Global Diasporas and Mission

Chandler Im

• Publisher: Regnum
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781908355485
• eBook ISBN: 9781912343379
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

The movement of people from their homelands is increasing exponentially. Such waves of both immigration and migration triggered by various factors have created new opportunities for the church and its mission. This volume explores such global diasporas from both ecclesiological and missiological perspectives. Its various case studies invite reconsideration of the missionary and evangelistic task of the church in response to contemporary global dynamics. The image of the dandelion on the front cover symbolizes diverse people groups dispersed around the globe, even as the Christian imagination views such dispersal as being carried by the winds of the Holy Spirit.

PART ONE

HISTORICAL AND BIBLICAL PERSPECTIVES

MISSION AND MIGRATION: THE DIASPORA FACTOR IN CHRISTIAN HISTORY¹

Andrew F. Walls

Migration as a Biblical Motif

The first recorded migration, according to the book of Genesis, took Adam and Eve out of Paradise. Genesis is all about archetypes, archetypes basic to the human condition. Migration seems to be basic to the human condition, for it has been repeated endlessly in human history, and has often been determinative in its effects on the life of peoples. But the expulsion from Eden (Gen. 3:23) is not the only migration described in the Genesis narrative, for it moves on swiftly to the wanderings of Cain (Gen. 4:12-16), and soon after that to the mass diffusion of peoples from Babel (Gen. 11:8-9), and thereafter to the saga of Abraham’s migration from Mesopotamia (Gen. 12:1-9). In this last instance, we meet characteristic accompaniments of migration, such as the disputes over limited grazing land which lead to a division in Abraham’s clan, so that Lot goes his own way (Gen. 13:5-12). Further migrations follow. A family dispute over inheritance causes Jacob to flee back to the old country (Gen. 27), and then to return to the new one (Gen. 31). The sons of Jacob migrate to Egypt – Joseph by force majeure (Gen. 38:12-36), the others by economic necessity (Gen. 47). The first book of the Bible might almost as readily have been called ‘Migrations’ as Genesis.

The great theme of the second book, Exodus, is the migration that created Israel by taking the twelve tribes out of Egypt and on the way to a land of their own. The history that follows describes how divine judgment brought upon Israel successive and forced migrations to Assyria (2 Kings 17:5-23) and Babylon (2 Kings 25), and how divine mercy brought successive re-migrations to the homeland (Ezra and Nehemiah).

If we take all the stories together, we have examples of almost every known form of migration, voluntary and involuntary. There are fugitives (Jacob), transported slaves (Joseph), famine victims (Joseph’s brothers), migrant workers, even one with an unresolved claim for residence (Ruth), refugees, traders, invaders, prisoners of war, deportees, and returnees. The categories interweave: Jacob’s sons came to Egypt as economic migrants, and they and their descendants became in turn prosperous settlers, slaves, migrants again, and settlers again. The stories highlight how migrations determine the future: the Babel story depicts migration as the source of language differentiation and the prophets attribute the movements, and thus the destinies, of the nations to the actions of Yahweh. It is he who brought Syrians and Philistines from their ancestral homes to places from which they could harass Israel.

Migration often stands for dispossession, loss of patrimony, or habitat. Adam loses Eden; Cain loses the security of the group. Israel loses the land, kingdom, and temple. In all these cases, migration is punitive, the result of wrongdoing, leading to dislocation and deprivation.

But there is another style of migration that is redemptive rather than punitive. Abraham is not expelled from his Mesopotamian city: he is divinely called out of it, with the promise of another land for his descendants. All he actually receives himself is a burial plot for his wife, and he carefully pays for that, though his Hittite neighbors are willing to give it to him. The settled city dweller becomes a nomadic pastoralist – in other words, a perennial migrant. It is as a nomadic pastoralist that he experiences those divine encounters that become the basis of Israel’s religion. Maybe he could never have heard the voice of the God of heaven so clearly in Ur or in Haran; the noisy presence of the gods of the land would have obtruded too much. Once settled in the promised land as regular cultivators or city dwellers, Abraham’s descendants readily make terms with the gods of the land, the Baalim, the territorial spirits.

In the beginning, it was to the nomads, the permanent migrants, that God revealed himself.² Abraham, the nomadic pastoralist with a promise of land he never settles in, is the archetype of redemptive migration. Centuries later, settled cultivators in Canaan acknowledged, as they made their harvest offerings, that their father was a wandering Aramean (Deut. 26:5), while the prophets pointed to the nomadic period as the happiest era of Israel’s history (Hos. 2:14-15).

