Mission Today and Tomorrow

Kirsteen Kim

• Publisher: Regnum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781870345910
• eBook ISBN: 9781911372332
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

The centenary of the historic and influential World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh 1910 presented a unique opportunity for the whole church worldwide to come together in celebration, reflection and recommitment to witnessing to Christ today. Edinburgh 2010 also engaged in serious study and reflection on the current state of world mission and the challenges facing all those who seek to witness Christ today. The results of this research was presented and debated within the context of Christian fellowship and worship at the conference in June 2010. This record of that conference is intended to give the background to that Call, to share the spirit of the conference, and to stimulate informed and focused participation in God's mission in Christ for the world's salvation.

PLENARY 1: MISSION IN LONG PERSPECTIVE THURSDAY, 3 JUNE 2010

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Dr Dana L. Robert, Truman Collins Professor of World Christianity and History of Mission, Boston University School of Theology, USA ¹

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb! (Rev. 7:9-10)

Since the early days of the persecuted church, this powerful Revelation vision has anchored Christian hope amid suffering and struggle. It carries prophetic significance for united Christian witness, as it points to the day when the followers of Jesus – called out from every nation, tribe, people, and linguistic group – together praise God. It promises that those washed in the blood of the Lamb will hunger and thirst no more, and ‘God will wipe away every tear from their eyes’. (Rev. 7:16-17)

This Revelation prophecy grounds us in the history of God’s mission. Over two hundred years ago, the first African seminarians in England became followers of Jesus. Against the powers and principalities of the African slave trade, then at the height of its brutality and global reach, they prepared to return to Sierra Leone as witnesses to the Gospel. At their baptismal service in 1805, the Reverend John Venn, a founder of the Church Missionary Society, charged them to herald the day ‘when Africa shall embrace the Truth of Christ’. Venn described the vision of assembled believers from the ends of the earth, united in love with no racial or national divisions among them: ‘Glorious day! Whose heart does not burn with the sacred prospect? Who does not, amid the desolation of war, the tumult and destruction, the feuds and jealousies, which agitate the Earth – who does not cry, How long, O Lord, how long?’²

In 2010, the promises of Revelation 7 take on renewed meaning for united Christian witness. During the lifetimes of the people gathered in this room, Christianity has undergone one of the biggest changes in its two thousand year history. It is now a multi-cultural faith, with believers drawn from every inhabited continent. Today we rejoice in God’s global mission as we gather to celebrate this moment in history! Yet as we look at our interconnected world today, we still cry with the psalmist and John Venn, ‘How long, O Lord, how long?’ For in God’s timing, our work on earth has not finished. ‘Witnessing to Christ today’ means both inviting others to join us in following Jesus, and discerning the ways in which our promised unity challenges those things that enslave God’s people in the twenty-first century.

Participants in the World Missionary Conference a century ago attempted to evangelise the world in their own generation. We who are alive in 2010 must bear witness to our own generation. It is our turn to point to the Revelation vision of believers called from all nations, in praise of the living God, who speaks to us through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Looking backward reminds us that continuity with the Edinburgh conference a century ago does not lie narrowly in the particular accomplishments or structures to which it gave birth. To take the ‘long view’ requires that we acknowledge that both Edinburgh 1910 and Edinburgh 2010 are proleptic moments. In other words, our gatherings derive their shared meaning from the certainty that the past and the future belong to God. The history of world mission is located somewhere along the road from Jesus’ resurrection to the glorious day when believers from all nations will stand before the throne of the Lamb. Because we live within this larger narrative, witnesses to Christ are first and foremost ambassadors of hope: Today we witness to the Good News of what God has done, what God is doing, and what God will do through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ!

In this address, I will explore two turning points in twentieth century mission history, both of which light the pathway of our shared journey toward God’s shalom. These moments show that despite our sins and limitations, the biblical promises beckon as a light in the darkness, and make united witness to Christ both possible and necessary.

World Missionary Conference 1910

A century ago, over twelve hundred delegates from Protestant missionary societies came by ship and train from around the world to Edinburgh. For ten days, Protestant leaders discussed the key issues facing world missions in the twentieth century. For two years prior to the event, conference organisers had corresponded with missionaries and informants around the world to produce eight commission reports. The contemporary importance of the conference was such that the archbishop of Canterbury judged it to be without parallel in the history of Christianity.

