciousness’ in a ‘five-to midnight’ sense of urgency, has come to the end of its useful course.³ In this sense, mission can be seen as preparatory; the relation between mission and justice is that mission must take place with a focus on proclamation in order that justice might flow forth from divine action. However, in a missiological worldview which prioritises proclamation on the understanding that God’s justice needs to come now, there is the problem (to put it very simply and crudely) of perhaps being seen as ignoring what otherwise could be tried to help a broken and imperfect world. What role then, does experience have in such an eschatological framework, given that these events (as far as we know) are still in God’s future?

Wonsuk Ma explains clearly that it is a question of where energy is put and how far proclamation can itself be not only transformative but forward looking, driving people towards the eschatological event. For example, he talks eloquently about the success of drug programmes and the signs and wonders of miraculous change.⁴ Proclamation then, results in two kinds of experience, – the experience of God’s reality in the power of worship and the experience of the Spirit’s transforming work in the lives of others. Such experience itself is proclamatory. Although very clearly seen in Pentecostal traditions, we should not be surprised also to see mission as proclamation as a default mode of clergy in the local survey, given that, when people look for evidence of God’s work in the world it’s the commitment to changing lives which most readily confirms our vocation – this is what the church is here for. This experience of real effects flowing from ministry is understandably what ministers are going to draw on when asked about abstract concepts such as mission and justice.

However, when this is viewed on a larger scale, it is not clear whether proclamation per se can enact transformations everywhere or whether such issues are culturally constructed or mediated or are only applicable to those that have ears to hear. In other words, preparing the ground for God’s justice to be finally realised, in whatever form that missiological work takes, might be predicated on good and positive experiences where most preaching is done to the converted. What is not clear is whether putting a large amount of energy into mission as proclamation in fact de-sensitises some Christians to the needs of communities who are disenfranchised by mission activity. For example, one woman on a housing estate told a mission team which had planted a church, that she was unable to attend worship because she had no transport, did not feel safe after dark, had no resources and her child had no suitable footwear to make the journey. The mission team had not considered these possible factors in their concerns that the church plant was not attracting members; they had no connections to the lived experience of those unchurched by social circumstance if not by inclination.

This example indicates that for yet other Christians addressing the statement survey in Foundations for Mission, ‘justice’ is synonymous with social justice. That is: it is a mark of mission that human need should be addressed, the wellbeing of our neighbours placed at the top of the mission agenda. Or, that work to transform the world into a picture of God’s desire for humans is itself mission. This perspective fits best with the idea of mission as transformation, a means of introducing people to Christian faith by changing the environment around them, offering empowerment, voice and autonomy. In this case experience is related to a high perception of what is demonstrably unjust in relation to what is known of God’s desire for human beings. Consequently, transformation is required at various levels, including an address to unjust structures. The tricky matter is how far the perception of injustice and the energy needed to address it, can (or should) suppress the sharing of faith as part of the transformative process. People of other faiths and none can (and do) devote themselves to transforming the lives of others for the better. What difference does Christian faith and vocation make in such contexts?

It can be argued perhaps that social justice as part of Christian mission matters because social transformation requires a concomitant desire for the spiritual welfare of human beings in order to ensure that they are enabled to grow and to flourish. For example, Michael Taylor tells the story of a development agency which created a well of clean water in a village to save its women the long walk to obtain water. But the women repeatedly vandalised the well because the walk to find water was important to them, giving them space from the men and the chores of the village and a chance to talk, bond and share together. In improving their lives, the women’s voice was ignored: their spiritual needs were not addressed.⁵

Following on from this, it is also necessary to take into account the history of missions where we now know that mission activity, or an action taken in the spirit of Christian social justice has itself caused problems in indigenous populations which have subsequently been unable to flourish. Robert Schreiter has written of a form of colonising people’s heads with the gospel as ‘the narrative of the lie’ where evangelism has simply written over a person’s history with God with what we wanted to hear repeated back to us.⁶ Here, then, are competing levels of experience, in which indigenous spirituality has been suppressed and reshaped but not destroyed, so that it resurfaces and comes back with its own demands for justice. For example, in Australia’s history, many Aboriginal children were adopted into white Christian families as ‘the best thing’ for them. A generation since, it is accepted that such actions have not allowed the Aboriginal community to flourish and, in the opinions of some, have amounted to ‘cultural genocide’.⁷ Similarly, where mission activity accompanied colonization, the imposition of western perspectives within a Christian cultural hegemony has sometimes obscured the difficult experiences of the receiving people. In such cases, the relationship between mission and justice is now fraught because the gap between what mission ‘is’ and what mission ‘ought’ to be is laid out through people’s narratives and histories: justice now means addressing the results of inappropriate mission and learning to respond to reverse mission as post-colonial Christians feed their experiences and insights back to us.

Regarding mission as an outflow of the missio Dei changes the matter of what ‘justice’ looks like yet again. If mission is God’s mission, then justice can be simultaneously a matter of God’s justice within an unrepentant world and God’s desire to see the poor and the oppressed lifted up. So here, the question becomes ‘what is God doing?’ and ‘where and how should we be joining in?’ In this context one generally accepted criticism of the missio Dei – that we can do anything we like in mission and blame God – can also be extended to the notion of justice. For example, if a company is going to build a big factory and create thousands of jobs, but at the expense of eradicating irreplaceable wildlife, what does God ‘want’: justice for unemployed and suffering families, or justice for creation? Whatever the outcome, God can be praised and blamed in equal measure, rather than facing the difficulties and complexities of moral pressures within mission.

With deeper exploration into the theological questions underlying the relationship between ‘mission’ and ‘justice’ it can be seen that the sources of the confusion and hesitation about dealing with statements pairing the two, even when the justice issue is framed as ‘development’ or ‘social justice’, are both varied and problematic. There are tensions and even anxieties associated with thinking about mission and justice which have to do with the way religious experience is entered and interpreted. One aspect often not considered, however, is the possibility that the way people commit to a narrative of faith might itself become a form of blinker or even inhibitory to God’s work.

Raymond Fung, for example, calls attention to what he calls the Isaiah Vision, an agenda for what God wants to see realised in the world. Thus Isaiah 65:20-23 represents God’s own directive to his faithful people: in which children do not die; old people live in dignity; people who build houses live in them; and those who plant vineyards eat the fruit. This vision, says Fung, calls us to action and the action is a fundamentally missiological enterprise working for a community in which the weakest are protected and cared for; work matters and the establishment of home and community provides the context for human flourishing and fulfilment. The experience of health, wellbeing, honest labour and fulfilment themselves become testimony that a faithful people is fulfilling its calling, undergirded by an assumption that faithfulness and obedience are what enable these experiences of human flourishing in the first place.⁸

Yet when Jesus himself begins his ministry with a declaration of another Isaiah agenda, he goes further by indicating that faith itself can be problematic in seeing this agenda fulfilled. Luke 4:18-19 tells us that he read the portion in the synagogue which reads ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring the good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of the sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour’ and then, astonishingly, announces that this scripture has been fulfilled. But also interestingly, Jesus notes that Scripture also says that it is not among the faithful that this work is done, which drives his hearers into a rage against him. The fact of being the faithful somehow gets in the way. This prophetic word of Jesus nearly got him killed and is still working itself...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: Exploring Experience as a Foundation for Mission
• Part Two: Exploring the Bible as a Foundation for Mission
• Part Three: Exploring Theology as a Foundation for Mission
• Part Four: The Bible, Theology and Experience Together
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Back Cover