And in the New Testament it is still Abraham, the perennial migrant, who becomes the exemplar of the Christian faith and the pointer to Christian identity (Rom. 4). In the Epistle to the Hebrews, Abraham heads the list of those who died in faith without attaining the well-founded city prepared for them (Heb. 11:8-10). Christians in that letter are described in terms applicable to migrant workers, seeking that better future that migrants typically desire for their children. Other New Testament writers use the figure of the diaspora, that institutionalized migration whereby so many Jews lived outside the promised land, to portray normal Christian experience in the world (Phil. 3:20). One even describes Christians as ‘refugees’ (I Pet. 1:1; 2:11, GNB).

In the biblical record, there is the dual character of migration. There is a paradigm of migration for which we may adopt the description ‘Adamic’ as convenient shorthand. Adamic migration means disaster, deprivation and loss. But there is another model, which we may call ‘Abrahamic’, where migration stands for escape to a superlatively better future. The two models overlap, of course, because within the divine economy, disaster itself may have a redemptive purpose. Both models represent the significance of migration for the migrant. For the host community to which migrants go, migration may represent blessing or bane, depending on the community’s own numbers and social cohesion, and the numbers and activity of those who come to its area.

Migrants may bring with them the memory of their ancestors (Israel never forgot Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), and maintain a strong sense of historic identity. But, typically, the connection with localized divinities, the gods of the land, is loosened. And in Abrahamic migration, the promised better future is linked with the knowledge of God. Again we recall that New Testament writers saw the nomadic herdsman or the migrant worker as a fair indicator of the position of Christians in the world.

Migration and Mission

Since migration stands for both disaster and high promise, it is not surprising that there is not a single clear answer to the question whether it favors or hinders Christian mission. It is easy enough to point to historical situations where migration forwarded the spread of the faith. It is clear, for instance, that the earliest spread of the faith beyond Jewish Palestine owed much to prior Jewish migration across the Mediterranean world, as well as into Mesopotamia and beyond. The Jewish communities of the diaspora provided the networks by which the message about Jesus spread. The book of Acts shows how the Antiochene missionaries, Barnabas and Paul, regularly began their mission activity in the synagogues or other Jewish communal places, which often had a fringe of interested Gentiles (Acts 13:14-41; 14:1-7). It is clear from the same source that such Gentiles, who had already been attracted to the worship of the God of Israel by means of diaspora Judaism, were particularly fertile soil for the early Christian preaching – more fertile, indeed, than diaspora Jews themselves. There are signs that something similar happened with the large Jewish communities of the Euphrates Valley, where Christian preaching spread eastward, and in Egypt, where it spread southward. First-century Christianity in its fullness was rooted in the great Jewish migration out of Palestine.

However, it would be equally easy to produce examples where migration inhibited or reversed Christian expansion. It would be difficult to determine whether the overflowing boiling pot of migration among the peoples of the north and west in the period of the conversion of Europe from the fourth century onwards did more to help or to hinder the process of conversion. There are dramatic examples of migration leading pagan peoples to the faith. The Franks who invaded the region of Tours, for instance, came to acknowledge the superior power of the God of their Romanized Celtic subjects. But for every such example, one could recognize another where migration crushed, overwhelmed, or expelled a well-established Christian community. Teutonic pagan peoples, newly arrived in Britain, often brought the eclipse of a pre-existing Celtic Christianity. Their conversion, in turn, produced Christian settlements which were themselves devastated by the last wave of raiders from Scandinavia. That it took so many centuries for Europe to become Christian was due, at least in part, to the repeated need for re-evangelization of new migrants in areas that had already undergone a process of conversion. Migration both furthered the conversion of Europe and obstructed that conversion. Migration determined the future in both directions. The complex interaction of the migration patterns of the peoples beyond the old Roman frontiers who came to make up the population of Europe, together with that other migration that brought the Arabs with their new faith out of Arabia, form the grid on which centuries of Christian history were worked out.

The history of Christianity within the Roman Empire clearly shows the importance of migrant communities who retained ties to their home locality, while traveling from one part of the empire to another, for trade, or work, or some other reason. Sometimes the reason was persecution. For many years, believers in Jesus, centered in Jerusalem, were eager to declare the good news of the Messiahship of Jesus to the whole of Israel, but made little effort to share it with anyone else, and then only under special circumstances. They themselves were Jewish by birth and inheritance, and the good news for them was the coming of the Savior of Israel. They had not changed their religion by responding to the gospel; the gospel had enabled them to understand more thoroughly now the religion they had always believed in. Everything about Jesus made sense in Jewish terms. The Cornelius incident (Acts 10-11) opened up for Peter and others some new ideas, but there is nothing to suggest that it led to a change of mission policy. Only persecution did that. It was the migration of Jerusalem Christians following the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: Historical and Biblical Perspectives
• Part Two: Ethnic and Regional Developments
• Part Three: Missional Implications
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index
• List Of Contributors
• Back Cover