The vast majority of delegates were European and North American men. Two hundred were women, an estimated nineteen were Asians, and one African.³ They gathered under the assumption that missions operated in the context of western colonialism. But they departed with a prophetic glimpse of Christianity as a worldwide fellowship! In other words, the conference itself awakened them to the reality that discussions of mission policy could not be separated from the deeper meaning of the church as a worldwide community united before God. The depth of this discovery was expressed by the chairman John R. Mott, in his closing remarks:

Gathered together from different nations and races and communions, have we not come to realise our oneness in Christ? ... It is not His will that the influences set forth by Him shall cease this night. Rather shall they course out through us to the very ends of the earth. ... Our best days are ahead of us because we have a larger Christ, even one who requires, as we have learned increasingly these days, all of us, and all nations, and races, and communions through which adequately to express His excellences, and to communicate His power to our generation.⁴

Mott’s words show that conference delegates recognised that the Christ to whom they witnessed was ‘larger’ than that of western dominance and sectarian divisions. They cemented this bigger vision through united prayer and fellowship. It also broke into their consciousness through the witness of the non-western delegates at the conference, notably that of young V.S. Azariah, co-founder of the first Indian missionary society. Azariah gave a powerful speech calling for equality and friendship between missionaries and Indian Christians. Not only was cross-racial friendship practically necessary, but it was a spiritual imperative for faithful witness. He said, ‘The exceeding riches of the glory of Christ can be fully realised not by the Englishman, the American, and the Continental alone, nor by the Japanese, the Chinese, and the Indians by themselves – but by all working together, worshipping together, and learning together the Perfect Image of our Lord and Christ’.⁵

The youngest delegate to the conference, Cheng Jingyi, pastor of an independent church in Beijing, made a strong impression on the conference when he declared that, in Chinese terms, the universal church was a family: ‘The Church of Christ is universal, not only irrespective of denominations, but also irrespective of nationalities – “All one in Christ Jesus”’.⁶ Cheng urged that as a full member of a universal family, Chinese Christianity should be united and become independent of foreign denominations. He appealed to the conference to take concrete action toward uniting the church in China: ‘Let us go, with our Divine Master, up on the top of the Mount of Olives, and there we will obtain a wider, broader, and larger view of the needs of the Church and the world’.⁷

The courage behind Azariah, Cheng, and Mott’s statements lay in their eschatological hope. Obviously in human terms they could not achieve the Revelation vision. Colonialism and racism continued unabated, and World War I broke out soon afterward. But they lived in courageous certainty of the ‘long view’ that God’s love would ultimately prevail. Thus they refused to separate Christian mission from concrete work for unity among believers of different nations, ethnicities, denominations, and social classes.⁸ The commitments of Azariah, Cheng, and Mott cohered around their realisation that despite human brokenness, the followers of Christ do in fact constitute a worldwide fellowship. In retrospect what historians remember about Edinburgh 1910 is that it led to a number of important organisations and transnational Christian movements. But ticking off a list of organisations does not do justice to the deeper contribution of Edinburgh 1910 – namely, that it kindled an unquenchable longing for the realisation of God’s kingdom in the hearts of those touched by it.

Another way the conference framed the challenge of living into a ‘larger Christ’ was that it named the complex problems of diversity within unity – issues that are still with us today. The Commission on Co-Operation and Unity asked the questions ‘How is it possible to attain that unity for which our Lord prayed and yet to leave free play for the diversity which alone will give to the unity comprehension and life?’ ‘How can we help to lay the foundations of a Church that shall have its roots deeply planted in the national life, and which at the same time will not be so exclusively national in spirit as to forget its place and membership in the Church Universal?’⁹ These questions raised not only the issue of sectarian divisions, but of what we now call ‘inculturation’ or ‘contextualisation’. The report noted that the growth of Christianity in India, China, Japan, and Africa ‘is presenting problems of great complexity and gravity’. And the delegates humbly admitted that their own comprehension was not adequate to envision the future of Christianity. ‘Unity when it comes must be something richer, grander, more comprehensive than anything which we can see at present.... We need to have sufficient faith in God to believe that He can bring us to something higher and more Christ-like than anything to which at present we see a way.’¹⁰

Commission VIII’s call for ‘penitence and prayer’¹¹ over Christian divisions occurred amid what Commission I on ‘Carrying the Gospel’ called ‘the rising spiritual tide in many mission fields’.¹² This report noted the rapid growth of Christianity in China, Korea, Japan, India, Burma, Oceania, and Indonesia. The report also saw the growth of ‘national and racial patriotism’ as ‘a most inspiring summons’ for Christian missions to improve not only the lives of individuals but entire nations. For Christianity was ‘universally indigenous’ and needed to adapt to Asian and African peoples.¹³

From the vantage point of a century later, we see that the World Missionary Conference stood on the cusp of the greatest demographic shift in the history of Christianity. The subsequent growth of Christianity in Asia, Africa, and Latin America during the twentieth century no doubt would have delighted the delegates. After all, they were missionaries who had given their lives to make it possible.

What the delegates to the 1910 World Missionary Conference could not have imagined was the elimination of entire communities of ancient Christians in the Near East, nor the destruction of Orthodoxy under the Soviet Union, nor the decline of Christianity in the European heartland. Neither could they envision the radicality of the indigenisation that they called for, nor its often brutal suppression by colonial authorities. Even as the conference was meeting in Edinburgh, Liberian prophet William Wadé Harris was in prison receiving a call from God to evangelise throughout West Africa. This great missionary would convert an estimated 100,000 people before being re-arrested by the French in 1914. In Congo, African-American missionary William Sheppard had just been tried for libel, for exposing the atrocities perpetuated by Belgian companies against rubber gatherers.¹⁴ In the Philippines, the first ordained Protestant minister Nicolas Zamora had just broken away from the Methodist mission, thereby founding one of at least twenty-five independent Filipino churches organised by the 1930s. The growing Korean Christianity praised in conference reports would soon be suppressed by Japanese annexation of Korea two months after the conference. In 1910 while denominational mission leaders met in Edinburgh, freelance faith missionaries were spreading the new Pentecostal movement from San Francisco and India into Chile, Norway, Sweden, South Africa, China, Russia, Germany, Australia, and elsewhere.¹⁵

Today when we identify the historical legacy of the World Missionary Conference of 1910, we must include the unintended consequences of what the delegates could only then see through a glass darkly (1 Cor. 13:12). The importance of grounding our work today in the Revelation vision of united witness to Christ is not only because we live in the certainty of Christian hope, but because we also know that the shape, timing, and achievement of God’s kingdom is beyond human control. Just as witness and unity are inseparable in God’s timing, so are Christian hope and humility. ‘How long, O Lord, how long?’

Whole Church, Whole Gospel, Whole World 1963

Now let us fast forward a half century to another decisive turning point in the inseparability of mission and unity. Here I quote the conclusion of the final Message from the groundbreaking World Council of Churches mission conference in 1963, ‘Witness in Six Continents’: ‘We therefore affirm that this missionary movement now involves Christians in all six continents and in all lands. It must be the common witness of the whole Church, bringing the whole Gospel to the whole world.’¹⁶

This statement, in a nutshell, reflected fifty years of missiological developments set into motion by Edinburgh 1910. In retrospect, we see that it marked the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Words of greeting
• Spiritual life of the conference, Elizabeth Moran, SSC
• Homilies
• Worship, Common Prayer and the Opening and Closing Celebrations Douglas Galbraith
• Conference study process, Kirsteen Kim
• Plenary 1: Mission in long perspective
• Plenary 2: Mission worldwide
• Parallel sessions
• Selected papers from the parallel sessions
• Reports
• Reflections
• Statements
• Mission in the Twenty-First Century, Kirsteen Kim
• Bibliography
• Appendix 1: Edinburgh 2010 Project
• Appendix 2: Governance
• Appendix 3: Project Donors
• Appendix 4: Conference Programme
• Appendix 5: Plenary Sessions
• Appendix 6: Parallel sessions on study themes
• Appendix 7: Daily Common Prayer Services
• Appendix 8: Conference Personnel
• Appendix 9: Conference Delegates
• Appendix 10: Other 2010 Documents
• Back Cover